Hong Kong

Overview

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China with its own currency, border, courts and internet, and about 7.5 million people packed onto a few peninsulas and islands where country parks cover roughly 40 percent of the land.

The status dates from the 1997 handover from British rule, under the formula known as one country, two systems. It shapes the day’s small details. Street signs are bilingual. Octopus card readers chirp at every turnstile. The Star Ferry charges in Hong Kong dollars, not yuan, and a low-rise tenement on Hollywood Road can sit beside an art gallery in a converted police station from 1841.

The territory splits into three legal parts and four practical ones. Hong Kong Island was the first piece Britain took, and its north shore (Central, Sheung Wan, Wan Chai, Causeway Bay) still holds the banks, the old colonial buildings and the lower station of the Peak Tram. Kowloon, the peninsula across Victoria Harbour, came next and is the denser, more Chinese half of the city: Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip, with the Clock Tower and the Museum of Art, then Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po behind. The New Territories, held on the lease that ran out in 1997, run north to the Shenzhen border and hold most of the country parks and the walled clan villages. The Outlying Islands are the fourth part: Lantau, with the airport, Disneyland and the Tian Tan Buddha, and the smaller car-free islands of Lamma and Cheung Chau.

Plan the visit in two layers. The harbour core, Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, is where the hotels, the museums, the dim sum halls and the skyline are, and you can fill four or five days there without using anything but the MTR and your feet. The second layer is everything you reach in under an hour from it: ridge trails above the South China Sea, hexagonal rock columns in a UNESCO geopark, a bronze Buddha on a Lantau plateau, a stilt-house fishing village, and ferries to islands where the loudest vehicle is a bicycle. Both layers run on the same transit card, and for most Western passports on an entry stamp rather than a visa.

History & character

Clans, salt and a drowned emperor

Before the British arrived the area was a scatter of farming and fishing villages under Guangdong’s administration, and the families that mattered were the great clans of the New Territories. The Tang clan built the walled village of Kat Hing Wai at Kam Tin in the fifteenth century and walled it properly in the early Kangxi years of the 1660s; around 400 of their descendants still live inside it. The territory’s one moment in the imperial spotlight came in 1279, when the last child emperor of the Song dynasty was enthroned at Mui Wo on Lantau while fleeing the Mongols.

Three treaties, 1842 to 1898

Britain took Hong Kong Island in the First Opium War and kept it under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, added the Kowloon peninsula after the Second Opium War in 1860, and leased the New Territories for 99 years in 1898. That lease is the whole reason for the 1997 date. Stanley, on the island’s south coast, was briefly the capital in 1841 with around 2,000 residents before the government moved to the north shore and built Victoria City around the harbour.

The Japanese occupation ran from December 1941 to August 1945 and emptied the city: the population fell from 1.6 million to about 600,000 through flight, hunger and death. Recovery was fast and came from the mainland. Refugees from the civil war and the 1949 Communist victory supplied the labour for the textile, plastics and electronics factories that made the 1950s to 1970s Hong Kong’s manufacturing decades.

MacLehose and the making of the modern city

Murray MacLehose, the longest-serving of the colonial governors, is the name behind two things visitors use constantly: the country park system he championed, and the trail across the New Territories that opened in 1979 and carries his name. The same decade built the MTR, whose first section opened on 1 October 1979. After 1978 the factories crossed the border into Shenzhen and the wider Pearl River Delta, and Hong Kong became the finance and logistics city it still is.

The Joint Declaration and the handover

Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing on 19 December 1984. It fixed the handover for 1 July 1997 and promised that Hong Kong’s capitalist system and way of life would stay unchanged for 50 years, to 2047, under one country, two systems, with China running defence and foreign affairs and the SAR keeping its own courts, currency and customs. The ceremony took place in the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.

Umbrellas, extradition and the security laws

Friction over how far “two systems” reached built through the 2000s. A first attempt at local security legislation under Article 23 of the Basic Law was withdrawn in 2003 after large protests. In 2014 a Beijing decision to pre-screen candidates for chief executive triggered the Umbrella Movement, which occupied Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok from 26 September to 15 December, 79 days, and ended without concessions.

