The village settlements at the base of the hill — Sheung Yuen Leng (上元嶺) and Ha Yuen Leng (下元嶺) — were established before British colonization, and may date to the early eighteenth century. By the time colonial administration arrived, these were already rooted communities.

What followed was decades of layered displacement. The Japanese occupation during World War II brought the expansion of nearby Kai Tak Airport, which consumed part of the hill. The Mass Transit Railway required more. Lung Cheung Road and the Tate's Cairn Tunnel took further bites. Each infrastructure project required demolition, and each round of demolition added to the pressure on the squatter settlements that had grown, layer by layer, up and down the hill's slopes.

At its peak, the squatter population on Diamond Hill reached around 50,000 people — a city within a city, constructed from corrugated iron, timber, and whatever else could be found. The shanties climbed the slopes without plan or permission, housing those who had come to Hong Kong with nothing and had built what they could with what they had.

The Hong Kong government spent years trying to clear the settlement. The shortage of public housing made resettlement slow and contested: there was simply nowhere to put 50,000 people quickly. The last sections were not demolished until 2001. What replaced them was a neighbourhood of public housing estates, a shopping mall, a Buddhist cultural centre, and the quiet hill cemetery high above.

On the cleared land near the hill's base, two remarkable structures appeared. The Chi Lin Nunnery and its adjacent Nan Lian Garden were built according to the architectural conventions of the Tang dynasty — a deliberate evocation of a Chinese aesthetic that predates the British presence in Hong Kong by more than a millennium. Wooden halls with sweeping eave lines, lotus ponds, carefully composed rock arrangements: the complex became a significant tourist attraction and a place of genuine spiritual life for the Buddhist community.

The juxtaposition is striking. Where the squatter shanties represented improvised survival, the nunnery and garden represent meticulous classical form. Both are responses to the same hill — and both have shaped what Diamond Hill means to the people who live around it.

Diamond Hill has a film history as layered as its geography. The former movie studio in the area launched the career of Bruce Lee. Sam Hui and his brothers lived nearby — the Hui family whose films defined Cantonese popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. The squatter settlement itself became a visual shorthand for Hong Kong poverty in local cinema, its corrugated rooftops and narrow alleys appearing in dozens of productions.

Director Cheang Pou-soi set a film there — Diamond Hill (發光的石頭), or "The Shining Stone" — and Fruit Chan's Hollywood Hong Kong (香港有個荷里活) used the settlement as both setting and metaphor. In A Better Tomorrow II, a character is introduced as "The King of Diamond Hill" before he turns away from crime. The hill absorbed these stories and kept generating them. Kit Fan's novel Diamond Hill, published in English, revisits the area in the 1980s — a fictional return to a place that no longer physically exists.

Today, Diamond Hill MTR station serves a largely residential district of public housing estates and the Plaza Hollywood shopping centre, whose name gestures at the movie studio history nearby. The Tate's Cairn Tunnel entrance sits at the edge of the neighbourhood, connecting Kowloon to the New Territories. The Diamond Hill Urn Cemetery occupies the heights above.

The squatter village is gone. The quarry that gave the hill its true name is a memory. But the mistranslated English name endures — and in enduring, it has become accurate in its own way. Diamond Hill is where Hong Kong's twentieth century was concentrated and compressed: displacement, rebuilding, cinema, faith, and the slow replacement of improvised life with planned city.