A lay of the land …
Hong Kong is a surprisingly simple city to get your head around, despite being an ‘Asian City’ (with all the craziness that such a label implies).
For one thing, unlike other Chinese cities whose histories extend back hundreds if not thousands of years, Hong Kong’s entry upon the world stage really only took place when the English sought to establish a trading presence in east Asia well into the 19th century, and settled on a balmy, typhoon-protected island off the coast of southerly Guangdong province (Macau, located across on the western side of the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, had been settled two hundred years earlier in the 1600s by Portuguese missionaries).
Hong Kong (a derangement of ‘Sheung Gung,’ which means ‘fragrant port,’ a name given because of the sandalwood tree plantations in the area) grew from a backwater into a major shipping port (exporting silk, tea and curios to the west, and importing, er, opium to the Chinese) in a few short decades. The urban expansion was tempered, at least on Hong Kong island, by the geography – building was certainly possible atop the flat, coast plains, but those conditions gave way abruptly to impenetrable, jungly hills that rose steeply to almost a kilometer at their highest points.
If you look at the satellite image of Hong Kong above, you can see the impossibly narrow sliver of civilization clinging to the northern coast of the island (for more detail, click here); compare that to the images of San Francisco and New York to get an idea of the scale and you’ll see what I mean about how tiiiiiny – and dense – Hong Kong really is.
In fact, the pattern of Hong Kong’s growth can be described by three basic maneuvers: up, out, and north. Up as defined by the ceaseless building of vertical residential and commerical superstructures that push floor-to-area ratios to their absurd limits (check out the photographic work of Michael Wolf, namely his Architecture of Density collection; one such image is above). Out in the land reclamation projects that repeatedly step the coastline of Hong Kong and Kowloon further out into Victoria Harbour (walking around, you can easily notice the ghosts of former coastlines as they sat on either side – perhaps someday the waterway will be no wider than the Seine and the two neighborhoods will be linked up by a footbridge). And north in the delirious expansion of the New Territories (the large urban swath immediately north of Kowloon, where the majority of HK residents live) upwards into China along the Pearl River, forming a vague, sprawling megalopolis together with the Chinese Special Economic Zone (SEZ) cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
All of this craziness leaves Hong Kong itself a relatively peaceable kingdom!
In a later post we’ll provide a breakdown of some notable neighborhoods themselves, as well as the (very easy) ways of getting around and between them. For now – bedtime!