The 2019 protests began over a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China. Organisers claimed a million marchers on 9 June and nearly two million on 16 June; the bill was withdrawn on 23 October, but by then the movement had five demands, including universal suffrage, and the confrontations ran into the university sieges of November. Beijing’s answer was the National Security Law of 30 June 2020, covering secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. Apple Daily closed in June 2021 and Stand News in December 2021, the electoral system was rewritten in 2021, and the local Safeguarding National Security Ordinance followed on 19 March 2024.

What that means today

For a visitor, the changes register in what is absent rather than in anything you will be asked to do. The street politics are gone, some newspapers and bookshops with them, and a noticeable share of the middle class has emigrated. The bilingual signage, the common-law courts, the separate currency and the open internet all remain, and the daily texture of the city, its transport, its food and its hills, is the same one it has had for decades. The tone is quieter than in 2019. It is not a different country from the one in the rest of this guide, but it is still a very different place to travel in.

See & do

Victoria Peak

The Peak Tram has hauled people up from Garden Road since 30 May 1888, which makes it Asia’s first funicular. The sixth-generation cars introduced in August 2022 carry 210 people each, the ride takes about five minutes at gradients of up to 48 percent, and the fare is HK$76 single or HK$108 return. The true summit, at 552 metres, is fenced off for radio masts, so the view is from the Peak Tower and, better, from the level 3.5-kilometre loop along Lugard and Harlech Roads, where the harbour opens out about twenty minutes in. Bus 15 from Central does the same climb for a fraction of the price if the tram queue is long.

The harbour from the water and the promenade

The Star Ferry has crossed between Central and Tsim Sha Tsui since 1888, when it was the Kowloon Ferry Company; it still carries more than 70,000 people a day on nine green-and-white diesel-electric boats, and the Society of American Travel Writers rated it the most exciting ferry ride in the world. Ride it at dusk to the Kowloon side and you land next to the 1915 Clock Tower, the only piece left of the old railway terminus, with the Cultural Centre and the Hong Kong Museum of Art behind it. The promenade continues east as the Avenue of Stars, and at 20:00 every night A Symphony of Lights runs for about ten minutes across more than 40 towers on both shores; it has held the Guinness record for the largest permanent light and sound show since it started in January 2004. Full detail on the water itself is in the Victoria Harbour guide.

Lantau: the Buddha and Tai O

The Tian Tan Buddha at Ngong Ping is 34 metres of bronze weighing over 250 tonnes, finished on 29 December 1993 above Po Lin Monastery, and reached by 268 steps; the site is open 10:00 to 17:30 and the exterior is free. The Ngong Ping 360 cable car from Tung Chung MTR takes 25 minutes over 5.7 kilometres, with glass-floored Crystal Cabins at a higher fare; bus 23 from Tung Chung is the cheap alternative and the fallback when the cable car closes for maintenance. Carry on by bus 21 from Ngong Ping to Tai O on the western tip, a Tanka fishing village of stilt houses over the creek where shrimp paste and salted fish are still made and boats go out looking for the pink Chinese white dolphins. Hong Kong Disneyland, at Penny’s Bay on Lantau’s north-east corner, has its own themed MTR shuttle from Sunny Bay on the Tung Chung line.

Temples

Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple in Kowloon, completed in 1921, is where the whole city goes to ask questions. The ritual is kau chim: shake a bamboo cylinder until one numbered stick falls out, then take the number to a soothsayer in the arcade of fortune-telling stalls. Open 07:00 to 17:00, free, and packed at Lunar New Year and on the god’s birthday on the 23rd day of the eighth lunar month. Man Mo Temple at 124 to 126 Hollywood Road in Sheung Wan, built in 1847 for the civil god Man Cheong and the martial god Kwan Tai, is the one with the giant incense coils hanging from the roof; the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals has run it since 1908.

Tai Kwun

The former Central Police Station compound at 10 Hollywood Road, built between 1841 and 1925 and including Victoria Prison, reopened on 29 May 2018 after an eight-year, HK$3.8 billion restoration by the Jockey Club: sixteen heritage buildings plus two new ones, now galleries, bars and courtyards, with free entry. Combine it with Man Mo Temple and the antique shops on the same road.

