The trailhead on South Lantau Road looks like a drainage ditch. That’s the first thing that throws visitors off — there’s no sign, no faded wooden post with an arrow, nothing that says “historic site this way.” Just a concrete culvert disappearing into the undergrowth, the kind of thing a hiker would walk past ten times without a second glance. A local named Wong, who has been leading small walking groups on Lantau for about five years, says most people picture an entrance with ceremony when they think about bunkers. “The military didn’t want ceremony. They wanted a hole in the ground that you couldn’t see from the road, and they succeeded.”
The vegetation has done its job too. By mid-afternoon, the canopy closes in quickly enough that the light drops by a full stop within the first fifty metres. The path narrows to shoulder-width, and the air smells less like the coast and more like damp concrete and leaf litter — the particular scent of a place that has been sealed off from the wind for decades. The ground underfoot shifts from packed earth to something harder, and that’s the first clue that the trail isn’t natural. Someone laid this surface deliberately, and they did it to last.
A short descent through a grove of banana trees — the kind that grow wild wherever water pools in Hong Kong — opens onto a stream bed that runs clear after rain. The water here is cold enough to register through the soles of hiking boots. Regulars on the trail know to stop and refill bottles at this point, because the ridge above has no reliable source. A small footbridge, nothing more than a single steel beam with wooden slats bolted across it, spans the stream. The slats are new, replaced within the last year by volunteers from one of the local hiking groups. The original bridge, says Wong, was a fallen tree that lasted close to a decade before someone finally decided a proper crossing was needed.
Beyond the stream, the trail begins to climb. It’s not a gentle gradient — the path rises roughly two hundred metres over the next half-kilometre, switchbacking through secondary forest that has reclaimed what was once a military service road. Concrete fragments, some the size of a fist, some larger, litter the slope on either side. They’re not archaeological remnants in the usual sense; they’re the shattered edges of a much larger structure that was dismantled piece by piece when the garrison left. A single length of rusted steel pipe, perhaps three metres long, lies half-buried in the undergrowth. The pipe still rings when tapped with a trekking pole — a hollow sound that carries through the trees.
The first bunker, when it appears, is easy to miss. It sits back from the trail, tucked into a fold of the hillside where the vegetation has grown thick enough to obscure the entrance entirely. A visitor who wasn’t looking for it might walk past within two metres and never notice. The entrance is a low concrete arch, barely a metre and a half high, with a steel door that has long since been removed. Inside, the bunker is a single rectangular chamber, roughly four metres deep and three wide, with firing slits on three sides that now offer views of nothing but leaves and branches. The floor is a few centimetres deep in dry leaf litter. The walls are bare concrete, unpainted, marked only by the faint outlines of mounting brackets where equipment was once bolted in place.
What makes this bunker different from the more famous ones along the Dragon’s Back or on the Peak isn’t its size or condition — it’s the fact that nobody has tagged it with graffiti, cleared its interior, or installed an information panel outside. The concrete is unmarked except by weather. The firing slits still have their original steel shutters, rusted into the open position. A spent cartridge casing, probably from a Lee-Enfield rifle, sits wedged in a crack where the wall meets the floor, too corroded to identify by stamp but clearly old enough to predate the jungle that has grown up around it. Wong picks it up carefully, turns it over once, and puts it back exactly where he found it. “People take things. They don’t realize that once you take the last one, there’s nothing left to find.”
The second bunker, a hundred metres further up the ridge, is larger and better preserved. Its entrance faces southeast, toward the sea, and the firing slit on that side commands a clear view of the shipping lanes approaching Hong Kong from the Pearl River estuary. The position was clearly chosen with care — the bunker’s field of fire covers the approaches to Tung Chung Bay and the northern coast of Lantau, where any amphibious landing would have been most likely. Inside, this bunker has two chambers, connected by a narrow passage just wide enough for a soldier to pass with equipment. The rear chamber still contains the concrete base of a storage rack, perhaps for ammunition or radio batteries. A faint, greasy smell clings to the walls — the residue of decades of damp and decay, not unlike the smell of an old garage that hasn’t been opened in years.
The ridge above the bunkers opens onto a broad, grassy saddle that offers the best view of the coastline. On a clear day, the vista stretches from the distinctive peak of Sunset Peak in the east to the freighters anchored off the west coast of Lantau, waiting their turn to enter the port. The saddle itself is a quiet place, sheltered from the wind by the surrounding hills, and it’s here that the temperature difference becomes most apparent — the humid, still air of the lower gullies gives way to a dry breeze that carries the salt of the South China Sea. The contrast is sharp enough to feel on the skin.
The bunkers on this ridge were part of a network of defensive positions built during the 1930s, when the British military was preparing for the possibility of a Japanese invasion that would approach from the southwest. History records that those preparations were ultimately insufficient — the Japanese landed on the northeast coast of the New Territories in December 1941, not on Lantau, and the bunkers never saw combat. But the fact that they were never used in anger doesn’t make them irrelevant. The effort that went into their construction is still visible in the precision of the concrete work, the careful siting of each position, the way the entrances are angled to be invisible from the air. A military historian with knowledge of the site once described it as “a complete defensive system built to a very high standard, designed by people who expected to need it, or something like that.”
The trail continues beyond the saddle, descending through a grove of bamboo that rattles in the wind like a percussion instrument, before emerging onto a dirt road that leads back toward the village of Tung Chung. The entire circuit takes about three hours at a steady pace, not counting time spent exploring the bunkers themselves. A visitor who wants to see all four surviving structures on the ridge should budget closer to four and a half hours, with water and a flashlight. A headlamp is better — both hands free for scrambling on the steeper sections. The path down from the saddle is loose in places, a mix of decomposed granite and leaf litter that can be treacherous after rain. Trekking poles make a noticeable difference, though experienced hikers in the area tend to say the real trick is just taking the descent slowly and letting the boots find their own grip.
The most surprising thing about the entire walk is not the bunkers themselves. It’s the fact that the trail exists at all. Hong Kong is a city where every square metre of accessible land has been mapped, photographed, and written about in at least a dozen blogs. And yet here is a route — legitimate, passable, marked only by the occasional faded ribbon tied to a branch by volunteers — that leads to a collection of military structures in a state of preservation that would be unthinkable at a more famous site. No glass cases. No rope barriers. No signs asking visitors not to climb on the structures. Just concrete, rust, and the long grass growing through the firing slits.
On a Saturday afternoon in November, the trail saw exactly three people: a couple from Sheung Wan who had found a reference to the bunkers in a ten-year-old hiking forum post, and a solo hiker from Tsim Sha Tsui who had heard about the gully from a friend at work. The forum post, still live and still accurate, contained no photographs — just a rough description of the route and a note that “the fourth bunker is the most interesting but you have to push through the ferns to get to it.” The ferns, four metres high in places, have only grown thicker in the decade since that post was written.
The fourth bunker sits at the end of a narrow spur ridge, reached by a faint trail that branches off the main route just before the descent to the village. The path to it requires pushing through a dense stand of fern that leaves arms and clothes covered in tiny, irritating hairs, and the bunker itself is the most overgrown of the four. Its entrance is almost completely obscured by a thicket of bamboo that has grown up through the concrete floor, splitting the structure from within. The roof has collapsed partially, and the interior is a tangle of roots and sunlight and rusted reinforcing bars exposed to the air. A hiker who makes it this far tends to stay a while.
📷 Photos: Karvin Au-yeung (Unsplash), Nicola Lewellen (Unsplash)
