Ma On Shan Village — Ma On Shan Tsuen in Cantonese — grew because of what was underground. The iron mine that gave the hillside its economic reason for being had opened in 1906, but it was in the 1950s, when mining went fully underground and a Japanese joint venture expanded the operations, that the village truly exploded in size. Workers flooded in, bringing families. The population climbed past 10,000 at its peak, a remarkable concentration of people on a hillside in Sha Tin District that had previously been quiet rural territory. The village was not planned in any formal sense — it accreted around the mine's needs, filling whatever space the slope allowed.

Both churches built in 1952 became anchors for communities within the community. The Lutheran Yan Kwong Church was part of a five-building complex; a primary school joined it in 1961. The Catholic St. Joseph's complex was more elaborate still: church, primary school, kindergarten, a small clinic built between 1952 and 1954, and a convent, all arranged on the top of a small hill within the village. The church was rebuilt in 1962, reflecting the confidence of a congregation expecting to stay. These institutions offered something the mine itself could not: continuity, community ritual, a place where people could mark births, marriages, and deaths with ceremony rather than the shift roster.

In 1976, the Ma On Shan Iron Mine closed. The workforce of 400 was laid off; the families who depended on those wages began to leave. The primary school and kindergarten attached to the Lutheran church closed the same year the mine did — their student population had simply walked away. St. Joseph's held Sunday services until 1981, when regular worship became unsustainable. A priest named Father Wu continued occasional missionary visits afterward, but the congregation had scattered. By 1999, the church complex was vacant. The village did not disappear entirely — around 80 families still live there — but the dense, humming community of 10,000 that had built this place was gone.

The Lutheran primary school relocated rather than simply closing. It moved to Heng On Estate in the Ma On Shan new town and was renamed Ma On Shan Lutheran Primary School in 1987, carrying the institution's identity into a different kind of community. The Yan Kwong Church itself was revitalized in 2015 — under the name ELCHK Grace Youth Camp, following a restoration project that began in 2014 — as a centre for preserving the history and culture of the old mining village, giving the building a new purpose rooted in the past it witnessed. St. Joseph's Church achieved a different kind of afterlife: in 2009, the director Law Wing-cheung used its vacant buildings as a location for the film Tactical Unit — Comrades in Arms, the empty complex standing in for spaces that feel both institutional and abandoned. The Ma On Shan Country Trail now runs from the village to Tai Shui Tseng, passing through the landscape that miners once crossed on their way to work.