Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park

Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park was an amusement park in Lai Chi Kok, Hong Kong, that covered around 150,000 square meters and housed mechanical rides, game stalls, water slides, and several swimming pools filled with spring water from the hills. The complex was divided into different zones including a Song Dynasty replica area, an ice skating rink, and animal enclosures with elephants.

Principal Shek Chung-shan of Sacred Heart English College founded the site as an amusement park in 1949, charging 50 cents for adults and 30 cents for children at the entrance. The Shen Chang Fu Circus brought a Burmese elephant named Tino in 1958, who then lived in the park zoo inside a roughly 50-square-meter enclosure.

The name Lai Chi Kok means lychee bay and recalls the orchards that once grew here before the park was built. Visitors could watch traditional opera performances in the evening theater or dance in the outdoor ballroom while an open-air cinema showed films elsewhere in the grounds.

The park opened every day from 8 in the morning until midnight, giving visitors plenty of time to spend a whole day on the grounds. Those who arrived early could use the swimming pools, while opera shows and the cinema only began after sunset.

The theater held 1,000 spectators and staged nightly Cantonese opera performances while films ran and people danced in the ballroom at the same time. Several swimming pools filled with fresh spring water that flowed down directly from the nearby hills.