Central & Kowloon: Neon, Temples & the Harbour

The ferries themselves are named after stars — Morning Star, Golden Star, Twinkling Star — and they have barely changed their appearance in a century. The green-painted hull, the white superstructure, the life rings, the wooden bench seats with reversible backs so you can always face forward. You will notice that the lower deck is cheaper than the upper deck. It always has been. The upper deck puts you above the spray and gives you the full panoramic view that has made this crossing famous. The eight minutes between pier and pier might be the best-value eight minutes in travel.

Geography is the whole story of Hong Kong, and this crossing makes it legible. The Kowloon Peninsula — where you are standing — was ceded to Britain by China in eighteen sixty and expanded in eighteen sixty with what became known as the new Kowloon. The New Territories to the north were added on a ninety-nine-year lease in eighteen ninety-eight, and that lease expiry date — nineteen ninety-seven — determined everything that followed. Hong Kong Island had been first, ceded in perpetuity in eighteen forty-two after the first Opium War, which means it was technically British land with no end date. The lease question was what forced the handover negotiation.

From this pier, in nineteen ninety-seven, you could have watched fireworks mark the moment Britain handed this city back to China. The last governor, Chris Patten, wept on the boat leaving. The Prince of Wales was there. Rain poured down. It was the end of a hundred and fifty-five years of colonial rule, and this harbour, right here, was where the world was watching.

Buy your ticket — a few Hong Kong dollars, one of the great bargains left on earth — and board the ferry. Find a seat on the upper deck, on the Kowloon side so you face forward. The crossing begins in a moment, and what you will see across the water is one of the defining views in the world.

The Avenue of Stars used to be lined with handprints of Hong Kong cinema's greatest actors and directors — John Woo, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Wong Kar-wai. The avenue was renovated in two thousand and nineteen and many of the original plaques were relocated, but the spirit remains: this is a city that took its own film industry seriously, producing work that influenced action cinema globally for three decades.

After dark, this promenade becomes the front-row seat for the Symphony of Lights — a nightly laser and lighting show that plays across the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island at eight o'clock every evening. The buildings themselves become the stage: coloured lights sweep across facades, lasers shoot from rooftops, and the whole thing is accompanied by music broadcast on a local radio frequency. It holds the Guinness World Record for the largest permanent light and sound show in the world. Tourists gather along this railing every night to watch it. Locals mostly do not bother, which is the accurate measure of whether a city attraction has been absorbed into the fabric of daily life.

In the nineteen fifties, Kowloon was one of the most densely populated places on earth. Refugees had flooded across the border from the mainland after the Communist revolution of nineteen forty-nine, settling in Kowloon's Walled City and the surrounding streets in numbers that overwhelmed every infrastructure the colonial government tried to build. The neon signs that became Hong Kong's visual identity — the vertical Chinese characters hanging from buildings on iron brackets, glowing in red and gold and white — were partly a product of that density. When every shopfront is competing for attention in a street too narrow for daylight to reach the ground, the sign becomes everything.

Walk east along the promenade. The harbour is narrower than it was a century ago — land reclamation has pushed both shores outward — but the essential transaction remains unchanged: two cities facing each other across moving water, the crossing between them the hinge on which everything turns.

Then the Opium Wars, and everything changes. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company was running a trade deficit with China — buying vast quantities of tea, silk, and porcelain but selling very little in return, because Chinese demand for British goods was minimal. The solution the Company found was opium, grown in Bengal and smuggled into China in quantities that created millions of addicts. When the Chinese government seized and destroyed twenty thousand chests of British opium in eighteen thirty-nine, Britain went to war. It won both wars, extracting Hong Kong Island in eighteen forty-two and Kowloon in eighteen sixty.

The museum handles the handover of nineteen ninety-seven with nuance. This was not simply a return — it was the creation of something genuinely new. The 'one country, two systems' framework negotiated by Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher promised Hong Kong fifty years of its existing legal system, civil liberties, and way of life under Chinese sovereignty. Whether that promise is being kept is a question that the museum, opened in the year two thousand, could not fully anticipate.

The reconstructed street scenes from colonial Hong Kong are extraordinary — a nineteen forties tram stop, a nineteen thirties medicine hall, the whole texture of a city that was always, even under British rule, predominantly Chinese in culture and Cantonese in language. The British governed the infrastructure; the residents governed themselves. That tension — between formal colonial authority and the vigorous autonomy of the population — produced one of the most dynamic urban cultures in the world. Give yourself an hour inside if the permanent exhibition is open. The story it tells is unlike any other colonial history you will encounter.

Look for the flamingos. Yes, flamingos — a flock of Chilean flamingos lives in the park's aviary section, an incongruous splash of pink against the surrounding grey. They have been here since the nineteen eighties. The park also has a swimming pool complex, an indoor sports centre, and the Mirage Pool, a shallow reflecting pool whose still surface mirrors the towers of Nathan Road rising at the park's edge.

