27th October 2026 – (Hong Kong) Reinstatement plans for two Peak houses once held for China Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan have laid bare a roughly 7,000-square-foot underground “palace”, complete with a thousand-foot pool dug under the estate road – illegal works that cost at least HK$16.25 million to put right.
Hui, also known as Xu Jiayin, was sentenced in August 2026 by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court to life imprisonment on eight counts including illegally absorbing public deposits and fundraising fraud, with lifelong deprivation of political rights and confiscation of all personal property. Three houses at 10 Plunkett’s Road on the Peak – B, C and E – that he held through Hong Kong or offshore companies had already been taken over by creditors after Evergrande’s debt crisis. House 10B sold in 2024 for HK$448 million. House 10E was marketed then pulled back, a move suspected to be linked to the scale of the unauthorised building.
An August 2025, investigation had already flagged a Buildings Department demolition order on 10E from June that year. Unauthorised work covered the ground floor and basement: a front courtyard platform of more than 1,000 square feet had been raised, and basement concrete hollowed out, for a total of 6,028 square feet on the order. The notice did not spell out how the dug space was used. Only when receivers lodged reinstatement drawings did the fuller picture emerge – about 7,000 square feet of underground “palace”.
Within the house boundary alone, the lower basement had been cut outward for nearly 4,000 square feet of cellar. Structural and partition walls were removed and some reinforcement cut. Inside sat a suite of more than 300 square feet, a thousand-foot space with no labelled use, plus rooms, stores and plant rooms. The dig did not stop at the lot line. A private road runs between the six houses at No. 10; 10E’s illegal basement ran under that road. The hollow structure beneath had X-shaped bracing to stop the carriageway deforming or collapsing. That bracing was stripped out to create a pool of more than 1,000 square feet under the estate road.
The neighbouring 10C house, likewise in receivership for Hui’s camp, drew its own demolition order in August 2025 for hollowed basement concrete, removed partitions and cut steel – about 1,800 square feet divided into rooms. Together the two houses’ unauthorised area ran to about 8,000 square feet, some 3.5 times the Kowloon Tong basement once associated with former chief secretary Henry Tang. Company accounts show the holding firms received HK$16.247 million between May 2025 and May 2026 for property reinstatement works.
The Buildings Department said unauthorised areas were about 1,829 square feet at 10C and 6,028 at 10E, with the orders registered at the Land Registry in July and September 2025. Receivers appointed building professionals to finish demolition and repair; the department wrote in September 2026 that the orders had been complied with. Other houses in the same estate were already listed in 2025 for a large-scale drive against illegal structures and disrepair, and staff are still inspecting before further enforcement. The underground pool is gone from under Plunkett’s Road; the bill for winding back the Peak “palace” stands at more than sixteen million dollars.