The first Tai Po Hui was established by the Tang clan — specifically the Tai Po Tau branch — during the Qing dynasty. The Tang family's dominance was not merely commercial; it was political. Under Qing rule, the Tang clan's market town was legally reserved for Tang traders: non-Tang villagers were explicitly forbidden to set up shops within it. This arrangement, documented in the Kangxi and Jiaqing editions of the Xin'an County Gazetteer, held for long enough to generate a countermovement. The other villages of the area organized themselves into an alliance called Tai Po Tsat Yeuk — the Tai Po Seven Alliances — and established their own rival market on the south bank of the Lam Tsuen River. They called it Tai Wo Shi: Tai Wo Market. In 1896, the alliance built a bridge connecting the two market towns. Competition, eventually, became a form of coexistence.

The arrival of the Kowloon–Canton Railway in 1910 shifted the balance decisively. The railway opened a flag station near the Tai Wo Shi side of the river — its station named Tai Po Market — and the new connection to Kowloon and the urban south gave the newer market a commercial advantage the original Tang market could not match. Tai Wo Shi took the name Tai Po Hui. The original Tang clan market became Tai Po Kau Hui — Old Tai Po Market. It is now known as Tai Po Old Market, or Tai Po Kau, and the area around it is a residential and commercial neighbourhood rather than an active market. The railway station itself moved further east in the 1980s, following the modernization and electrification of the line. The Four Lanes of Tai Po Market — Kwong Fuk Lane, Tai Wing Lane, Tai Kwong Lane, and Tai Ming Lane — survive in the area dating to the 1960s redevelopment.

In 1979, the Hong Kong government designated Tai Po as a site for one of its new towns — planned satellite communities designed to relieve pressure on the densely packed urban core. The process involved reclaiming land from the Lam Tsuen River mouth and from Tolo Harbour, transforming what had been seashore and tidal flats into building plots. The first public housing estate in Tai Po New Town, Tai Yuen Estate, was completed in 1980. Today the population of Tai Po has grown to around 320,000, spread across new residential blocks and the older market area that originally gave the whole place its name. The new town was explicitly designed to incorporate the existing market rather than erase it, and that design intention shows: the older lanes of Tai Po Market still carry a different texture from the planned residential precincts around them, though the difference is narrowing.

Today "Tai Po Market" can refer to at least three things: the historic commercial area around the original Tai Po Hui; the indoor Tai Po Hui Market and Cooked Food Centre opened in 2004 on a new site (its former location redeveloped as Po Heung Estate); and the MTR station serving the area. None of these three things occupies quite the same location, and none of the boundaries — for the market, the new town, the district, the election constituency — aligns neatly with the others. This layering of names and places that don't quite correspond is not a failure of planning. It is what happens when a place grows from a Qing dynasty market dispute through colonial railways and postwar urbanization into a contemporary Hong Kong neighbourhood. Identity accumulates. It rarely simplifies.