Wing Lung Wai was founded by Tang Siu-kui and his clansmen during the Chenghua reign of the Ming dynasty — that is, sometime between 1465 and 1487. The village originally went by the name Sha Lan Mei, a name it held for centuries before the present name was formalised in 1905. Three other walled villages sit nearby — Kat Hing Wai, Tai Hong Wai, and Kam Hing Wai — all built around the same period, making the Kam Tin area one of the densest concentrations of Tang Clan settlement in Hong Kong. The Tang were Punti people, among the first Chinese settlers to establish themselves in what is now the New Territories, and their walled villages represent the physical expression of that early claim on the land.

The enclosing wall that gives Wing Lung Wai its defining character was added later than the village itself — built during the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty, between 1661 and 1722, to protect the settlement from bandits, pirates, and rival enemies. By the time the wall went up, the Tang Clan had already been in Kam Tin for two centuries; they were defending an established community, not a new one. The fortifications served their purpose well enough that the village survived the turbulent centuries of the late Qing period intact. The moat that once surrounded the walls was reclaimed — filled in and built over — in the 1960s, a practical concession to modernisation that many Hong Kong villages made around the same time.

Inside the walls, the most significant surviving structure aside from the gate is Kang Sam Tong, an ancestral hall built in the 1880s. Ancestral halls in Chinese villages are not simply places of worship — they are the institutional heart of clan life, where genealogies are kept, major decisions are made, and the connection between living members and their forebears is ritually maintained. Kang Sam Tong served a second function as a study hall until 1926, providing education for the village's children within the same walls that housed the clan's memorial tablets. That dual purpose — honoring the ancestors while preparing the next generation — captures something essential about how these walled villages understood themselves: as projects extending across time, not just across space.

The watchtowers that once guarded Wing Lung Wai's corners are gone, though the base of the northeast tower survives as a low remnant in the ground. The Chung Shing Temple still stands at the end of the village's central axis — the traditional position for a village shrine, where the spiritual anchor of the community faces the entrance gate. The Antiquities Advisory Board has documented and assessed the entrance gate, the Chung Shing Temple, and Kang Sam Tong, recognising their historical significance in the broader catalogue of Hong Kong's built heritage. Wing Lung Wai remains a recognised village under the New Territories Small House Policy, meaning the Tang descendants who live here today retain legal continuity with the people who first raised these walls more than five centuries ago.