The government-appointed Lantau Development Advisory Committee has called for Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest island, to be developed into a tourism hub with seaside spa resorts and amusement parks. But this has been attacked as a ‘plunder of invaluable natural resources’ by citizen concern group Save Lantau Alliance.

Other plans have been floated to expand Tung Chung, a new town adjacent to the Hong Kong airport, and to develop the land around the Sunny Bay MTR stop, which connects to Hong Kong Disneyland and is currently surrounded by carparks and vacant lots. An even more ambitious proposal calls for the creation of a new artificial island off the coast of Lantau that would become a vast new development called the East Lantau Metropolis.

‘The main reason I live in Tung Chung is because of the green spaces, relatively quiet environment compared to Hong Kong Island or Kowloon and its proximity to the airport,’ says English teacher Derrick Chang, who’s lived in Tung Chung since 2014. He looks forward to new developments that will bring better restaurants and cheaper supermarkets to his neighbourhood, but hopes ‘it won’t cause too much traffic and foot congestion’.

That would be an ironic outcome for a project that succeeded in depositing Hong Kong’s millions of arriving visitors far away from Kowloon’s atmospheric but chaotic streets. But Lantau is huge – twice the size of Hong Kong Island – and half the area is country park. The days of aircraft landing between tower blocks and washing lines are long gone.