Construction on the Kowloon Reservoir began in 1901. When it was completed in 1910, it became the first reservoir in the New Territories — a distinction that reflects how quickly Kowloon was growing and how urgently the colonial administration needed to secure a reliable water supply. The total cost came in at $619,000. At completion, its capacity was 1.42 million cubic meters. That was not enough for long. The surrounding hills collected rainfall efficiently, but the population it served kept expanding. The Shek Lei Pui Reservoir followed in 1925, with a capacity of 440,000 cubic meters. The Kowloon Reception Reservoir was completed in 1926. The Kowloon Byewash Reservoir — designed to capture overflow and route it into the main system — was finished in 1931, adding another 700,000 cubic meters. Together, including the Shek Lei Pui, the group holds approximately 2.9 million cubic meters.

The main dam of the Kowloon Reservoir, its valve house, the spillway dam, the spillway dam recorder house, and the recorder house have all been declared monuments under Hong Kong law — a rare designation that protects them from alteration. The structures date from the period 1901 to 1910, a moment when colonial engineers were building across Asia with a confidence in stone and brick that produced buildings of genuine beauty. Golden Hill Road runs along the top of the main dam, giving anyone who drives or walks it an unobstructed view across the reservoir surface to the wooded hills beyond. The valve house sits just off the road, its period details intact. These structures were built to last, and they have.

A century after the Kowloon Reservoir opened, engineers returned to the same hills to solve a different problem. The reservoir group had a tendency to overflow — excess rainwater spilled through the Lai Chi Kok Transfer Scheme and ultimately discharged into the sea, representing water that could have been used. Beginning in 2019, construction started on the Inter-reservoirs Transfer Scheme: a water tunnel 2.8 kilometers long and 3 meters in diameter connecting the Kowloon Byewash Reservoir to the Lower Shing Mun Reservoir. The project was completed in January 2023. It was not glamorous infrastructure — a tunnel beneath the hills is invisible to anyone not specifically looking for it — but it made the reservoir system more efficient, reducing overflow and capturing water that had previously been lost.

The reservoirs did not remain in isolation. As Kowloon urbanized through the twentieth century, the hills where the reservoirs sat became increasingly valuable as open space. Kam Shan Country Park was established around them, protecting the forested watershed and offering a green escape from the density below. Hikers follow trails past the dam walls and through stands of trees where the macaques move through the canopy overhead. The juxtaposition is striking — Edwardian-era colonial engineering, declared monuments, set inside a working country park full of wildlife. Neither element diminishes the other. The reservoir group is both infrastructure and landscape, functional and historic, all at once.