Hong Kong Star Ferry, the Peak and National Day

The high-speed train from Shenzhen to Hong Kong takes fourteen minutes. The border takes longer. Both sets of passport controls sit in the same building at West Kowloon, so you check out of China, walk a few meters, maybe shop at one of the many duty-free shops, and check into Hong Kong, with a line for each.

Then the subway, and then, as usual, the last 500 meters. My guesthouse was in Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, which turned out to be one building with five towers standing on a shared ground floor of money changers, phone shops and curry counters. Each tower has its own elevators. I asked my way from one Indian vendor to the next until somebody pointed at the right one.

The room had a window, which in that building is not a given. Everything else about it was small, the bathroom especially, and there were spots on the sheets that made me think about bed bugs. But at least the air conditioning worked. This is just the way it is in Hong Kong. Everything is cramped.

Up, because there is nowhere else

Chungking Mansions went up in 1961: seventeen floors, five blocks, around four thousand residents and more than a hundred guesthouses. It is Hong Kong in one building. Everything is stacked on top of everything else.

The reason is the ground. Hong Kong is mostly mountain. Away from the harbor the land is steep hillside, and about 40 percent of it is protected as country park. What flat land there is runs along the water, and a lot of it used to be water. Roughly a quarter of all the developed land in Hong Kong was reclaimed from the sea.

So the city went up instead of out. Hong Kong has 569 buildings over 150 meters. New York has about 320. A fifty-story apartment block is ordinary housing here.

It shows at street level too. Every walk between two places seems to pass through a mall, usually on more than one floor.

On the island the hills start right behind the waterfront, and the city has found its own way up them. From Central to the Mid-Levels runs a chain of covered outdoor escalators, about 800 meters in all, carrying commuters downhill in the morning rush and uphill for the rest of the day. It has been running since 1993 and is often called the longest of its kind.

For some people there is even less room. Hong Kong has about 360,000 foreign domestic helpers, most of them from the Philippines and Indonesia, and most of them live in their employers’ already small apartments. On Sundays, their day off, they take over the sidewalks, footbridges and plazas of Central, because there is nowhere else for them to go.

How Hong Kong became British, in three pieces

Britain did not take Hong Kong all at once. It acquired it in three pieces over 56 years, and the last and largest piece was only borrowed.

The first piece was Hong Kong Island, ceded by the Qing government in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 at the end of the First Opium War. Britain wanted a base for its China trade, and the island had one of the best deep-water harbors on the coast and very little else.

The second was the tip of the Kowloon peninsula across the harbor, added in 1860 after the Second Opium War. The third was the New Territories, the hills and farmland north of Kowloon together with most of the outlying islands, Lantau included. Those were not ceded. In 1898 Britain leased them for 99 years, and that lease is the reason there was a handover in 1997.

Japan invaded in December 1941, on the same morning as Pearl Harbor, and held Hong Kong for three years and eight months. By the end of the war the population had fallen from about 1.6 million to around 600,000.

Then came the refugees. The civil war on the mainland and the communist victory in 1949 sent hundreds of thousands south across the border, and by the early 1950s Hong Kong had more than two million people, many of them in squatter shacks on the hillsides. On Christmas Day 1953 a fire at Shek Kip Mei left more than 50,000 people homeless in a single night. The government answered with resettlement blocks, several stories high and built fast. That was the start of a public housing program that today houses close to half the population, and the start of the towers.

The Star Ferry, forty years on

The first afternoon I took the Star Ferry across to the island. I last did that about forty years ago, and nothing obvious had changed. The same green and white boats, the same wooden benches where you flip the backrest to face whichever way you want. The company has run the crossing since 1888, and the oldest boat in the fleet was built in 1956.

What has changed is the harbor. On the island side the old Central pier was demolished in 2006 to make room for more reclamation, and the new one stands on land that was open water when I was last here. The ferry is the same. The harbor it crosses is narrower.

I came off the boat and walked straight into a mall, and it took me a good while to find a way out to an actual street. I had lunch in there in the end, which felt like conceding the point. I finally found my way out of the shopping mall and walked around at random, just ingesting the Hong Kong atmosphere.

