When construction finished in 1574 during the Ming dynasty, Chik Chuen Wai sheltered sixteen founding clans: Wai, Chan, Ng, Yeung, Wong, Lee, Hui, Cheng, Tong, Yuen, Yau, Lam, Lok, Tam, Mok, and Choy. The settlement was rectangular, reinforced at each corner by a watch tower, and enclosed behind walls thick enough to discourage bandits and pirates who frequented the valley. By the 1911 census, 350 people lived here — 164 of them male — a figure that captures a village both old and intimate. The towers and most of the walls have since been demolished, but the entrance gate survives, now listed as a Grade II historic building by Hong Kong authorities.

Of the sixteen founding clans, the Wai family grew largest and claimed the most extraordinary lineage. According to tradition passed within the clan, they are descended from Han Xin, the brilliant Han dynasty general who helped Emperor Gao of Han unify China in the early second century BCE. Han Xin fell out of imperial favour when Empress Lü Zhi ordered his execution. His descendants, the story goes, fled south to escape the purge and eventually settled in what would become Sha Tin. To conceal their identity, they split the Chinese character for Han (韓) down the middle and took the right half, producing the character Wai (韋) — a new surname that literally encoded a secret history.

The village's Cheng family carried an equally storied past. Their ancestral roots traced to Xingyang in Zhengzhou, Henan — the same city from which, in Chinese legend, the Moon goddess Chang'e is said to have made her flight to the lunar palace. Xingyang was also the birthplace of Li Shangyin, one of the most celebrated poets of the late Tang dynasty, renowned for his dense and allusive verse. These Cheng ancestors who settled in Tai Wai brought that heritage — of myth, of poetry, of a particular corner of central China — into a walled village in a Hong Kong valley.

The village appeared in writing at least as early as the 1688 Xinan Gazetteer, which documented settlements across the administrative district covering much of what is now the Hong Kong region. In 1866, Italian missionary Simeone Volonteri published his "Map of the San-On District," and Tai Wai appears on it — a village already old enough to anchor its section of the map. Inside the walls, the community built more than houses. A Hau Wong Temple — dedicated to a loyalist official of the Song dynasty revered across the New Territories — was originally sited outside the village walls but moved inside during the Xianfeng Emperor's reign, between 1850 and 1861. The Wai Ancestral Hall, raised sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century just outside the walls, remains a place of clan remembrance.

Walk out of Tai Wai MTR station today and the village is almost immediately to your right, tucked against the commercial streets that have grown up around it. High-rise estates loom beyond the rooflines. But the low-slung interior of Chik Chuen Wai — houses in their historic rows, lanes between them still narrow — maintains a different scale and pace from everything surrounding it. The houses at numbers 1, 2, and 3 First Street are listed as Grade III historic buildings. This is not a village preserved under glass: people live here, ancestral halls are still visited, and the Hau Wong Temple still draws worshippers. Tai Wai Village gave its name to the district and outlasted everything that name became.