Dried seafood shops, herbal medicine wholesalers and coffee bars, on the streets where the Chinese city began.
When the British took Hong Kong Island in 1841, they built their own town at Central and the Chinese population settled immediately west of it, at Sheung Wan — literally “upper ring”.
It has been the Chinese commercial quarter ever since, and it still trades in the things it always traded in.
Dried Seafood Street
Des Voeux Road West and the streets around it are lined with wholesalers of dried seafood — scallops, abalone, fish maw, sea cucumber, shark fin, oysters, squid — laid out in open sacks and baskets on the pavement.
Some of these are extremely expensive commodities; dried abalone and fish maw of good grade run to thousands of dollars a catty.
The smell is intense and specific and it is the reason to walk the street.
Shark fin remains on sale here, which is contested and which Hong Kong’s own airlines and hotels have progressively stopped serving.
Herbal Medicine Street
Ko Shing Street is the wholesale centre for Chinese herbal medicine — dried roots, bark, fungus, ginseng, deer antler, birds’ nests — sold by the sack to pharmacies across the region.
The ladder streets
Sheung Wan climbs steeply, and several of the streets are stepped. Pound Lane, Ladder Street and Shing Wong Street are the survivors, and Ladder Street with Man Mo Temple at the top is the most photographed.
PoHo and the new Sheung Wan
The blocks around Po Hing Fong, Tai Ping Shan Street and Square Street have become the city’s small-scale creative district — independent coffee, natural wine, ceramics, secondhand books and small restaurants, in low-rise pre-war buildings.
It sits directly on top of the district’s grimmest history: Tai Ping Shan was the epicentre of the 1894 bubonic plague outbreak, which killed over 2,500 people and led the government to demolish the entire neighbourhood. Blake Garden is the open space left where the housing was cleared.
The Pak Sing Ancestral Hall and Kwong Fuk I Tsz on Tai Ping Shan Street were where the bodies and ancestral tablets of the Chinese poor were kept.
Also here
Western Market, an Edwardian brick market building of 1906, restored, now with fabric sellers upstairs.
Man Wa Lane — a lane of chop carvers cutting personal name seals in stone while you wait. It takes twenty minutes and makes a genuinely good thing to take home.
Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail, marking sites connected to the revolutionary’s years in Hong Kong.
Practicalities
Sheung Wan MTR, or the tram along Des Voeux Road, which costs almost nothing and is the best way to arrive.
Wholesalers keep daytime hours and close on Sundays. The cafés and restaurants keep the opposite pattern.
