Tai Long Sai Wan sits within Sai Kung East Country Park at Stage 2 of the MacLehose Trail, one of Hong Kong's most celebrated long-distance routes. There is no road to the beach and no easy shortcut. The approach involves a sustained climb over headland and ridge, rewarded at the descent by the first view down to the sand. That inaccessibility is precisely why the water runs clear and the sand stays white. Next door, Ham Tin Village offers a small restaurant and rents camping equipment and surfboards — the only commercial infrastructure within walking distance. The Star of the Sea Mass Centre nearby, built in 1953, rebuilt in 1963, and restored in 2021, stands as one of the historic churches of Sai Kung Peninsula. Sai Wan was once a typhoon shelter for fishing boats until the High Island Reservoir project blocked the shortcut channel that had made the anchorage practical.

The same open-ocean exposure that produces Tai Long Sai Wan's dramatic surf also makes it dangerous. Rip currents run year-round, strong enough to drag swimmers into open water before they understand what is happening. The beach is not gazetted — no lifeguards, no shark nets, none of the safety infrastructure Hong Kong posts at its official swimming beaches. The consequences have been real and recurring. On 28 August 2001, an off-duty firefighter died attempting to rescue a 15-year-old swept out by waves; a second person drowned in the same incident. In June 2002, another off-duty firefighter drowned while swimming from a yacht to shore. In July 2005, a manager drowned from exhaustion swimming out to a boat. In September 2009, a university student was swept away by a two-metre wave. These are not statistical abstractions — they are individual tragedies at a beach that looks, in photographs, entirely benign. The sand is white, the water is blue, and the current does not announce itself.

In July 2010, reports emerged that businessman Simon Lo Lin-shing had acquired several plots of abandoned village land directly behind Sai Wan for approximately HK$16 million. The site, roughly 10,000 square metres, sat just outside the boundary of Hong Kong Country Parks and was not covered by any Outline Zoning Plan — a gap in protections that left it technically buildable. Diggers cleared the vegetation. A warning sign went up against trespassing. What was planned remained unclear; villagers heard talk of artificial ponds, a tennis court, and private apartments. Within days, more than 68,000 people joined a Facebook group opposing the development. Conservation groups planned protest hikes. A leading conservationist warned that the incident would damage Hong Kong's case for UNESCO World Heritage recognition of the National Geopark. The Secretary for the Environment said he had not heard of it until journalists called. The argument that followed — between private property rights, country park boundaries, and the public's attachment to a beach that had taken first place in a national scenic vote — played out in the press for weeks.

The debate over Sai Wan's development revealed something broader: roughly 20 other sites in or near Sai Kung's country parks were identified as similarly vulnerable to the same type of private development. The episode sharpened calls for planning controls on private land adjacent to protected areas, and for repossession of key parcels before further damage occurred. Conservation may be achieved through many other ways, as officials noted at the time — though what those ways were remained vague. What is not vague is what the beach itself offers: a walk that takes real effort, sand that has not been managed or manicured, and water whose beauty is inseparable from its risk. The Li family's descendants are long gone from these shores. The beach they left behind is still worth the climb.