Alfred Herbert Rennie was a 19th-century Canadian businessman who came to Junk Bay with ambitions and partners — Paul Chater and Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, names well known in Hong Kong commercial history. Together they established the Hong Kong Milling Company at Rennie's Mill, as the place came to be called in English. The enterprise failed. Rennie drowned himself in the bay in 1908; contemporary reports got the manner of his death wrong, saying he had hanged himself, which is why the Chinese name memorialized a hanging rather than a drowning. A double mistranslation of a suicide, locked into the landscape. The English name Rennie's Mill survived him by nearly a century, appearing on road signs long after anyone connected to the mill was gone. The bay remembered what the city tried to forget.

On 26 June 1950, the Hong Kong Government's Social Welfare Office settled approximately 6,800 refugees at Rennie's Mill. They were former Nationalist soldiers and Kuomintang supporters, people who had fled mainland China after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. The colonial government's plan was temporary resettlement pending repatriation — to Taiwan or back to the mainland — but the repatriation never came. What grew instead was something without precedent in Hong Kong: an enclave flying the flag of the Republic of China, with its own schools, its own internal governance, and practically off-limits to the Royal Hong Kong Police Force until 1962. By the late 1950s, 'Little Taiwan' was the nickname; 'Bastion Against Communism' was the slogan painted on the hillside. The 1967 riots that shook the rest of Hong Kong never touched Rennie's Mill. It was insulated by its own politics.

Typhoon Wanda struck in 1962, badly damaging Rennie's Mill and rendering many of its residents homeless. The community rebuilt. The Hong Kong Government, seeking to reduce tension over the growing Kuomintang presence, turned the enclave into a formal resettlement estate that same year, bringing it back under some degree of administrative control. In 1961, residents had been promised they could stay indefinitely. By 1996, the government was serving notices to quit. Residents petitioned the High Court, and judge Raymond Sears found plainly that serving those notices, in breach of the 1961 promises, amounted to an abuse of power. The finding changed nothing. In 1996, the last of the original residents were evicted — a move widely understood as a gesture to the incoming Beijing government ahead of the 1997 handover of sovereignty.

After the handover, the English name Rennie's Mill was officially retired. The area became Tiu Keng Leng in all government usage, following the Cantonese. What followed was a complete physical transformation. High-rise residential towers replaced the low-slung refugee settlement. Metro Town, nine towers built above a shopping mall podium and a carpark, is now the tallest structure in the area. Ocean Shores, built on the site of the former Shiu Wing Steel mill, added more towers to the south. Three public housing estates — Kin Ming Estate, Choi Ming Court, and Shin Ming Estate — house tens of thousands of people where a few thousand exiles once lived under a foreign flag. The 2002 opening of Tiu Keng Leng MTR station connected the area to Kowloon's urban core; the Tseung Kwan O–Lam Tin Tunnel, completed in 2022, added a direct road link. The enclave that was once almost unreachable by public transport now has two tube lines.

Something unexpected happened in the new Tiu Keng Leng: it became an education hub. The Hong Kong Design Institute, opened in November 2010 at a construction cost of HK$1.2 billion, occupies a building of conspicuous architectural ambition — a glazed box raised seven storeys above the ground on four lattice-steel towers, designed by French firm Coldefy & Associés, meant to resemble a sheet of paper suspended in mid-air. Next door, the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education's Lee Wai Lee campus trains tradespeople. Saint Francis University, the first Catholic university in Hong Kong, occupies a campus in the same district. The settlement that kept itself apart from Hong Kong for four decades is now, in a particular irony, a place where young people from across the territory come to learn.