Before Chek Lap Kok became the island beneath one of the world's busiest airports, it was the site of a medieval industrial operation whose purpose puzzled archaeologists for years. The Hong Kong International Airport Historical Garden, together with the adjoining Ancient Kiln Park, preserves and commemorates a cluster of thirteen dome-shaped kilns excavated at Ha Lo Wan on the island in 1990, ahead of the massive land-reclamation and construction project that would flatten most of Chek Lap Kok to build the airport. Rather than leaving the discovery buried and forgotten under runways, Hong Kong's Antiquities and Monuments Office arranged for the kiln remains to be preserved and reconstructed within these landscaped grounds, giving travelers passing through one of the world's great modern transit hubs a direct physical link to the island's pre-colonial past.
The Ha Lo Wan kilns were built by digging cavities into the side of a ravine and lining them with clay, each structure standing roughly 75 centimeters high and about 2 meters in diameter — modest in scale, but clearly purpose-built and repeated across at least thirteen separate units. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal recovered from the site placed their use in the late Song to Yuan dynasty transition, roughly between the mid-13th and early 15th centuries. For years after excavation, researchers debated exactly what the kilns had produced, since they did not match the layout of typical pottery or lime kilns found elsewhere in the region.
