HONG KONG.- Sacha Yasumoto likes to serve dinner with a side of danger.

Her guests are blindfolded and driven to a mystery location in the middle of nowhere Hong Kong. Depending on the night in question, they might have to trek into the jungle to reach their final destination.

Here, in the decaying ruins of a mansion or temple or other abandoned site, the guests might be served a menu of kabocha potage, gin jake (salmon), slow-cooked wagyu beef and chocolate cake, while at any moment, a bat, gecko or wild monkey could make an appearance.

“It’s all multisensory,” said Yasumoto, who has been organizing these 30-40 person Dangerous Dinners in Hong Kong since early 2023. “Things like the wind, the creaking, maybe the passing leopard cat.”

The meals are a chance to get a glimpse of a wilder side of Hong Kong, and the surprising — and often personal — histories hidden away in the city’s abandoned buildings, with Yasumoto as a guide to the richness of life past and present. (Yasumoto gets permission from the owners of the sites to host the dinners, and guests must sign a waiver to join.)

In that sense, she — and the diners — are part of a broader community of explorers, history buffs and nostalgia seekers peering into a bygone era. They have been sharing the snippets of history they have uncovered on local Facebook groups, Instagram and YouTube.

It’s a community that has expanded as the city struggles with tectonic political and cultural shifts, in particular China’s growing influence in the once highly independent territory. Now, there’s more interest in seeing these places, before politics or development erase what people see as the city’s unique identity at the crossroads of, as cliche as it now sounds, East and West.

Some, like the members of Hong Kong Urban Exploration (HK Urbex), an anonymous collective made up of filmmakers, content creators and media types, have been documenting these historic places for over a decade, while others, like Yasumoto, have joined more recently, as the pandemic limited their prospects to visit more far-flung destinations.

The Unlikeliest Places

Yasumoto, a British interior designer with ties to the property business — her husband is Japanese developer and philanthropist Alex Yasumoto — has been exploring hundreds of abandoned properties dotted around Hong Kong during the pandemic, after her teenage son pointed one out from their house in the more rural area of Tuen Mun, near the British boarding school Harrow.

Since that first excursion, she’s been inside the most unlikely of places: an old hospital, a brothel and a zipper factory; Vietnamese refugee camps; and even the old homes of the rich and famous, including one where a Chinese artist lived and the villa of a Hong Kong movie tycoon, where starlets would swim in the pool — now lying empty with its blue tiles chipped, faded glamour from the glorious past of Hong Kong cinema.

In her explorations, Yasumoto says that she has been privy to deeply personal scenes: notes left scattered by a woman who was practicing for a tough conversation with her husband that speak of heartbreaking loneliness, and the documents detailing their divorce; a bag of photos, money and passports belonging to a family who Yasumoto says has not been seen since the 1980s; and, there and elsewhere, clothes and other personal effects that look like they’re still waiting for their owners’ return as the building around them crumbles.

It’s from the history of Hong Kong she’s witnessed that Yasumoto is drawing inspiration for her dinners.

Ronna Chao, 57, who operates a family-run company, attended the second Dangerous Dinner Yasumoto put on, in an old Gurkha temple built in the 1960s as a site of worship for the Nepalese soldiers recruited by the British army and stationed in Hong Kong.

“I follow Sacha on social media, and I see all the photos that she takes of all these beautiful abandoned places all over Hong Kong, so it was kind of exciting to think: Where are we going, and what is it going to be like? And, you know, what stories will the place tell?” Chao said. “But I had no idea, and I did not know that the meal itself was going to be so beautifully set up and grand.”

Despite having no running water and limited electricity on site, Yasumoto was able to work with a French-trained Japanese chef to set up a fine dining experience there: fancy place settings, candlelight, a table overflowing with roses, all at 3,600 Hong Kong dollars ($460) per person.

Old Meets New

The members of HK Urbex are also driven by the thrill of going places most people don’t get to go. Over the years, they’ve explored abandoned cinemas, bomb shelters and subway tunnels.

Recently, several members of the group explored an old way station for British soldiers, later used as a malaria camp, then turned into an artists’ commune. The grounds were overgrown, taken over by the jungle, but two buildings were still intact, windows cracked and covered in a thin layer of orange and green lichen.

As they moved through the space, the trio — who declined to be named, because they were trespassing — examined every detail: doors rotted off hinges, a modern-looking fabric wall panel that wouldn’t be out of place in a college classroom, but very out of place in the 1920s structure. There was also an odd assortment of things left behind, including a large Snorlax Pokémon plushie and a bulbous computer monitor from the 1990s.

Explorers don’t often share the location of these sites, worried that they might be damaged by thrill seekers. The collective adheres to three standard Urbex rules: take nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time, leave nothing but footprints.

Long Overlooked

Out in the New Territories, in the reaches of Hong Kong that are farther from the dense cityscape people imagine when they think of Hong Kong, near the border with mainland China, photographer Stefan Irvine documented deserted homes for his book “Abandoned Villages of Hong Kong,” released in January.

It delves into the less publicized history of the city, the lives of the farmers, fishermen and early settlers from China. His work provides snapshots of the lives these people left behind in their ancestral homes, whether they were fleeing the Japanese invasion during World War II, moving into the more urban parts of Hong Kong as refugees from China’s civil war and the Cultural Revolution swelled the New Territories’ population, or perhaps emigrated to Britain in the ’80s when it announced it would return Hong Kong to China.

Irvine of England, who has lived in Hong Kong for more than 20 years, explained in a phone interview what attracted him to the old houses. He said that when the structures become weathered, they look “even more charming,” with trees and big plants growing in and through the structures.

The project brought him to the stories of Hakka immigrants, a group of Chinese people originally from the north, who have wandered the country for centuries, and the story of Hong Kong’s rise from small, scattered hamlets to the megacity it is today, and the architecture that reflects that history. The buildings he documented show the villagers’ traditional building techniques and the influence of the British, who arrived in the mid-19th century to make their fortunes trading in silk, salt, porcelain, opium and tea, and eventually took Hong Kong as part of the Opium War.

Irvine writes in the book: “While there has been an explosion of interest in exploring Hong Kong’s abandoned spaces in recent years — from derelict film studios and disused abattoirs to World War II bomb shelters and failed holiday camps — for me, the humble village house remains the most appealing of these relics. The silent dignity of these once-treasured dwellings, long since relinquished to the encroaching vegetation, is a reminder of the former glories that existed long before this vibrant city-port was born.”

Looking Forward

Hong Kong is not known for being good at heritage preservation. A city constantly in flux, which has had millions of refugees and migrants from wars and the Cultural Revolution flood across its borders, it has razed its fair share of beautiful buildings to make room for housing developments and skyscrapers, with barely any old buildings surviving in Wanchai and Central. (Even when a building is listed as a heritage site worthy of protection, that status does not provide any legal safeguards against it being torn down.)

But there’s a change that’s been taking place over the last decade, with more residents starting to care about the pockets of history that remain and being vocal about its preservation.

Even the government, which has at times been deaf to calls for preservation, is starting to listen to public sentiment, choosing to preserve heritage sites like the rediscovered Ex-Sham Shui Po Service Reservoir, a cavernous chamber with soaring Romanesque brick arches built in 1904 — where planned demolitions were stopped during the pandemic.

Pictures of the site taken by urban explorers had made it onto social media, and the public put pressure on officials to protect the rare site. It’s now open to the public with a number of guided tours offered by the Water Supplies Department.

Yasumoto is hoping to host a Dangerous Dinner here. Like much in the realm of heritage preservation, her plans are still a mystery.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.