The collection
Victoria Harbour · A city with nowhere to go but up
Hong Kong rewards a change of altitude. Ride the Peak Tram up for the view over the whole harbour and both skylines at once, then take the Star Ferry back down at deck level and watch the same towers turn into a wall of light from the water. The city runs late and starts early, and the harbour looks different at every hour you cross it.
Hong Kong is a harbour with a city built into the hills around it, and the hills did not move to make room. Victoria Harbour is the reason the British East India Company wanted the place at all — deep water, sheltered on 3 sides, close to the Pearl River trade routes — and the territory was ceded under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 after the First Opium War, with Kowloon added in 1860 and the New Territories leased for 99 years in 1898. Sovereignty returned to China on 1 July 1997, under an arrangement meant to hold the city's own laws and currency in place for 50 years. What that history left behind is a place with almost no flat ground and nowhere to spread except up: over 40 percent of the territory is protected country park, hiking trail and reservoir, while the built-up sliver along the harbour holds most of the population stacked into towers because there was nowhere else to put them. The trams on Hong Kong Island have run since 1904, double-decker and still among the cheapest ways across town; the Peak Tram has climbed to Victoria Peak since 1888. Cantonese is still the street language under the English signage, and the harbour itself keeps shrinking, a little at a time, to reclamation on both shores.
The Peak Tram has climbed the 1.4-kilometre track to Victoria Peak since 1888, one of the oldest funicular railways in Asia. Go before 10 in the morning or after dark to skip the longest queues, which build through the middle of the day. The view holds Hong Kong Island's own towers in the foreground and the whole of Kowloon across the water.
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Victoria Dockside, Tsim Sha Tsui
A glass tower on Victoria Dockside, with Hong Kong's own art world two floors below it and 11 kitchens above.
The Star Ferry has crossed Victoria Harbour between Central and Tsim Sha Tsui since the 1880s, in green-and-white double-ended boats built to be pushed rather than turned around. The crossing is short, just a few minutes, and the fare is still counted in coins. Sit on the lower deck on the harbour side for the view of both skylines as the boat clears the pier.
Built in the 1840s on Hollywood Road, Man Mo is dedicated to the gods of literature and war, and its hall is hung with spiral incense coils that burn for weeks at a time, thick smoke pooling under the roof beams. It predates the street around it by decades and sits a short walk up from the antique shops of Sheung Wan.
Temple Street in Kowloon turns into a market after dark, stalls of clothes, jade and electronics down the centre of the road and fortune tellers working folding tables at the Tin Hau end. It runs into midnight most nights, later on weekends. The street food stalls around Woo Sung Street, just off it, keep going longer than the market itself.
The bronze Buddha at Po Lin Monastery sits atop 268 steps on a hillside on Lantau Island, finished in 1993. The Ngong Ping cable car crosses from Tung Chung in about 25 minutes and gives the only aerial approach; the alternative is a bus up the mountain road. Vegetarian meals are still served on-site, in a hall below the statue.
Tai O is a fishing village on stilts over a tidal creek at the western edge of Lantau, built by the Tanka boat people who have worked this coast for generations. Houses stand directly over the water, connected by a footbridge across the creek mouth. Boat trips from the village occasionally spot Chinese white dolphins in the estuary beyond it, though sightings are never guaranteed.
Pacific Place, Admiralty
André Fu designed all 117 rooms here, on the upper floors of a tower over Pacific Place, connected directly to the Admiralty MTR.
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