Markets

Mong Kok has a population density of 130,000 per square kilometre and Guinness once named it the busiest district on earth, so its streets specialise by product. Tung Choi Street is the Ladies’ Market from noon to midnight and, north of Bute Street, the Goldfish Market; Fa Yuen Street is Sneakers Street; Flower Market Road and the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden (10:00 to 18:00) sit at the top end near Prince Edward MTR; Sai Yeung Choi Street South is electronics and cosmetics. Temple Street, one stop south in Yau Ma Tei, opens its night market from 14:00 and gets going at dusk: more than a hundred stalls of men’s clothing, lighters and gadgets, plus the seafood restaurants and claypot-rice tables that are the real reason to go. Yau Ma Tei MTR exit C is a minute away.

Museums

The Hong Kong Museum of History at 100 Chatham Road South reopened its permanent exhibition on 1 April 2026 after nearly six years closed, now ten galleries on the ground floor. Across in the West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ opened on 12 November 2021 in a Herzog & de Meuron building with 185,000 square feet of galleries and the Uli Sigg collection of 1,463 works of contemporary Chinese art; it drew 2.6 million visitors in 2024. Next door, the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened in July 2022 with rotating loans from the Palace Museum in Beijing, some never shown before, in a Rocco Design Architects building funded by a HK$3.5 billion Jockey Club donation. Kowloon MTR is the station for both.

Hills and trails

Around 448 square kilometres of the SAR, 44,842 hectares across 24 country parks and 22 special areas, is protected, which against 1,114 square kilometres of land is where the 40 percent figure comes from. The easiest big walk is Dragon’s Back in Shek O Country Park: bus 9 from Shau Kei Wan MTR to the To Tei Wan stop, then 8.5 kilometres of ridge along stage 8 of the Hong Kong Trail to Big Wave Bay, where you swim and catch the same bus back. Little shade on the first half, no water on the route.

The MacLehose Trail’s 100 kilometres run in ten stages from Pak Tam Chung in Sai Kung to Tuen Mun, over Tai Mo Shan, at 957 metres the territory’s highest point; stages 1 and 2 round High Island Reservoir and its hexagonal volcanic columns, which are the centrepiece of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark, a 150-square-kilometre site inscribed in 2011. Sai Kung Town, the base for it, has no MTR; you come by bus or minibus from Kowloon, and from its waterfront you can hire motorised junks for beaches and islands. On Lantau, Lantau Peak (934 metres, the second highest in Hong Kong, foggy and windy most of the year) is reached on the Lantau Trail, with the Wisdom Path of carved sutras at its foot; the full trail runs 70 kilometres round the island.

Walled villages

Kat Hing Wai at Kam Tin is a 100 by 90 metre rectangle of Tang-clan houses inside walls with four watchtowers, all Grade I listed since 2010. The British removed its iron gates after the Six-Day War of 1899; one was handed back in 1925 and a tablet by the entrance tells the story. Kam Sheung Road MTR is the stop. Nearby, the Ping Shan Heritage Trail (opened 12 December 1993) links 14 historic Tang buildings through three villages, including Tsui Sing Lau, Hong Kong’s only ancient pagoda, a 700-year-old ancestral hall and the clan gallery in the old police station.

Islands

Lamma, the third-largest island, has no cars at all, about 7,000 residents of whom nearly a quarter are Western, and a hill path between its two villages, Yung Shue Wan and Sok Kwu Wan, the latter with the biggest fish farm in Hong Kong and a row of seafood restaurants. Cheung Chau is a dumbbell of two granite lumps joined by a sandbar, also car-free, with Pak Tai Temple from 1783, a pirate’s cave, beaches and the windsurfing that gave Hong Kong its first Olympic gold in 1996. Ferries for both leave from the Central piers; times and pier numbers are in Getting around.

