MacLehose Trail

History & Context

The MacLehose Trail opened on 26 October 1979, named for Sir Murray MacLehose, Hong Kong’s 25th Governor and by most measures its most consequential — his 1971–1982 tenure produced the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the ten-year public housing programme, nine years of free compulsory education, and the country parks system that made a trail like this possible in the first place. Running 100 kilometres from Pak Tam Chung in Sai Kung to Tuen Mun, the trail is divided into ten sections and crosses eight country parks, effectively stitching together New Territories terrain that had previously existed as isolated protected pockets rather than a connected network. Construction relied on stone-paved paths and concrete staircases engineered to withstand Hong Kong’s combination of heavy monsoon rain and seasonal typhoons rather than fair-weather hiking conditions alone.

Architecture & Geography

The trail crosses some of Hong Kong’s more distinctive geology, including the hexagonal volcanic rock columns of the Sai Kung Volcanic Rock Region, formed roughly 140 million years ago by rapidly cooling lava — a formation significant enough that the area was later designated part of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark. Section 1 runs along the paved road encircling High Island Reservoir, completed in 1978 to address the territory’s chronic freshwater shortages by converting a former sea channel into a walled freshwater reservoir, one of the more ambitious civil engineering projects Hong Kong undertook in the 1970s. Markers placed every 500 metres run the length of the trail, supporting both hiker navigation and emergency response coordination on a route where mobile signal is inconsistent in the more remote eastern sections.

Economic Context & Lore

The trail’s best-known modern institution is the Oxfam Trailwalker, a 100-kilometre team relay race along the full MacLehose route that began in 1981 as a training exercise for the Gurkha Brigade’s Queen’s Gurkha Signals before opening to civilian teams in 1986. Since then it has grown into one of Hong Kong’s largest annual fundraising events, with participating teams of four required to complete the full trail within 48 hours in exchange for sponsorship pledges that have collectively raised several hundred million Hong Kong dollars for Oxfam’s poverty-relief work in Asia and Africa — an unusually direct link between a hiking trail’s physical difficulty and a specific, ongoing charitable fundraising model.

Practical Information

Reaching Pak Tam Chung typically means taking the MTR to Diamond Hill Station and transferring to bus 92, or continuing by village taxi or the 9A minibus from Sai Kung town. The western terminus in Tuen Mun sits close to Tuen Mun MTR Station. Hikers should carry at least two litres of water given the low density of facilities between mountain passes, and those finishing sections near Sai Kung typically head to the town’s waterfront, where seafood restaurants and egg-waffle stalls cater to the steady stream of hikers coming off the trail’s eastern end.

Environmental Context

Managing the trail means balancing conservation against genuinely heavy use — the Country and Marine Parks Authority reports significant weekend footfall on the more accessible western sections nearest urban Kowloon, and popularity spikes sharply around the annual Trailwalker event, when thousands of participants pass along the same paths within a compressed window. Erosion control, drainage maintenance and periodic path resurfacing are ongoing tasks rather than one-time construction work, particularly on the steeper granite sections shared with peaks like Lion Rock and Ma On Shan along the route.