This Used to be an Oil Facility: Walking from Mei Foo Sun Chuen to Lai Chi Kok, Hong Kong | 4K 60FPS

Mei Foo is one of those places that if you live in the New Territories you've probably passed through a lot on the MTR. A major transport interchange below ground, it also pays host to one of the largest housing developments in the world on the surface with a whopping 99 blocks. This walk starts at Lai Chi Kok Park and crosses Kwai Chung Road and the Ching Sha Wan to Cheung Sha Wan in the commercial area of Lai Chi Kok (Lychee Corner).

Mei Foo is named for Mobil - yes, that Mobil, now part of ExxonMobil - which traded under the name 美孚 (Mei Foo) in Hong Kong. In the past, rather than transliterating names from English to Chinese or Cantonese, companies would pick approximations that used auspicious characters. This is how you get some pretty different-sounding place names in Chinese. Swire, the British-Asian conglomerate, is called Taikoo (太古), for example.

The development is named after the company because much of it is built on land previously reclaimed by the firm for a petrol storage facility. Once they were finished with it, they turned it into what you see in this video. It's a great example of how, faced with a shortage of land, people in Hong Kong reuse space that people in more spacious countries might otherwise abandon or consider undesirable. Today, it's a sprawling place where thousands of families make their homes, with tens of restaurants, arcades, schools, and other facilities on street-level, of which this video only barely scratches the surface.

I filmed this video largely on impulse as we were visiting Lai Chi Kok Public Library. I thought the local route looked interesting as I quite like moving through industrial and residential areas, and taking paths that people generally don't. HK is great for that sort of exploring if you like footbridges and navigating under and overpasses. I actually really enjoyed filming it because a lot of this places you'll only see from the top deck of a bus, rarely on foot. Nothing too remarkable here, of course - it probably just looks like a segment of concrete jungle - but unremarkable is what I do. Hope you enjoy.

Locations featured:
00:00 Intro
00:16 Lai Chi Kok Garden (Lai Wan Road)
02:22 Mount Sterling Mall
06:02 Mei Lai Road
08:24 Cheung Sha Wan Road Pedestrian Overpass
14:26 Stairwell to Po Lun Street
15:36 Yuet Luen Street
18:23 Beneath the Tsing Sha Highway
20:41 Crossing over Kwai Chung Road
23:08 Cheung Sha Wan Road (street level)
25:51 Outro

This video was filmed in June 2023 on the Panasonic GH5S using a DJI RS3 Mini gimbal. If you liked this video, please consider subscribing. It is the best way to support the channel, and it costs nothing but means a lot! For enquiries including privacy requests and licencing, please see the channel description.

Postscript: Two interesting sights for me in this video. The large building you see at 11:35 on the right is the KMB headquarters. Salute to all my bus-loving friends. Also, the road on the left at this point is Castle Peak Road - the same one that features extensively in my Yuen Long video (   • Exploring Yuen Long and New Territories ba...  ). Castle Peak Road truly is the artery that links a lot of northern HK together.