Food & drink

Hong Kong was the second place in Asia to get a Michelin guide, in 2009, after Tokyo, and the 2026 edition lists 98 starred restaurants across Hong Kong and Macao, with three stars at Lung King Heen, Caprice, Forum and 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana among others. The base of all of it is Cantonese cooking, done more precisely and more expensively than across the border in Guangdong, and the cheapest way to eat it well is the daily ritual below.

Yum cha

Yum cha means “drink tea” and is the Cantonese breakfast or brunch of dim sum with a pot of tea. The etiquette is compact: pour for others before yourself, fill cups about 80 percent, tap two fingers on the table to say thanks when someone pours for you, and tip the teapot lid open when it needs refilling. Push-cart service dates from the early 1960s and survives in the older halls; most places now use a tick sheet. Tim Ho Wan started in March 2009 as a 20-seat shop in Mong Kok run by a former Lung King Heen chef, took a Michelin star within a year as the cheapest starred restaurant anywhere, and now has eight Hong Kong branches, including Central, Sham Shui Po and West Kowloon station.

Cha chaan teng

The cha chaan teng, literally tea restaurant, grew out of the 1950s and 1960s as the working-class answer to expensive Western dining: a greasy-spoon diner serving Hong Kong dishes and Hong Kong-style Western ones off one long menu. Sittings last 10 to 20 minutes, food arrives in about five, tables are shared at peak hours, and set meals run all day. Order the baked pork chop rice, macaroni in soup, a pineapple bun, an egg tart, or the deep-fried French toast. The Australia Dairy Company at 47 to 49 Parkes Street in Jordan, founded by the Tang family in 1970, is the famous one: scrambled eggs, steamed milk pudding, 106 seats, a ten-minute average visit, and service so brisk it has its own reputation.

Dai pai dong

The open-air cooked-food stalls that fed post-war Hong Kong are nearly gone. The “big licence” that names them was issued from 1945 to the families of dead or injured civil servants, new ones stopped in 1956, and a licence can pass only to a spouse, so each closure is permanent: 17 remained in July 2024, down from 25 a decade earlier, concentrated in Central and Sham Shui Po with a few in Wan Chai, Tai Hang and Tai O. Expect congee, noodles, roast-meat rice plates and wok-charred stir-fries with the smoky wok hei that an air-conditioned kitchen cannot copy. Many of the rest moved into government cooked-food markets, which are worth seeking out above wet markets for the same cooking under a roof.

Everything else

Roast-meat shops with lacquered geese, ducks and pork belly in the window sell char siu over rice for one of the cheapest good lunches in the city. Wonton noodles, beef brisket noodles and fish-ball noodles are the standard small-shop orders across Kowloon. Sham Shui Po does the cheapest traditional food in the territory, including shops that specialise in soy milk, pork-liver noodles and old-style puddings. For South Asian and African cooking, the canteens above the money-changers in Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road feed the building’s own communities of traders from what one study counted as 120 nationalities a year. Restaurants with table service add a 10 percent service charge to the bill, so further tipping is optional.

When to go

Hong Kong’s climate is humid subtropical with a monsoon rhythm: 2,431 millimetres of rain a year on the Observatory’s 1991 to 2020 normals, more than four-fifths of it from April to September, and a mean temperature that swings from 16.5 °C in January to 28.9 °C in July.

October to December is the best window and November is the best month: mean 22.2 °C, 39 millimetres of rain, humidity down to 72 percent, and clear enough for the Peak and the ridge walks to be worth it. December and January are the driest months and can feel cold in a city built without heating; winter cold fronts push urban temperatures below 10 °C now and then.

Lunar New Year, in late January or February, brings the year’s biggest harbour fireworks, all-night flower markets in Mong Kok and Victoria Park, lion dances at every bank, and two to four days when small restaurants close and hotels fill.

March to May is mild, then humid, with fog on the hills and rain climbing from 75 millimetres in March to 291 in May. It is also the events season. Art Basel Hong Kong has run each March at the Convention and Exhibition Centre since 2013. The Hong Kong Sevens, played since 1976 on a weekend in late March or early April, moved to the new Kai Tak Stadium in 2025; its South Stand has been over-18s only since 2007, which tells you the mood. The Cheung Chau Bun Festival falls on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, usually early May: a parade of children suspended on hidden frames, three days when the whole island goes vegetarian (McDonald’s included), and a race up a bun-covered tower by trained climbers, revived in 2005 after a 1978 collapse that injured more than 100.

