Before the emperors arrived, before the Portuguese trading posts of the 1510s, Lantau was already inhabited. Rock carvings at Shek Pik on the southwestern coast are thought to date back to the Bronze Age; a stone circle at Fan Lau is older still, probably Neolithic. The island has been called Tai Hai Shan, Tai Kai Shan, Tai Yi Shan, and Tuen Mun Island across the centuries — each name a palimpsest of whoever was recording it.

Portuguese traders established some of the first European settlements in the Pearl River area on Lantau in the 1510s, before being driven out around 1517 following military defeats at the Battles of Tunmen and Sincouwaan. Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge of the Dutch East India Company visited in 1607, sketching an official's compound that was later published in his travelogue. Long before the British became interested in Hong Kong Island, Lantau was already on European maps as a landmark on the sea route to Canton.

Lantau's mountainous terrain and deep valleys made it ideal for people who preferred to operate outside official sight. The pirate Cheung Po Tsai — one of the most formidable pirates in South China Sea history — used the island as a base in the 19th century. Galena, a lead-silver mineral, was mined at Mui Wo until the same era.

The British built Tung Chung Fort in 1817 specifically to thwart the opium trade and defend against the pirates working the coast. Six old cannons still stand within its granite enclosures. During the Second World War, Japanese forces occupied the fort, just as they occupied the rest of Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945. The island's wooded areas and deep valleys that once sheltered pirates then sheltered resistance fighters, who used them to organize ambushes and move supplies until the Japanese occupation ended. The fort was listed as a historical monument in 1979.

On the Ngong Ping Plateau, 268 steps above the Po Lin Monastery, a 26-metre bronze Buddha sits facing north — once the world's largest seated outdoor bronze Buddha statue, consecrated in 1993. Walkers can reach it in two hours from Tung Chung; the Ngong Ping 360 cable car covers the 5.7-kilometre journey in 20 minutes. On clear mornings, the view from the Buddha's platform takes in the whole northern coast of Lantau, Hong Kong International Airport, and the South China Sea beyond.

Tai O, in the northwest, offers the opposite kind of spectacle. Over three centuries old, it is one of the last traditional fishing villages in Hong Kong, built on stilts over a tidal channel. Hundreds of *pang uk* — stilt houses — crowd the water's edge, accessed by footbridge. A fire in July 2000 destroyed a section; super typhoons have damaged others. Yet Tai O keeps its character: the smell of the locally produced shrimp paste, the sound of fishing boats returning, the waterways dividing the village as they always have.

More than half of Lantau consists of protected national parks, and the island's ecological health shows. Chinese white dolphins — called pink dolphins for the colour their skin takes in sunlight — swim off the coast in numbers that make Lantau one of the best places in Asia to see them. The Southwest Lantau Marine Park was established to protect their habitat.

Feral water buffalo roam the wetlands at Mui Wo and Pui O, descendants of working animals that were released when farmers mechanized. Oyster beds, lemon trees, and tangerine orchards define the rural south. Cheung Sha, Lantau's longest beach, curves along the southern coast. The 70-kilometre Lantau Trail circles the island in 12 stages, crossing all of this terrain — through country park, along ridgelines, past ancient villages, down to the sea.

Hong Kong International Airport opened on Chek Lap Kok — a small island off Lantau's north coast that was levelled and expanded through one of the largest land reclamation projects in history — in July 1998. Connected to the urban areas by the Lantau Link (which includes the Tsing Ma Bridge, one of the world's longest road-and-rail suspension bridges), the airport transformed Lantau overnight. The Tung Chung new town rose around the rail connection. Hong Kong Disneyland followed in 2005 on reclaimed land at Penny's Bay, a US$1.8 billion project covering 310 acres.

In the space of a decade, an island that had spent millennia as a place people passed through on the way to somewhere else became a destination in its own right — and the literal entry point to one of the world's great cities.