How one Hong Kong restaurant's Tanka cuisine has been a community favourite for 35 years
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Tanka are an ethnic group from South China who have largely acculturated to the dominant Han Chinese community. Their specific origins are somewhat ambiguous, but history indicates that they were aboriginals who were pushed into boat-living during the Qin dynasty (221BC-207BC) due to the Han's territorial expansion from the north.
In the centuries since, the Tanka – also called 'boat dwellers' or 'boat people' – have lived on boats along the southeast China coast and made their living through fishing, all while being ostracised from Han Chinese subgroups. That said, encountering a Tanka on their houseboat today would be difficult, as most have moved onto land and abandoned their fishing traditions.
There are, however, still surviving traces of the boat dwellers in Hong Kong. In particular, Po Toi O is home to a number of such inhabitants.
Po Yau-fai, a sixth-generation Tanka, grew up there. Over the past 35 years, he and his wife Ada Kwok Yin-lai, whose family is from Shantou, in Guangdong province, have run Kam Tung Kitchen, a restaurant in Shau Kei Wan where you can find a taste of authentic Tanka cuisine.
Ada Kwok (left) and Po Yau-fai at Kam Tung in Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong
The signature dishes at the restaurant – think steamed crab and pork patty, stir-fried rice rolls with mantis shrimp in soy sauce, salted fish pot, and stir-fried pork liver and clams – all stem from Po's upbringing on the coast.
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