June to September is hot, wet and cheap. June alone averages 492 millimetres of rain, July highs average 31.6 °C with 81 percent humidity, and the afternoon thunderstorm is a fixture. Typhoons are possible from May to November and most likely from July to September.

Air quality is the other thing to check before a hill day. The Air Quality Health Index, run by the Environmental Protection Department since December 2013, scores 1 to 10+ on ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and particulates; 7 counts as high and 8 to 10 as very high.

Getting there

By air

Hong Kong International Airport opened on Chek Lap Kok, off north Lantau, in 1998, has been the world’s busiest cargo airport since it overtook Memphis in 2010, and handled 32.8 million passengers in the first half of 2026. The third runway came into use in July 2022, the reconfigured centre runway reopened on 28 November 2024, and the expanded Terminal 2 reopened on 27 May 2026. Cathay Pacific is the home carrier and has its headquarters on the airport site.

The Airport Express, open since 6 July 1998, takes about 24 minutes to Hong Kong station in Central and slightly less to Kowloon; adult Octopus fares are HK$120 to Hong Kong, HK$105 to Kowloon and HK$73 to Tsing Yi, with same-station returns within 30 days at HK$215, HK$195 and HK$130. Going home, Hong Kong and Kowloon stations offer in-town check-in with participating airlines, so you can drop bags before breakfast. A taxi to Central runs about HK$300 to 400 depending on traffic and tolls, and route A21 is the airport bus down Nathan Road.

By high-speed rail

The Hong Kong section of the Guangzhou to Shenzhen to Hong Kong Express Rail Link opened on 23 September 2018: 26 kilometres of tunnel from West Kowloon station to the border, with mainland immigration officers stationed inside the Hong Kong terminus under the “co-location” arrangement, so you clear both sides before boarding. Fastest times are 14 minutes to Futian in Shenzhen, 18 to Shenzhen North and 46 to Guangzhou South in Guangdong, with through trains to Shanghai Hongqiao and Beijing West; around 100 trains a day run each way. You need mainland entry permission to use it; the rules are on the China page.

By bridge and ferry to Macao

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, 55 kilometres and the longest sea crossing in the world, opened on 24 October 2018. Its Hong Kong Port sits beside the airport (buses A35 and B4 to B6 serve it), and the HZMBus shuttle to Macao and Zhuhai runs 24 hours a day at up to five-minute intervals, taking about 40 minutes plus immigration. TurboJET and its rival Cotai Water Jet run the older route: about an hour across 70 kilometres of water from the Hong Kong-Macau Ferry Terminal at Shun Tak Centre in Sheung Wan, the China Ferry Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui, or the airport’s SkyPier, for passengers connecting straight from a flight.

Overland from Shenzhen

The East Rail line is the cheap way in and out of the mainland and the one most people use for a Shenzhen day trip. Which passports may walk across, and for how long, is set by mainland rules rather than Hong Kong ones; visa-free entry to Hong Kong itself is covered in Practical info.

Getting around

More than 90 percent of daily journeys in Hong Kong are made on public transport, the highest share anywhere, and after two days you will see why.

MTR. Ten heavy-rail lines, 99 stations, the Airport Express and the high-speed terminus, plus a light-rail system in the north-west New Territories, on 245 kilometres of track; the operator reports 99.9 percent punctuality and carries about 4.8 million people a day on the metro lines alone. Signage is bilingual, exits are lettered and mapped to street level, and the Central, Admiralty and Hong Kong stations under the financial district join most of the lines. The system closes for a few hours in the small hours, which is when taxis take over.

Octopus. The stored-value card launched on 1 September 1997 and now handles more than 14 million transactions a day: MTR, buses, trams, ferries, green minibuses, convenience stores, supermarkets, vending machines and a growing share of restaurants. There are 33 million in circulation for 7.5 million people. Buy one at an MTR customer service counter, including at the airport, or skip the plastic: Octopus lives in Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Huawei Pay and Google Wallet, and the maximum load is HK$3,000.

