Of all the figures in Tung Chung Fort's long history, Cheung Po Tsai is perhaps the most vivid. During the Qing dynasty, he commanded one of the most powerful pirate fleets in South China — a confederation of ships that at its peak numbered in the hundreds. Tung Chung Bay, sheltered and strategically positioned, was the kind of anchorage a pirate fleet needed, and Cheung Po Tsai made full use of the fort. The Qing government eventually negotiated his surrender rather than continuing to fight a battle it was losing. After Cheung Po Tsai submitted to imperial authority, the government rebuilt and regarrisoned the fort. Scholars debate the precise year — either 1817 or 1832 — but the rebuilt fort was manned by the Right Battalion of Tai Peng to defend the coast until the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898, at which point the garrison was withdrawn.

The fort that survives today is the Qing reconstruction, and it is more complete than most historical sites of comparable age in Hong Kong. Six muzzle-loading cannons still stand on their cement bases, each surrounded by granite block enclosures. Three arched gateways punctuate the walls, each one engraved with a Chinese inscription. The walls themselves are built from large granite blocks, with the characteristic mass and thickness of a serious military installation. The villages of Sheung Ling Pei and Ha Ling Pei still surround the site, giving it a context that feels continuous rather than museum-like. Walking through the arched gateways, there is an unusual quality of solidity: the granite is cool and heavy, and the proportions of the enclosures suggest a place designed to absorb violence, not merely to observe it.

After the garrison departed in 1898, Tung Chung Fort accumulated a long series of new identities. The Imperial Japanese Army occupied it during World War II. After the war, it became a police station, then was converted to house Wa Ying College. For a time it served as the Tung Chung Public Primary School, which operated until 2003 when the school ceased operations. Today the fort compound serves as the base for the Rural Committee Office. Each transformation left the structure essentially intact — the walls are too solid for anything short of deliberate demolition. Hong Kong's Antiquities and Monuments Office declared it a monument in 1979, and it was refurbished in 1988, adding another layer of institutional attention to a site that has somehow accumulated more care than destruction over eight centuries.

Tung Chung Fort sits in a valley that has been transformed almost beyond recognition in the past three decades. When the fort was built in the Southern Song era, Tung Chung was a remote bay settlement on the northern coast of Lantau. When it was last garrisoned in the Qing era, it still faced open water and fishing villages. Now, it is surrounded by a new town of over a hundred thousand people, an international airport less than two kilometres away, and the beginning of an expressway network connecting Lantau to Zhuhai and Macau via the world's longest sea-crossing bridge. The granite walls absorb the noise of aircraft and traffic the way they once absorbed the concern of approaching ships. The fort endures. Everything around it keeps changing.