Yim Tin Tsai
"The whole island held maybe a dozen visitors and one former resident who'd come back just to open the chapel, and it felt less like a destination than a favor someone was doing us."
A near-abandoned salt-farming island off Sai Kung, brought back to life one chapel restoration and one Venice Biennale prize at a time.
Yim Tin Tsai’s name translates to “small salt field,” and that is exactly what the island was built for — Hakka settlers arrived in the 17th century and turned the low-lying flats into salt pans, a livelihood that sustained a village of a few hundred people for generations before it collapsed in the mid-20th century as cheaper imported salt made the trade unviable. By the 1990s the island was essentially empty, its houses left to the weather, until a handful of the original families’ descendants began, slowly and mostly with their own money, restoring it.
We caught the kaido from the Sai Kung public pier — a short, cheap boat ride of maybe twenty minutes — on a recommendation from the same friend who’d sent us out to the seafood market on the mainland side. The island is small enough to walk end to end in under an hour, and the first thing you notice stepping off the boat is the quiet: no shops, no crowds, just a scatter of restored buildings and a slightly overgrown path leading up toward the chapel.
That chapel — St. Joseph’s Chapel, built in 1890 when the island’s population converted largely to Catholicism under Italian missionaries — is the reason Yim Tin Tsai has any profile at all. Its restoration won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage award in 2005, and the chapel and surrounding village won a special mention at the Venice Biennale of Architecture years later, recognition that feels almost absurdly disproportionate to how few people actually visit. Descendants of the original Hakka Catholic families still return for an annual festival, and a small number volunteer as informal caretakers, one of whom unlocked the chapel for us and talked for twenty minutes about growing up on an island that, by the time he was an adult, had nobody left on it.
The restored salt pans themselves, a short walk from the chapel, have been brought partially back into working order by a conservation project that now produces small batches of salt using the traditional evaporation method, sold in the little visitor centre near the pier. We bought a bag more as a souvenir than an ingredient, though it turned out to be genuinely good salt, coarse and faintly mineral, and it sits next to the Tai O shrimp paste in my kitchen now as the second thing from Hong Kong I’ve been rationing since we got home.
When to go: Kaido boats run mainly on weekends and public holidays with limited weekday service, so check the schedule from Sai Kung pier before planning around it. October to April brings the most comfortable walking weather across the exposed, largely shadeless island.