In the early 1950s, opium addiction was widespread among many of the mainland Chinese who had fled to Hong Kong. Borgeest's approach was direct and practical: provide land, housing, tools, seeds, and training, and let people rebuild. Each refugee family received the chance to work a small farm on the island. The Religious Society of Friends — the Quakers — supported the work. What followed was, by contemporary accounts, a genuine success. In May 1956, Hong Kong Governor Sir Alexander Grantham visited and met one of the resettled residents. The man's words to the governor carry a quiet force: "Sir, owning one's own land, managing one's own affairs, does something to a man. Such cannot be achieved, or even understood, by those who are content to let the government fill their rice bowls for them." For this work, Borgeest was awarded the 1961 Ramon Magsaysay Prize — awarded annually to individuals demonstrating greatness of spirit in service to others, and known informally as "Asia's Nobel Prize." Sunshine Island's model later informed drug rehabilitation settlements still operating in Hong Kong.

The farming community's chapter eventually closed. In the years that followed, the island found a different purpose: missionaries took it over and established a drug rehabilitation centre — the Sunshine Island Gospel Drug Rehabilitation Center — continuing the island's tradition as a place of recovery and second chances, though in a very different register than Borgeest's agricultural vision. Neighbouring islands in the Lantau Channel bore a heavier burden during the same decades. Hei Ling Chau, just to the southwest, housed Vietnamese refugees from the 1980s. Tai A Chau, further south in the Soko Islands, held a detention facility until 1996. Sunshine Island itself was not part of that network, but it sat in waters touched by the same history — a small, named place in an archipelago of contested ones.

The detention centre is long gone, and the island has reverted to a kind of wildness. Some structures remain — scenic rocks, ruins of buildings, the quiet that comes when humans leave a place. According to reports, only one person lives on the island: a man named Lam Chi-ngai. There is no public transport. What thrives in this near-solitude is wildlife. After the construction of Hong Kong Disneyland disrupted habitat on Lantau Island's Pa Tau Kwu, white-bellied sea eagles relocated to Sunshine Island, finding in its stillness what the nearby theme park could no longer provide. The island is also home to Bogadek's legless lizard, Dibamus bogadeki — an endemic species found nowhere else, a small, burrowing creature that outlasted every human institution the island has hosted.

Sunshine Island sits in the outer islands group south of Peng Chau, sharing its waters with the larger Hei Ling Chau island that lies to its southwest. It is small and easy to overlook on a map of Hong Kong's approximately 260 islands. No ferries call there. Its coordinates — 22.261°N, 114.051°E — place it firmly within the administrative Islands District, but the island has drifted far from any district's daily concerns. What remains, beyond the ruins and the eagles and the one resident, is a name chosen by a Quaker from Ningbo who believed that naming a place for the sun was itself a kind of intention. Whether the island has lived up to it depends entirely on which chapter you read.