| Hau Tei Square |  |
Hau Tei Square is situated at the junction of Chuen Lung Street and Sha Tsui Road, with buildings on three sides, having the size of a mini-soccer pitch. Sixty years ago, the shallow beaches of Tsuen Wan was the gathering place of horseshoe crabs (“Hau”), and so the place got its name. Hawkers used to block off plots of this land to sell their goods, at first in the open-air and later wooden boards and metal sheets were used to build simple stalls, forming eventually four main corridors and many small paths.
In the early 1980s, the government redeveloped Chung On Street and Chuen Lung Street, and about two hundred hawkers there were relocated to Hau Tei Square to continue doing business. They need not pay rent, and only paid a license fee to the government of several thousand dollars per year. They could therefore sell goods cheaper than shops, and the grassroots population in Tsuen Wan would like to find bargains here. But such Hau Tei Square markets had recently been demolished, in mid-2012, to make way for a new indoor bazaar for the hawkers to move in.
