As Victoria Harbour narrows and fishing traditions fade, we ask whether Hong Kong can reclaim the maritime consciousness that once defined it.
Hong Kong’s maritime story is steadily fading from everyday awareness. As the city’s nautical heritage drifts into the background, Professor Law Lok-yin from the Education University of Hong Kong, Richard Kendall of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, and writer Cheng Sze-hang offer their perspectives on how we can preserve memories for future generations.
Richard Kendall, Director and Chief Executive of Hong Kong Maritime Museum, speaks with Youth Hong Kong.
No Ocean, No Hong Kong
The history of Hong Kong is written in salt water. As Kendall, Director and Chief Executive of the Maritime Museum, puts it: “Without maritime (history), Hong Kong wouldn’t be where it is today.” This is echoed by both Professor Law and Cheng, who remind us that from Hong Kong’s very earliest days, its sheltered coves were the home of people who lived with and from the sea. Once the modern world arrived in the mid-19th century, the fluid and cosmopolitan culture of today’s Hong Kong steadily grew.
While many view Hong Kong’s past through a simple lens and would describe its origins as a “fishing village,” Professor Law sees a more complex, dual evolution. “Typically, industrial ports and fishing villages evolve into separate, distinct spaces,” he says. “Yet, due to Hong Kong’s specific political and social development, we see a dual existence: the Victoria Harbour coastline developed into one of the Far East’s most sophisticated shipping and logistics hubs, while areas such as Cheung Chau and Sai Kung preserved authentic communities that continued to rely on fisheries and other trades for their livelihood.”
Hong Kong mirrored many South China Sea havens in the city’s transition from traditional junk trade to post-war entrepôt, but its shared border with the Chinese Mainland meant it maintained a level of global connectivity that few, if any, other cities could match. It became the primary connector for trade with the mainland and for the global Chinese diaspora.
Professor Law Lok Yin
Cheng Sze Hang
The Disconnect
Yet if Hong Kong’s growth came from the sea, many residents today experience it only at a distance. Cheng points out that fishing traditions and island rituals that once defined local life, are fading. Remote outposts like Tap Mun (塔門) and Ko Lau Wan (高流灣) are losing residents, ferry services are disappearing and traditional customs like the On Lung Qing Jiao (安龍清醮) ritual feel more like historical curiosities than living culture.
From the list of 79 items in Hong Kong’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, many carry the maritime memories of ancestors, including the Hung Shing Festival, Tin Hau Festival, Tam Kung Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Lung Mo (Dragon Mother) Festival. All these names refer both to the physical locations and the traditions created by the generations who lived from and with the sea. They are still celebrated by fishermen and boat people, invoking deities that protect those at sea or involve rituals performed on the water.
“We are losing the narrative of our remote islands,” Professor Law writes. As communities shrink, their traditions can appear “mysterious” to urban dwellers. They become invisible because they are no longer embedded in everyday experience.
The disconnect is also physical. Almost everyone over 40 years old will have a story about the loss of Hong Kong’s shorelines and the decrease in everyday use of water transport. Before the Cross-Harbour Tunnel opened in 1967 and the MTR in 1979, ferries and piers were central to city life. “That waterborne commute was essential,” says Law. “For people growing up before the 70s through the 90s, piers were central to their collective memory.”
Today, most of those piers are gone. According to the Annual Traffic Census, passenger journeys on the Star Ferry peaked in 1971 at more than 150 million and in recent years have hovered around 16 million.
The city looks at the harbour but rarely experiences it. Aberdeen’s once-bustling fishing fleet has dwindled to a few boats. Oyster farms in Lau Fau Shan (流浮山) have almost disappeared and pearl fishing in Tai Po, never a thriving trade, has vanished. As Law puts it, as part of their heritage, they are “barely recognised by the younger generation.”
