Lantau Island: Hong Kong's Big Buddha and Natural Escape

Lantau Island, twice the size of Hong Kong Island and home to less than five percent of the territory's population, provides Hong Kong with the breathing space that its urban density makes essential — the forests, beaches, fishing villages, and mountain trails that allow residents to reconnect with natural environments within an hour of Central. The island's largest settlement, Tung Chung, developed rapidly as a new town after the airport relocation to Chek Lap Kok in 1998, its high-rise towers and MTR connection providing the residential infrastructure for those who value the island's relative tranquility over urban convenience. The Ngong Ping 360 cable car connects Tung Chung to the island's mountain plateau, its 25-minute journey over forested hillsides providing the most spectacular approach to the Po Lin Monastery and the Tian Tan Buddha that crowns it.

The Tian Tan Buddha — at 34 metres the world's largest outdoor seated bronze Buddha when completed in 1993 — sits on the mountain plateau of Ngong Ping with views across the South China Sea and the airport island in conditions of theatrical mountain grandeur. The 268 steps ascending to its base are climbed by visitors who find the summit's combination of religious significance, architectural ambition, and panoramic view one of Hong Kong's most rewarding experiences. The adjacent Po Lin Monastery, active since 1906 and expanded considerably since the Buddha's installation, provides vegetarian lunches in a canteen that feeds thousands of visitors daily in a practice of Buddhist hospitality that sustains the monastery's religious character amid its tourist function.

The Lantau Trail, a 70-kilometre circuit of the island, provides serious hiking through landscapes that range from the forested ridges above Tung Chung to the beaches of Cheung Sha — the longest beach in Hong Kong — and the fishing villages of Tai O, which preserves its stilt house architecture above the channels of a tidal estuary in a living demonstration of the waterborne way of life that characterised much of Hong Kong's coastline before land reclamation transformed the territory's relationship with its water. Tai O's narrow lanes, its shrimp paste factories, and the pink Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins that swim the surrounding channels provide a complete rural Lantau experience accessible to day visitors without the hiking commitment the full trail requires.