Trams and ferries. The “ding ding” runs 13.3 kilometres from Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan with a clockwise loop round Happy Valley racecourse; upper deck, front seats. The Star Ferry is HK$4 to HK$6.50 depending on deck and day between Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, a little more from Wan Chai, and it is the cheapest harbour cruise in the city. Outlying island boats leave from the Central piers: Pier 4 for Lamma (western berth to Sok Kwu Wan, eastern to Yung Shue Wan), Pier 5 for Cheung Chau, Pier 6 for Peng Chau and Mui Wo on Lantau, Pier 3 for Discovery Bay. Count on about 25 minutes to Yung Shue Wan, 35 to Sok Kwu Wan, and 35 minutes fast or 55 slow to Cheung Chau and Mui Wo, with a 50 percent fare surcharge on Sundays and public holidays.

Minibuses. Sixteen or nineteen seats, no standing. Green ones run fixed routes at fixed fares and take Octopus; red ones are share-taxis with no timetable and mostly cash. On either, you shout your stop to the driver, who raises a hand to acknowledge, and a dashboard speedometer tells you whether the 80 km/h alarm is about to go off.

Taxis. Red cabs work the urban area, green ones the New Territories, and 75 blue ones are confined to Lantau, out of about 18,000 in total. Flag fall for the first two kilometres is HK$29 red, HK$25.50 green and HK$24 blue, then HK$2.10 per 200 metres, plus HK$6 a bag and the tunnel toll both ways for a harbour crossing. Have your destination written in Chinese. Ride-hailing apps operate without a legal framework; the government said in 2024 it would regulate them by the end of 2025.

On foot. The Central-Mid-Levels Escalator climbs 800 metres and 135 vertical metres from Queen’s Road Central to Conduit Road, mostly up Cochrane and Shelley Streets, in about twenty minutes. It has run downhill from 06:00 to 10:00 and uphill from 10:00 to midnight since it opened on 15 October 1993, and around 78,000 people a day use it. Elsewhere, the elevated walkways of Central and the underground concourses of Tsim Sha Tsui mean you can cover a kilometre in the rain without an umbrella.

Practical info

Money. The Hong Kong dollar has been pegged to the US dollar at HK$7.80 since 1983, trading in a band of 7.75 to 7.85. Three commercial banks print the notes, HSBC, Bank of China (Hong Kong) and Standard Chartered, so the same HK$100 comes in three designs, and the government issues the HK$10 note itself; coins run from 10 cents to HK$10. The dollar also circulates unofficially in Macao. Mainland renminbi and mainland payment apps are not the norm here; cards, contactless and Octopus are. Prices in this guide are in HK$.

Visas. Hong Kong runs its own immigration, separate from the mainland’s and from Macao’s. British citizens get 180 days visa-free; citizens of the EU, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico and most of the rest of the developed world get 90; South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, the UAE and Qatar 30; India, the Philippines and Russia 14, with Indian passport holders also needing a free pre-arrival registration. Your passport must be valid for at least a month beyond the stay. Entering the mainland from here is a separate decision under separate rules, covered on the China page.

Internet. No VPN needed. Google, WhatsApp, Instagram and Western news sites load as they do at home, and the government’s free GovWiFi hotspots cover the public buildings. Local SIMs are sold at the airport and in every convenience store.

Power and water. 220 volts, 50 hertz, on the British three-pin BS 1363 plug, a different standard from the mainland’s. Tap water meets WHO standards at the supply point; older buildings’ pipes are the reason locals still boil or filter it.

Language. Chinese and English are both official; Cantonese is the spoken Chinese of the street, Mandarin is widely understood, and English is on every sign and in every hotel, less reliably in minibuses and older taxis.

Safety and rules. The emergency number is 999. A smoking ban covers indoor public places, so the city is far less smoke-filled than the mainland. The national security laws described in History and character apply to visitors as well as residents: keep political slogans, flags and protest gear out of your luggage and your social media while you are here.