The first population census in Hong Kong, conducted in 1841 shortly after the British landed, recorded a total population of approximately 7,450 people on Hong Kong Island, with most of them living beside the sea in Stanley and Shau Kei Wan and depending on it for food and livelihood. This population consisted mainly of Tanka fishermen, charcoal burners, and farmers living in coastal villages. And now, from the latest population census conducted in 2021, the number of local fishermen stood at 10,120, taking only a tiny percentage of the city’s 7.4 million population.
Kendall shares similar observations. “As society develops, we become slightly removed from the engine that drives the life that we have,” Kendall reflects. “When people go to the supermarket to buy their goods, they don’t automatically think about the ships that may have brought the goods here. It’s just available on the shelves.”
As urban expansion reshapes the coastline, Cheng says our connection to the sea feels “increasingly abstract.” “The more Hong Kong builds over the water,” she says, “the further its people drift from their maritime stories.”
Anchor Plaza at Central Ferry Piers features a massive anchor from the Hong Kong-owned Seawise Giant.
Archiving Our City
It is critical, therefore, to archive and preserve this part of our city’s memory. Founded in 2005 by Hong Kong’s ship-owning community, the Maritime Museum was designed to confront this collective amnesia. Originally housed in Stanley, it relocated in 2013 to Central Pier 8 with government support, becoming a public–private partnership.
“Every great port city should have a maritime museum,” Kendall says. “We might have been late, but better late than never.”
The museum’s mission to engage, educate and entertain extends beyond static displays. Its exhibitions and school programmes aim to reconnect citizens with the sea as lived history. Outside, Anchor Plaza features a massive anchor from the Hong Kong-owned Seawise Giant, once the largest ship ever built. Longer than the IFC Mall is tall, the anchor offers a visceral sense of scale. “It’s a way to help people grasp the magnitude of global shipping,” Kendall explains.
Apart from looking after exhibits, the museum’s most urgent task is preserving human stories. Through oral history projects, they record the recollections of Aberdeen fishermen and dockworkers before they are lost to time. Professor Law, who also serves on the Intangible Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee, agrees. “Heritage belongs to the community,” he says. “Preservation shouldn’t be imposed from above. It should enable people to tell their own stories.” During his research at Ko Lau Wan’s On Lung Qing Jiao festival, he observed how visitor participation helped affirm the value of tradition. Preservation, he says, is “participatory, not paternalistic.”
For Cheng, preserving memories born of the sea is more personal. “To preserve them is to remember the sensibilities and stories shaped by water,” she says. “I hope my writing can be a gesture of reconnection, tracing those coastlines, both real and imagined, reminding us how the sea still defines who we are.”
Children interact with installations at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.
Photo provided by Professor Law Lok-yin shows the spirit assuaging ceremony at the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, a ritual among fishing communities to pray for safety from pirates.
A carpet map at the Maritime Museum shows how Victoria Harbour has narrowed dramatically.
These preservations of memories sit in stark juxtaposition to the reality of the city’s development, most especially land reclamation. Inside the museum’s Harbour View Gallery, a carpet map charting decades of encroachment shows how Victoria Harbour has narrowed dramatically. “It’s only about 900 metres across at the closest point today,” Kendall says. “It used to be 2.4 kilometres.”
Reclamation has long been both necessary and controversial. “We have to develop,” Kendall admits. “But we also need to protect the environment that sustains us.”
Law concurs. “Hong Kong’s coastal identity as a lived reality will continue to blur,” he predicts, citing climate change and declining reliance on the sea. Still, he sees a chance for renewal, if the city stops seeing the harbour as a place to fill with reclamation and starts valuing it as cultural heritage.
Kendall, sitting in his office over the water at Pier 8 in Central, adjacent to reclaimed land, surveys the sea that remains the city’s lifeblood, even if many have forgotten. From his window, Hong Kong’s iconic red-sail Chinese junks carrying tourists move steadily in the distance. The coastline has moved, the piers have vanished, and the fishing fleets have thinned, but the ocean still sustains trade, climate and memory.
The Maritime Museum, late though it came, stands as a reminder of those enduring ties. Kendall remains hopeful. “It’s not too late to make a difference,” he says. ■