Sha Tin
"I lost count of the statues somewhere past three hundred, and I don't think that was the point — the point was that I'd stopped counting."
A New Territories new town where ten thousand Buddha statues climb a hillside and one of the world's busiest racecourses sits beside a placid river.
Sha Tin is one of Hong Kong’s original “new towns,” planned from the 1970s onward to relieve pressure on the old urban core, and it would be an easy place to write off as a residential satellite if it didn’t also contain the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, which is, statue-for-statue, one of the strangest and most rewarding climbs in the territory. I went there on a day I’d otherwise blocked out for laundry and admin, which tells you something about how last-minute the decision was and how glad I am I made it anyway.
The monastery is not actually a single building at the top of a hill — it’s a climb of a few hundred steps up the hillside from Sha Tin’s town centre, and the steps themselves are lined, almost the entire way, with life-sized golden Buddha statues, each one different, some serene, some almost cartoonishly expressive, donated over decades by different patrons. The “ten thousand” in the name is not literal exaggeration by much — the main hall alone holds somewhere close to thirteen thousand smaller Buddha figurines lining its walls floor to ceiling, though I have no independent way to verify anyone actually counted.
What surprised me was how unmanicured the whole complex feels. It was built in stages from the 1950s through the 1990s by a single monk and volunteers, largely without official planning oversight, and it shows — a slightly ramshackle, deeply sincere quality where pagodas, statues, and shrines accumulate rather than compose. A nine-story pink pagoda near the base has become an unofficial symbol of Sha Tin, visible from the KCR platform, and climbing past it toward the main hall took me nearly an hour with stops to actually look at the statues rather than just walk past them.
Down at river level, Sha Tin has a second identity entirely: the racecourse. Sha Tin Racecourse is one of the two tracks the Hong Kong Jockey Club runs, and on a Wednesday or Saturday race night the atmosphere shifts completely from the quiet of the monastery hillside to something closer to a stadium concert, tens of thousands of people, most of them local, betting small amounts with real seriousness. I went to a race night on a separate trip and it remains one of the most purely fun evenings I’ve had in Hong Kong — cheap beer, communal shouting, and absolutely no pretension about what everyone was there for.
When to go: Year-round for the monastery, though the steps get uncomfortable in summer humidity, so October to April is more pleasant for the climb. For race nights, check the Jockey Club’s racing calendar — the Wednesday evening meets at Happy Valley get more press, but Sha Tin’s Saturday afternoon meets are less crowded and just as good.