Hargausiumei: Yuen Long Market

A day trip to Yuen Long Town in the New Territories, only an hour by train or bus from central Hong Kong Island. Once it was a simple market town where farmers and fishermen from the surrounding villages came to sell their produce. Now Yuen Long has a population approaching 600,000 who are mostly Cantonese speakers (about 90%) plus a variety of other Chinese dialects - and 8,500 (1.5%) English speakers!

The town seems a bit feverish, many building sites and bunches of skyscrapers being flung up in the surrounding areas, roads being re-built to cope, floods of people bustling about the streets, entrepreneurs everywhere trying to get a piece of the action. Because this is Hong Kong, the public transport system is hugely impressive; we took a bus from Hong Kong Island and then switched to the electrified light transport railway when we reached Yuen Long.

It's a clean, quiet, efficient and relatively cheap system with an extensive network that reaches most of the surrounding cities and villages.

downtown Yuen Long

Of course there is one huge reason for Yuen Long's spectacular growth...the China effect. As is common elsewhere in the territory, after 1997 mainlanders began descending on Hong Kong, buying everything up, fuelling price increases and causing shortages. Amazingly, property prices out here are at similar astronomical levels as Hong Kong Island; for a 500 square foot property you are expected to pay around $6 million (half a million Pounds or three-quarters of a million US Dollars).

The effect was multiplied on Yuen Long as it is located in the north of the territory, close to the Shenzen border in China's Guandong province. In particular – and especially after 2012 - it became a hub for parallel traders. Parallel traders are individuals who cross the border to buy up and re-export to China scarce products such as baby milk powder - the mainland products have suffered from contamination scandals - chocolate, household goods etc. Often they are 'regular Joes' rather than businessmen and we saw quite a lot of couples stuffing their wheeled suitcases or trolleys with purchases to take back over the border to re-sell at a profit.

The reason for our expedition to Yuen Long was that Madame was brought up just outside Yuen Long and was keen to see the place where she lived and was schooled. In the event, there was virtually nothing to see; her home was long ago bulldozed and probably replaced by one of the many new blocks of skyscrapers, we could not find her school and many other landmarks were gone or transformed.

...On the other hand, we had an excellent dim sum lunch in Yuen Long and wandered about the centre of the city. According to Madame, very little was left of the city she knew intimately 50 years ago – which I believe since she was driven to use Google maps to try and find her way about!

My own favourite was the street market.

Back home, in this age of supermarkets, frozen food, microwaveable meals and convenience meals, there are few real markets left, especially meat markets, so it is good to see choice cuts of meat hanging in the air, open to inspection...in an age when some children think milk originates from a machine rather than from an animal, the meat market is a raw biology lesson...

And would you like a stomach, madame? A foot to go?

What about some lovely fish swim bladders? special price just for you!

No? You're more a fruit and veg fan then? Got some lovely ripe fruit - see these durian fruits, like pineapples on steroids, smell hellishly but taste heavenly? Also some vegetables fresh out of the ground...