Time is UTC+8 with no daylight saving, the same as the mainland, so nothing changes on the train. What does change, at the border in both directions, is the currency, the SIM, the plug and the passport queue.

Where to stay

Rooms are small and rates are high by Chinese standards, because the hotel stock was built for business travel. Weekday rates swing with the trade-fair calendar rather than the tourist one, so a Sunday to Tuesday stay can be noticeably cheaper than the same room over a weekend, and the summer monsoon months are the quietest.

The two grand old hotels are on opposite sides of the harbour. The Peninsula opened at 22 Salisbury Road in Tsim Sha Tsui on 11 December 1928, keeps its 1928 lobby for afternoon tea, added a tower in 1994 to reach 300 rooms, and runs a fleet of 14 Rolls-Royce Phantoms in its own shade of green, the largest single order the company had ever taken. The Mandarin Oriental at 5 Connaught Road Central opened on 1 September 1963 as the tallest building in Hong Kong, with the first bath in every room in Asia, and has 501 rooms and 67 suites after its 2005 to 2006 rebuild.

Where to base yourself follows the neighbourhood logic. Central and Tsim Sha Tsui put you on the harbour and the Star Ferry, at the top of the price range. Causeway Bay is malls and business hotels with direct buses to Stanley. Mong Kok and Jordan are the budget-to-mid Kowloon options, loud at street level, with the markets on the doorstep and one MTR change to the Airport Express. Sheung Wan, Sai Ying Pun and Kennedy Town, the western end of the Island line, are quieter and have picked up smaller design-led hotels along with the cafés.

For something that is not a tower, Tai O Heritage Hotel on western Lantau occupies the village’s 1902 police station and has nine rooms and a restaurant, with stilt houses and dolphin boats outside. Lamma and Cheung Chau have small guesthouses for a car-free night, with the last ferry back to Central as the only curfew.

Neighbourhoods

Central is the financial district and the reference point. Norman Foster’s HSBC Main Building (1985) faces I. M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower (1990) across Statue Square, the former Legislative Council building of 1912 now houses the Court of Final Appeal, the stock exchange sits in Exchange Square above the bus station for the south side of the island, and the Tai Kwun compound and the old Central Market are the heritage set-pieces. Central, Admiralty and Hong Kong stations all serve it.

Sheung Wan, immediately west, is where British forces first occupied the island: Possession Street marked the shoreline then and is now several hundred metres inland behind reclamation. It keeps the dried-seafood shops of Des Voeux Road West, the Cat Street antique stalls on Upper Lascar Row, Western Market from 1906, the Macao ferry terminal in Shun Tak Centre, and the PMQ design hub in the former Police Married Quarters, converted in 2014; Tai Ping Shan Street behind Man Mo Temple is the café and gallery strip.

Wan Chai is the Convention and Exhibition Centre, Golden Bauhinia Square and the 78-storey Central Plaza on the reclaimed side, and a dense older grid behind, including Hung Shing Temple and the Lockhart Road bar strip of The World of Suzie Wong. The Blue House at 72 to 74A Stone Nullah Lane, a four-storey balconied tong lau from 1920 to 1922, was painted its colour in 1990, and is now a Grade I building with the House of Stories inside and residents still upstairs.

Causeway Bay is shopping: the 13-storey Sogo, Times Square, Hysan Place and Lee Gardens, on streets whose rents overtook Fifth Avenue in 2012 and stayed the world’s most expensive for about a decade. Victoria Park is the district’s green lung and Jardine Matheson still fires the Noonday Gun by the typhoon shelter every day at noon.

Tsim Sha Tsui, at the tip of Kowloon, is where most first-timers sleep and where roughly half the territory’s major museums are: the Museum of Art, Museum of History and Science Museum, plus the Space Museum and Cultural Centre on the site of the old railway terminus. Nathan Road runs north from the waterfront past Kowloon Park (a barracks until 1970) and Chungking Mansions; Canton Road and Harbour City are the luxury retail, and 1881 Heritage is the old Marine Police headquarters turned mall.

Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po are the two Kowloon districts north of it that feel most like the city Hongkongers live in. Mong Kok’s streets-by-product markets are in See and do; the 59-storey Langham Place tower is its one skyscraper. Sham Shui Po, one stop further on the Tsuen Wan line, is a lower-income district of second-hand electronics on Apliu Street, cheap computers in the Golden Computer Centre, fabric and buttons on Nam Cheong and Ki Lung Streets, and a Han-dynasty tomb found in 1955 that dates Chinese settlement here to 2,000 years ago.

Stanley, on the island’s south coast, is the day out by bus: routes 6, 6A, 6X, 66 and 260 from Exchange Square cross the hills to a market on New Street, Murray House (a Victorian building moved stone by stone from Central), two beaches with barbecue pits, and a Tin Hau temple from 1767. The wartime internment camp held about 2,800 civilians from 1941 to 1945.

Nightlife

Lan Kwai Fong is a small L-shaped lane off D’Aguilar Street in Central that Allan Zeman turned from a hawker district into a bar quarter after opening a restaurant called California there in 1983. It is loud, expensive, expat-heavy and full from Thursday to Saturday, and it spills through Wo On Lane and Wing Wah Lane towards Wyndham Street and the Fringe Club.

SoHo, the streets south of Hollywood Road along the escalator, is the slower version: smaller bars and restaurants on the lanes off Shelley and Cochrane Streets, a dinner crowd rather than a shots crowd, and an easy walk down to Lan Kwai Fong afterwards if you want more. Wan Chai’s Lockhart Road has been the sailor’s bar strip since the Suzie Wong era and still has a few survivors between the redevelopments.

Rooftop and hotel bars are Hong Kong’s own contribution to the format, and the harbour view is what you are paying for, on both shores. The free version is the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade for the light show, then a late cha chaan teng in Jordan, since the diners keep long hours and their staff work night shifts.

Two practicalities. Trams stop at 00:30 and the MTR shuts for a few hours after that, so the ride home from a late night is a taxi with a harbour-tunnel toll on top of the meter. And drug law is severe: possession of cannabis carries a maximum of life imprisonment, and that includes CBD products that are legal in most of Europe.

Language

Essentials

1. Yes係hai6
2. No唔係m4 hai6
3. Please唔該m4 goi1
4. Thank you多謝do1 ze6
5. You're welcome唔使客氣m4 sai2 haak3 hei3
6. Sorry對唔住deoi3 m4 zyu6
7. Hello你好nei5 hou2
8. Goodbye拜拜baai1 baai3
9. Good morning早晨zou2 san4
10. Good afternoon午安ng5 on1
11. My name is …我叫…ngo5 giu3 …
12. Do you speak English?你識唔識講英文？nei5 sik1 m4 sik1 gong2 jing1 man2?
13. I don't speak Cantonese我唔識講廣東話ngo5 m4 sik1 gong2 gwong2 dung1 waa2
14. I need a doctor我要睇醫生ngo5 jiu3 tai2 ji1 sang1

Out & about

1. The bill, please唔該埋單m4 goi1 maai4 daan1
2. How much does this cost?呢個幾多錢？ni1 go3 gei2 do1 cin2?
3. Two of these, please唔該要兩個呢個m4 goi1 jiu3 loeng5 go3 ni1 go3
4. Do you accept cards?可唔可以碌卡？ho2 m4 ho2 ji5 luk1 kaat1?
5. Where is the bathroom?洗手間喺邊度？sai2 sau2 gaan1 hai2 bin1 dou6?
6. What's the wifi password?Wi-Fi 密碼係咩？Wi-Fi mat6 maa5 hai6 me1?
7. Today / tomorrow今日 / 聽日gam1 jat6 / ting1 jat6
8. A glass of water一杯水jat1 bui1 seoi2
9. A beer, please唔該一支啤酒m4 goi1 jat1 zi1 be1 zau2
10. Is breakfast included?包唔包早餐？baau1 m4 baau1 zou2 caan1?
11. Could you take a photo?可唔可以幫我影張相？ho2 m4 ho2 ji5 bong1 ngo5 jing2 zoeng1 soeng2?

Also available: Mandarin