Early in the morning — come back at six if you can — the park fills with tai chi practitioners. Dozens of them, spread across the open areas, moving through the slow deliberate forms that have been practised in Chinese parks for centuries. The movements are the same whether the practitioner is twenty years old or eighty, whether they are in Hong Kong, Beijing, or Vancouver. It is a form of physical culture that crosses every boundary that Hong Kong's complicated history has created.

Near the park's Haiphong Road entrance, you will find the Kowloon Mosque and Islamic Centre — a white marble building that serves the city's Muslim community, which has roots going back to the South Asian soldiers and merchants who came with the British and stayed. The mosque can hold over five thousand worshippers. Its presence in the middle of a park that was once a British barracks, in a city that is ninety-two per cent ethnically Chinese, administered since nineteen ninety-seven by China, is a small but vivid illustration of how many histories have layered themselves onto this peninsula.

Walk the stalls slowly. There are jade sellers with trays of bangles and pendants, the green stone graded from pale celadon to deep imperial green, the prices varying by translucency and carving. There are fake designer goods sold with a cheerful lack of pretence — both parties understand the transaction. There are electronics, watches, T-shirts, and the miscellaneous household goods that give night markets their characteristic feeling of an entire neighbourhood's attic having been turned out onto folding tables.

But the strangest and most distinctly Hong Kong feature of Temple Street is the fortune tellers. They sit at card tables under the street lights with their charts and cards and caged birds, and they read your face, your palm, your date of birth, the configuration of the stars on the night you arrived in this world. Some of them are very old. Some speak enough English to practise on tourists. The tradition is a blend of Chinese numerology, face reading, and the specifically Cantonese capacity for finding the practical and the mystical in the same moment.

After dark, on the quieter northern stretch of the market, you will sometimes hear Cantonese opera — performed not in a theatre but in the street, by amateur singers accompanied by a small ensemble of strings and percussion, for an audience of older men sitting on plastic stools. Cantonese opera is one of the oldest musical theatre traditions in the world, and it has been practised in the streets of Yau Ma Tei for as long as there has been a Yau Ma Tei. Listen for a few minutes. The ornate vocal style, the sliding notes, the percussion punctuating the drama, is unlike anything in the Western musical tradition.

The two deities enshrined here give the temple its name. Man — the God of Literature — is the civil deity, patron of scholars, examination candidates, and civil servants. He is depicted holding a writing brush. Mo — the God of War — is Guan Yu, the deified general of the Three Kingdoms period, patron of soldiers, police, and the martial arts. He is depicted holding a sword. The pairing of civil and martial virtues is a classic Chinese philosophical balance, and the fact that both gods are worshipped here together reflects the Cantonese merchant class's understanding that success required literacy, diplomacy, and the occasional willingness to fight.

Outside the temple, Hollywood Road itself was Hong Kong's first road, cut through the hillside in eighteen forty-four. It remains one of the most interesting streets on the island: a long, slightly sloping lane lined with antique dealers, Chinese art shops, and furniture sellers who specialise in the furniture of old Shanghai, old Guangzhou, old Fujian. The antique trade here goes back to the nineteen twenties, when the European community and wealthy Chinese merchants began collecting. Some of what is sold is genuinely old. Much of it is not. Telling the difference requires either expertise or a tolerance for uncertainty, and both are qualities the Man Mo Temple would approve of.

Light a stick of incense before you leave — you can buy one at the entrance. Carry it to one of the altar tables, hold it in both hands, and bow three times. It costs almost nothing, offends no one, and connects you for a moment to a practice that has been repeated in this room, at this altar, for nearly two hundred years.

Sheung Wan — the district you are in — is one of the oldest settled areas of Hong Kong Island, predating the British by centuries as a fishing and trading community. The name means Upper Ring, a reference to a vanished geographical feature. What remains is a neighbourhood of compressed history: old tong lau shophouses — the three-and-four-storey buildings with ground-floor shops and residential floors above, their facades decorated with balconies and plaster ornament — pressed against glass towers that went up in the nineteen eighties and nineties.

Walk north toward Des Voeux Road West, where the dried seafood shops begin. This is one of the most distinctive commercial streets in Hong Kong — block after block of shops selling dried shrimp, dried scallops, dried abalone, dried fish maw, dried seahorse, dried sea cucumber, whole dried fish hanging from hooks above the pavement, the smell rich and briny and entirely unlike anything else in the city. These ingredients are the backbone of Cantonese cooking and Cantonese medicine. The top-grade dried abalone — the Japanese variety, small and dense and the colour of old amber — sells for thousands of Hong Kong dollars per piece.

