The inauguration of the Peng Chau Theatre on 6 February 1978 was a genuine occasion for the island. The ceremony was officiated by John Rawling Todd, who was serving as Acting Secretary for the New Territories at the time — a significant figure for a small island cinema. The theatre was inaugurated by Deacon Chiu Te Ken, the founder of Far East Consortium International Limited, a Hong Kong real estate and hotel group. That a businessman of Chiu's stature was involved in a 499-seat island cinema speaks to the ambitions of the era: Hong Kong's outlying islands had industries and populations that justified cultural infrastructure. Peng Chau had factories — toothpicks, incense, and woven rattan were among its products — and workers who wanted somewhere to go on an evening.

The theatre operated through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Its seating capacity of 499 was modest even by the standards of Hong Kong's neighbourhood cinemas, which served dense residential communities with regular programming. On Peng Chau, the audience was always going to be limited: the island's population was tied to its industries, and those industries were fading. As manufacturing moved to the mainland and Hong Kong's economy restructured, the factories on the outlying islands closed or contracted. Families followed the work. The population of Peng Chau declined. At the same time, television was becoming universal in Hong Kong households, offering entertainment at home without the ferry ride back. These two forces — a shrinking population and competition from home entertainment — converged on the Peng Chau Theatre. By the late 1980s, it had shuttered.

The building outlasted its purpose. After the cinema closed, it sat. In 2016, the Antiquities Advisory Board reviewed the building for heritage grading — the formal process by which Hong Kong identifies and protects historic structures. The board declined to grant it any grade. Without official protection, the theatre remained in limbo: too substantial to ignore, too obscure to save, its interior deteriorating. Photographs taken in subsequent years show a building marked by graffiti and decay, the auditorium open to the weather, the projection booth dark. Proposals to redevelop the site for housing circulated. Whether it survives will depend on forces the cinema itself never had any say over: land values, developer interest, and the shifting calculus of what counts as worth preserving.

The Peng Chau Theatre was not remarkable in itself. Hong Kong had dozens of neighbourhood cinemas in the postwar decades, serving communities that might otherwise have had no access to the films playing in Central or Kowloon. On the outlying islands — Cheung Chau, Lamma, Peng Chau — these cinemas were also social anchors: places where islanders gathered, where children saw their first films, where newsreels and Cantonese melodramas and kung fu serials arrived by ferry alongside the supplies. The Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s and 1980s — the era of Bruce Lee, the Shaw Brothers, and the New Wave directors — played out in part in small halls like this one. The Peng Chau Theatre was 499 seats on an island, but those seats connected the island to one of the most vibrant film cultures in the world.