This is the entry where the collection has to be careful, so it may as well do it in the open.
The story everybody tells. A Canadian businessman named Alfred Rennie built a flour mill on this stretch of coast in the early 1900s. The mill failed. Rennie killed himself. The place became known as 吊頸嶺 — hanging-neck ridge — and locals, understandably, did not want to live somewhere called that. So the characters were changed to 調景嶺, which sounds near enough and means something entirely different.
What holds up, and what doesn’t
Solid: Rennie was real, the mill was real, it failed, and he died in 1908. The English name of the place was Rennie’s Mill for most of the twentieth century, which is independent confirmation that the whole area was named after the man and his failure.
Wobbly: the manner of his death. Accounts differ — some say he hanged himself, others that he drowned, weighted, from a boat. It matters here because the entire folk etymology depends on the hanging.
Undocumented: the renaming itself. There is no record I can find of who changed the characters, or when, or whether 吊頸嶺 was ever a written name rather than something people said. It may have been the government tidying a map. It may have been residents. It may be that the grim name was invented after the fact, as an explanation for a name that had some other origin, which happens more often than anyone likes to admit.
Why keep it in the collection anyway
Because the folk etymology is doing real cultural work whether or not it’s true. A place whose name sounds like death gets renamed. That impulse — change the characters, keep the sound, fix the luck — is documented all over the Cantonese world, from choosing a number plate to the almanac renaming itself to avoid the word for losing.
So: the mechanism is certain, this particular instance isn’t, and both of those are worth saying on the same page. An earlier version of this site would have refused to publish this entry at all. That was the wrong call — it’s one of the most interesting names in Hong Kong, and “here’s what’s known and here’s what isn’t” is a perfectly good way to write it.