Affectionately known as Uncle Mak, Sai Kung’s Old Town icon, Mak Sing Yin started crafting metal items when he was 18 years old, and he’s still making buckets, watering cans, pans, letterboxes, money boxes, and Hakka-style New Year rice or orange peel storage containers at the age of 94.
Uncle Mak’s items are all hand-made, barring a few rivets, and with equipment that antique dealers would undoubtedly fight over. “I bought the round wooden block from my teacher, after finishing my three-year apprenticeship,” he explains, and goes on to say that this now well-worn block was already quite a few years old back then. He cuts the tin and stainless steel, on machinery that’s been in the shop here at least as long as he has – 58 years. He bends, shapes and hammers – a familiar sound to those walking through the alleys of the old market town area – churning out metal pieces day in and out.
Nowadays, he does it mainly to keep himself busy, rather than make a living. “It wouldn’t even pay the rates these days,” he says. He makes whatever he feels like making and displays them for sale in front of the shop, attracting some locals and a fair number of tourists too. He won’t take any time-specific orders these days but will accept design requests. 
At the same time, he still fulfils orders for buckets of various sizes for a Kam Tin company, which comes to pick them up whenever enough are finished. He turns out items in batches, so it’s hard to say how much time each one takes, but waving his hand at a stack of about 40 buckets piled up beside his block, he said those took him five days to do.
Following his apprenticeship, Uncle Mak worked in a Kowloon metal shop until the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941. For the three years and eight months of occupation – he is precise – he took on a variety of other jobs, including making soy sauce. Later he resumed his metal making, and eventually moved to his Sai Kung shop in 1952. Back then, there were other metal works shops along these narrow, somewhat quaint, alleys in what was once a thriving village market area with the waterfront not so far away. These days, this old part of town is making a comeback in terms of business, but with no one ready to take over and family spread out all over Hong Kong and the mainland, Uncle Mak’s metal business will be the last of its kind here.
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