In 1965, the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere — better known as CARE — put its name behind something unusual for an international aid organisation: a hillside village in Hong Kong. The result was Tsing Yi Fishermen Village, built on a slope facing the Tsing Yi Typhoon Shelter to house fishing families who had been uprooted from Tsuen Wan. It was not a grand gesture. It was a practical one, born from the understanding that fishermen needed to stay close to the sea. St. Paul's Village appeared on the same ground eight years later, in 1973, built for another community of fishermen and their families. Together, the two villages became one entry on the rolls of the Tsing Yi Rural Committee — a formal acknowledgment that these communities belonged to the island, even as the island changed around them.
The typhoon shelter the villages once faced is itself part of a vanished landscape. For generations, Tsing Yi's northeast bays were thick with the masts of fishing junks and the plank walkways connecting stilt houses above the water. Fishermen lived as much on the sea as off it, and the small natural harbours — Tsing Yi Tong, Mun Tsai Tong — were crowded with boats and the sounds of families making their living. By the 1970s, parts of the island still resembled Tai O on Lantau, with its characteristic water-level dwellings and narrow lanes. The decision to reclaim those harbours for residential towers erased most of that world. The Fishermen's Village and St. Paul's Village survived as quiet remnants, built on solid ground rather than water, serving communities that had already made one transition from boats to land and were now witnessing a second, as the whole island transformed around them.
It is worth pausing on who built Tsing Yi Fishermen Village and why. CARE was founded in 1945 to send packages to survivors of the Second World War in Europe. By the 1960s it had broadened into international development work, and its involvement in a Hong Kong fishing village reflects the scale of displacement taking place as the colony's industrial boom pushed people off the land and out of the water. The families relocated from Tsuen Wan needed somewhere they could still pursue their trade. The result was a settlement built on a slope above the typhoon shelter — not the easiest terrain, but a deliberate choice to keep the community within sight and reach of the sea. The village was not a temporary arrangement. It became a recognised place, governed and represented through the Tsing Yi Rural Committee alongside the island's other traditional villages.
The administrative pairing of Tsing Yi Fishermen Village and St. Paul's Village reflects a practical reality: the two settlements share the same small territory and the same basic history. St. Paul's Village, established in 1973, grew up beside the earlier fishermen's settlement and was similarly home to people whose lives had been shaped by the water. Both are represented together within the Tsing Yi Rural Committee, giving the combined community a formal voice in the island's governance. The villages sit in the northeastern part of Tsing Yi, a part of the island that has been more thoroughly transformed than almost any other — the natural harbours gone, replaced by housing estates, and the shipyards that once dominated the north shore since relocated westward. Through all of it, the two villages have persisted as a marker of what this corner of the island used to be.
Today the island still has fishermen, but the physical infrastructure of fishing — the stilt houses, the crowded typhoon shelters, the morning markets at water's edge — has largely disappeared. The Tin Hau Temple, originally built on the shore of Tsing Yi Tong for fishermen to worship the goddess of the sea, was relocated when the harbour was reclaimed. The Tsing Yi Pier still serves as a mooring point for fishing boats, though it now doubles as a tourist stop. For those who live in Tsing Yi Fishermen Village or St. Paul's Village, the connection to that older way of life is part of family memory rather than daily practice. The villages remain as a kind of living record — small, unassuming clusters of homes that carry the weight of a community's displacement and reinvention in a city that has remade itself many times over.
Tsing Yi Fishermen Village and St. Paul's Village sit on the northeastern shore of Tsing Yi Island at approximately 22.358°N, 114.105°E. From the air at 1,500–2,000 feet, the island's distinctive shape — a hilly spine running north-south, flanked by container terminals to the southwest and residential towers to the northeast — is clear. The villages themselves are small and not easily distinguished from the surrounding development, but they lie between the waterfront and the slopes leading up toward Tsing Yi Peak. Hong Kong International Airport (VHHH) at Chek Lap Kok on northern Lantau is approximately 8 nautical miles to the southwest. The Tsing Ma Bridge, linking Tsing Yi to Ma Wan and Lantau, is visible to the southwest, and the green hills of the Tsing Yi Peak ridge line mark the island's southern half.