That evening I walked down to the promenade on the Kowloon side. The island skyline at night, lit from the waterline to the top of the hill, is as good as its reputation. I picked a spot for the fireworks the next night.

Where the Star Ferry got its name

The Star Ferry was started by one man with a few boats, and its name comes from a poem.

In the 1880s Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala, a Parsee merchant, ran a ferry across the harbor that he called the Kowloon Ferry Company. He named his steamers Morning Star and Evening Star, after Tennyson’s poem Crossing the Bar. When he retired in 1898 he sold the business to a wharf company, and it became the Star Ferry Company. Every boat since has been a star of some kind: Celestial, Twinkling, Solar, Meridian.

For most of the next century it was the main way across the harbor, and that made the fare a political matter. In 1966 the company was allowed to raise the first-class fare by five cents. A young man began a hunger strike at the Central pier in protest, and his arrest set off several nights of rioting in Kowloon.

The Cross-Harbour Tunnel opened in 1972, the subway went under the harbor in 1980, and the ferry stopped being necessary. It kept running anyway, and it still carries tens of thousands of passengers a day.

The move to the new pier in 2006 was not quiet either. The old pier at Edinburgh Place, with its clock tower, was torn down for reclamation over the protests of people who wanted it kept.

The Peak before eight

I was at the lower Peak Tram station at 7:20 for the first tram at 7:30. I had been warned about lines. There were none, and by 7:45 I was at the top with a cappuccino, a cheese croissant and the whole city below me.

From up there the argument about the ground makes itself. The towers stand in a narrow band between the mountain behind them and the harbor in front, the same again on the Kowloon side, and then green hills again behind that. There is no sprawl, because there is nowhere for it to go.

The view was not always open to everyone. From 1904 to 1930 a colonial ordinance reserved most of the Peak as a place to live for non-Chinese residents. Chinese people worked in the houses up there as servants, but living there in your own right took an exemption from the governor.

When the Sky Terrace opened at 8:30 I went up for the same view from a little higher. Two hours in all, then down on a tram that has been climbing the same slope since 1888, at up to a 48% incline.

The rest of the day was less successful. An old temple and a couple of streets of galleries did not amount to much. What did work was the other tram, the ordinary double-decker that runs along the north shore of the island. I rode the top deck for no reason other than the ride. It is cheap, it is slow, and you are higher than everyone else on the street, which in Hong Kong is the right place to be.

How a rock with a harbor got rich

Hong Kong had no farmland to speak of, no raw materials, and after 1950 not much of its old trade either. It got rich anyway, three different ways, one after the other.

For its first century it was an entrepôt. Goods came in, changed hands and went out again, mostly to and from China, through a free port with almost no duties. That ended abruptly with the Korean War, when the United Nations embargo on trade with China cut off much of the business the colony lived on.

What replaced it was manufacturing. Industrialists from Shanghai had moved south with their capital, their machinery and their know-how, and the refugees supplied the labor. Through the 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong made textiles, plastic flowers, toys and later electronics for export to the West.

The government mostly stayed out of the way. Taxes were low and simple, the budget ran surpluses, money moved freely in and out, and a small colonial civil service ran courts that applied the same law to everyone. John Cowperthwaite, financial secretary from 1961 to 1971, was so wary of officials meddling that he refused to compile GDP statistics at all, on the grounds that the numbers would only tempt the government to act on them. During his decade real wages rose by half.

The third shift came after 1978, when China opened up. The factories moved across the border into Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta, where land and labor were cheaper, and Hong Kong became the office for all of it: banking, shipping, insurance and trade, the place where money went into China and came back out. By one count the economy grew about 180-fold between 1961 and 1997.

There is one more piece, and it brings back the ground. The government owns almost all the land in Hong Kong and leases it out, and land sales have long been one of its biggest sources of revenue. That is part of how taxes stay low. It is also part of why space costs what it does.

Two hundred meters

October 1 is National Day, and in Hong Kong that means fireworks over the harbor at eight in the evening. The promenade was 200 meters from my guesthouse, and I had picked out my spot the night before.

