| Abstract | This article traces the development of Tsuen Wan which lies on the south shore of Hong Kong's New Territories, the largest of the several New Towns that have grown up in what was, in the recent past, Hong Kong's rural backdrop. Tsuen Wan is a macrocosm of Hong Kong's development. It was transformed from a collection of poor Hakka villages into an intense industrial settlement in little more than a decade. It represents the Hong Kong transformation, and points to the dramatic changes that have occurred in the Pearl River Delta as a whole in the past 20 years, in which an agricultural way of life has given way to an industrialization of the countryside but in an even shorter time frame than was the case in Tsuen Wan. |
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