The Soko Islands form a small archipelago in the southwestern corner of Hong Kong's territorial waters, and Tai A Chau is by far the largest of them, covering 1.2 square kilometres. Its hills rise between 85 and 154 metres — modest summits, but enough to give the island presence from the sea. The coastline is steep and rocky, offering limited anchorage but dramatic edges. The two villages on the western and southern sides maintained community life for generations, connected to Hong Kong by the rhythms of the fishing trade and, apparently, by a surprisingly export-oriented shrimp paste business. The island also hosts a temple dedicated to Tin Hau, the sea goddess venerated across coastal southern China, along with seven earth shrines scattered across its terrain. These survive. The villages do not.

The villagers left in the 1980s when a detention camp for Vietnamese refugees was constructed on the island. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people fled Vietnam by sea — on boats, through storms, across waters patrolled by pirates — and sought refuge wherever they could land. Hong Kong became one of the primary destinations. The territory eventually housed tens of thousands of Vietnamese people in a network of closed detention centres across multiple islands and facilities. Tai A Chau was among them. The people confined there had survived extraordinary journeys to reach Hong Kong waters. Many had lost family members at sea. In the closed camps, they waited — sometimes for years — while resettlement applications moved slowly through international bureaucracies. The detention system drew persistent criticism from human rights organisations for its conditions and its use of confinement rather than open reception.

The Tai A Chau facility closed by government announcement on 10 June 1996. The actual departure of the remaining residents took ten consecutive days, from 16 to 25 September 1996. Each day followed the same choreography: one ferry carrying luggage, two ferries carrying approximately 550 Vietnamese men, women, and children, departing the island for HMS Tamar naval base at Stonecutters Island. From there, the people were transferred to Whitehead Detention Centre in Wu Kai Sha — a facility that had become notorious for overcrowding and difficult conditions — before many eventually resettled in the United States under the Resettlement Opportunity for Vietnamese Returnees Scheme. The precision of those numbers — 550 per day, ten days, one jetty — captures the bureaucratic orderliness of a process that was, for the individuals moving through it, anything but orderly. These were people rebuilding lives, piece by piece, with destinations and futures still uncertain.

Today Tai A Chau is uninhabited. The two helicopter pads and the jetty from the detention centre era are the most visible man-made features left. The Tin Hau temple stands, as does the cluster of earth shrines. The island sits roughly 2 kilometres north of the Hong Kong territorial boundary — far enough from the city that it receives few visitors, close enough that it never quite escapes the city's gravitational pull. There have been proposals over the years to site various industrial facilities nearby, including a liquefied natural gas terminal; environmental impact studies have documented the island's cultural heritage resources in some detail. For now, the island waits. Rocky, quiet, with its temple and its shrines facing the sea — which has brought, over the years, fishermen, refugees, and auditors from the civil service, and has returned them all to silence.