Where the colony began
Hong Kong's colonial history starts on a short slope in Sheung Wan. On 26 January 1841 a naval party landed here, raised the flag and fired a salute from the ships, and the road the engineers cut from the waterfront up to the high ground beside it became Possession Street. The Chinese name it was given then was a transliteration of the English - Boxingshun Street - and a later administration, noticing that a street named after the taking of the territory was not the most diplomatic address in the city, renamed it after the water channel beside it. The English name was never changed. The lane is 150 metres long, it climbs from Queen's Road, and almost nobody walking its length today knows what it commemorates.
The trades
Sheung Wan became the Chinese quarter by design: the colonial administration took Central, and the merchants who came south from Guangdong from the 1850s onwards settled west of it. What they built is still there, and it is wholesale rather than tourist-facing. Des Voeux Road West between Queen Street and Western Street is the dried seafood street, where sharks' fin, abalone, sea cucumber, dried scallops and mushrooms are graded, weighed and sold from bins in the doorway. Ko Shing Street is the medicine street, with ginseng, deer antler and herbs. Wing Lok Street and Bonham Strand handle birds' nest and ginseng. In 2000 the government formally adopted these names for the streets, which tells you how much of the district is still doing what it did in 1900.
Cat Street and Hollywood Road
Upper Lascar Row, which everyone calls Cat Street, is a lane about two hundred metres long lined with antique and curio shops and open stalls - jade, ceramics, calligraphy, old clocks, fountain pens, cameras, telephones, anything second-hand that might have a story. The name remembers the South Asian sailors who once lodged here, and the Indian constables after them. Hollywood Road, laid out in 1844, was one of the first roads completed in the new city and is now the spine of the antiques trade; its name comes from a house that once stood on the hill above it and has nothing to do with the film industry. Man Mo Temple stands at the top of it - the interior is covered properly on our Central heritage day, and we pass the door on this walk rather than repeat it.
Cultural Insight
The Western Market on Des Voeux Road Central has held a market on this site since 1858; the North Block that stands today, red brick with granite dressing and a corner tower, was completed in 1906. It is now shops and a small exhibition space - the largest surviving Edwardian market building in the city, and a reminder that this district was once the commercial edge of Victoria City.
The walk ends around Bonham Strand, where the colony's Chinese merchants first pooled their money. The plague of 1894 broke out in this quarter, ran for half a year and killed more than two thousand people; it returned almost every year for the next three decades and took over twenty thousand lives in all, and it is the reason the district was rebuilt in brick and stone, and one reason Hong Kong built itself a university and a public hospital system.
This is a working quarter rather than a heritage precinct: the pavements are narrow, the shops are wholesale, the trolleys come past at speed, and we are guests in it. Allow two to three hours at an unhurried pace, with a cha chaan teng lunch or dim sum in the middle.
Meals
Lunch (Cantonese, cha chaan teng or dim sum)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