The Western District, as this area is also known, has housed the communities that kept colonial Hong Kong running: the Sikh policemen, the South Asian traders, the Fujianese merchants, the Shanghainese refugees who arrived after nineteen forty-nine with their capital and their energy and their very different Mandarin-speaking culture. The neighbourhood absorbed all of them and remained recognisably itself — Cantonese in its daily habits, its food, its languages, its gods.

The PMQ complex you see today was opened in two thousand and fourteen after a heritage-conscious renovation that kept the two existing blocks — built in the nineteen fifties in a style of utilitarian modernism that somehow aged well — and converted the individual apartments into studios and shops for Hong Kong designers, craftspeople, and creative businesses. It is one of the better examples of heritage preservation in a city that spent much of the twentieth century demolishing things that should have been kept.

The resident designers and brands at PMQ rotate, but the quality tends to be high — this is a platform for serious Hong Kong creativity rather than a tourist souvenir market. You will find ceramics made in Kowloon, clothing designed in Hong Kong using fabrics from Japan, jewellery, furniture, graphic design studios, leather goods, food and drink concepts. The work is not cheap, but it is genuinely local.

Walk through the courtyard between the two blocks and look up. The building facades — yellow-painted concrete with the original metal-framed windows, the balcony railings unchanged from nineteen fifty-one — have a quiet dignity that expensive renovations often destroy. The trees in the courtyard are old. The stairwells smell of concrete and time. The police families who lived here from the nineteen fifties through the nineties — raising children in flats the size of the studio apartments that now sell handmade notebooks — are gone, but the scale of their daily life remains legible in the architecture.

PMQ also hosts events, markets, and exhibitions throughout the year, and its rooftop bar has one of the better views of the Mid-Levels hillside rising above Central. It is a place where the current city and the historical city occupy the same space without either one cancelling out the other.

Foster was asked to build the new headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in the fastest possible time, on a site that had to remain partially operational throughout construction. His solution was to build the structure from the outside in, suspending the floors from eight steel masts rather than stacking them on a central core. The result is a building with no internal columns, where every floor is a clear span, and where the entire structure is expressed on the exterior as honestly as a bridge. The escalators at the base — the longest indoor escalators in the world when they were installed — bring you up from the public plaza through the belly of the building.

The building has two steel lions at its entrance — Stephen and Stitt, named after the bank managers under whose tenure they were commissioned. The lions are riddled with bullet marks from the Japanese occupation of nineteen forty-one to nineteen forty-five, and the bank chose not to repair them. The marks are a record.

Feng shui played a significant role in the building's orientation and details. The two bronze cannons mounted on the rooftop, facing toward the Bank of China Tower, were positioned to deflect negative energy directed at the HSBC by its angular competitor. Whether or not you find that convincing, it is a measure of how seriously feng shui is taken by serious people in this city: not as superstition, but as a system of spatial logic that has shaped how Hong Kong is built and inhabited.

The IFC towers behind you — the two International Finance Centre buildings, the taller one at four hundred and twelve metres the tallest building in Hong Kong — define the contemporary skyline in the direction of the harbour. The Hong Kong Club building, just down the road, is the last major remaining colonial-era clubhouse in Central, a reminder that this entire district was once a tight grid of Victorian commercial buildings before the postwar development swept almost all of it away.

The crowd at Lan Kwai Fong today is different from the original. Hong Kong's own young professional class — educated in the city's universities, working in finance or media or the tech sector, speaking Cantonese at home and English at work — has made this as much their neighbourhood as it ever was the expat community's. The music in the bars shifts between Cantopop and international chart music without any sense of incongruity.

The best time to visit is on the cusp of evening, when the office workers are arriving and the restaurants are filling up but the night has not yet become loud. Walk the full length of D'Aguilar Street, past the bars with their menus chalked on boards outside, the restaurants whose kitchens are working at full pressure, the small grocery at the corner selling chilled Tsing Tao and Vitasoy in equal quantities.

A short walk east along Elgin Street brings you to SoHo — South of Hollywood Road — where some of the best restaurants in the city are found. Just above SoHo, the Mid-Levels Escalator begins its long climb: the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, eight hundred metres of moving steps that run downhill in the morning to carry commuters to Central, then reverse direction at ten and run uphill for the rest of the day. Built in nineteen ninety-three, it works perfectly — which in a city this complicated is its own small miracle.

This is where the walk ends, though Hong Kong is not a city that wants you to stop. The night market is still going in Kowloon. The trams are still running along Des Voeux Road. The harbour is still crossing itself in both directions with every ferry. Somewhere in Yau Ma Tei, an opera singer is holding a note. It is that kind of city — the kind that keeps offering you the next thing before you have finished with the last one.