I left at 6:30, which for a 200-meter walk felt generous. The streets were already full, and not ordinary Hong Kong full. Hundreds of thousands of people, police barricades at the junctions, and the crowd let through in blocks of 50 or 100 meters at a time, then held.

In an hour and a half I covered about half the distance. When the fireworks started I was standing behind a row of buildings. I saw the top of every burst, and it was spectacular, and I never got to the spot I had picked.

A city with no room has solved the problem by building upwards, and it has solved it well. A crowd cannot do that. On the one night when a few hundred thousand people want the same strip of waterfront, the old arithmetic comes back.

1997, when the lease ran out

When I was last here, forty years ago, Hong Kong was a British colony. This time I was there for China’s National Day.

The handover came down to a lease. The island and Kowloon had been ceded outright, but the New Territories were only leased, and the lease ran out in 1997. By the 1980s most of the land, the reservoirs and the new towns were on the leased side, and nobody seriously proposed returning the New Territories and keeping the rest.

In December 1984 Margaret Thatcher and Premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Joint Declaration in Beijing. The whole territory would return to China on July 1, 1997, as a special administrative region. Under the formula Deng Xiaoping called one country, two systems, Hong Kong would keep its capitalist economy, its own laws and courts, its own currency and its way of life for fifty years, until 2047. The Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, followed in 1990.

Not everyone trusted the promise. Emigration rose sharply after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, and between 1984 and 1997 close to a million people left, mostly for Canada, Australia, the United States and Britain.

The handover itself was at midnight between June 30 and July 1, 1997, in the convention center on the Wan Chai waterfront. Prince Charles spoke for Britain and President Jiang Zemin for China, the British flag came down, and the last governor, Chris Patten, sailed out of the harbor on the royal yacht Britannia. Tung Chee-hwa, a shipping magnate, became the first chief executive.

How it has gone since depends on whom you ask. For two decades the arrangement largely held, with recurring arguments over how much democracy the Basic Law promised. After the mass protests of 2019, Beijing imposed a National Security Law in 2020 and later overhauled the electoral system. Beijing says this restored stability. Critics, including many former residents now living abroad, say the second system has largely been folded into the first. The 2047 date is still on paper.

October 1 is now celebrated in Hong Kong with fireworks over the harbor, which is how I came to be standing behind a row of buildings that night.

Hong Kong, the practical stuff

How do you get from Shenzhen to Hong Kong by train? — High-speed train from Futian to Hong Kong West Kowloon, 14 minutes. Both border controls are in the same building at West Kowloon: exit China first, then enter Hong Kong. Allow time for a line at each.
What is it like to stay in Chungking Mansions? — Budget guesthouses in five blocks, A to E, each with its own elevators. Know your block before you arrive, or ask on the ground floor. Rooms are small, so ask for one with a window.
How much is the Star Ferry in Hong Kong? — A few Hong Kong dollars for a few minutes across the harbor from Tsim Sha Tsui, and still the best way to see the skyline.
When does the Peak Tram start, and what does it cost? — The first tram is at 07:30, when there was no line at all. HK$82 (about US$10.50) single and HK$116 (about US$15) return, fares from December 2025. The Sky Terrace opens at 08:30, and the flat loop path around the summit is free and takes about an hour.
How much is the Hong Kong street tram? — A flat HK$3.30 (about US$0.40) however far you ride along the north shore of Hong Kong Island, paid by Octopus card or exact change when you get off. Go upstairs.
When should you arrive for the National Day fireworks in Hong Kong? — By the afternoon of October 1 if the waterfront matters to you. Leaving at 18:30 for a 20:00 start was hours too late, even for 200 meters.
How do you get from central Hong Kong to the airport? — MTR to Central, then the Airport Express, about an hour in all. Inside the airport, the far gates are a train ride away.
When is the best time to visit Hong Kong? — November to February, which is clear, cool and the best season for the hill trails. May to September is hot, humid and typhoon season.

China 2026 — all posts

Before you go: Planning a trip to China · Essential apps for travelling in China