2nd November 2026 – (Hong Kong) Rescuers this afternoon recovered the body of 80-year-old Tung Chung-yin near Hung Shek Mun Au in Tai Po, ending a six-day hill search after the Tin Shui Wai resident went missing on a suspected hike toward Wu Kau Tang.
Mr Tung left his Tin Shui Wai home on the morning of 25th October and did not return. Relatives reported him missing to police on 27th October. Investigators traced his mobile phone’s last signal to the Wu Kau Tang area of Tai Po, a rugged stretch of countryside park paths and coastal hills popular with walkers heading toward Double Haven and the red-rock shoreline at Hung Shek Mun.
From that day onward official rescue crews worked the hills around Wu Kau Tang in successive shifts. Civilian search teams also turned out unasked, combing ridgelines, bush paths and stream courses where an elderly solo walker might have strayed. Despite the sustained effort, there was no confirmed sighting until today’s grim find.
At about 12.40pm today, searchers located Mr Tung near Hung Shek Mun Au, the pass above the Hung Shek Mun coast. He was clearly dead. Crews began arranging to move his body down from the hillside. Relatives later confirmed the news on social media, writing that he was “already at rest among the mountains and sea he loved most” and thanking rescue personnel and fellow hikers for their help.
Alongside government teams, volunteers from the Hong Kong Guardians (HKGV) and the Countryside Volunteer Search Team (CVST) joined the hunt over successive days. Some sorties brought search dogs to widen the sweep across thick scrub and faint trails. A comment left earlier on CVST’s Facebook page said a walker had met Mr Tung on the morning of 25th October near Ma Tau Fung close to Kau Tam Tso, when he was heading toward Wu Kau Tang — placing him on the north-eastern Tai Po trails from the first hours of his disappearance.
The Wu Kau Tang–Hung Shek Mun corridor is a long, demanding outing with unofficial forks, steep drops and limited replenishment points, and elderly hikers are often urged to leave route plans with family and avoid going alone. Mr Tung’s case underlines how quickly a familiar hill walk can become a multi-agency missing-person operation once phone signals fade and days pass without contact.
For now the focus has shifted from hope of a living find to recovering Mr Tung from the pass where the six-day effort closed, while relatives mark his death in the landscape he favoured and acknowledge the official crews, volunteer units and hill-walkers who stayed on the search until he was found.
