Causeway Bay: Then & Now

That’s certainly not true anymore. Hong Kong is a fast changing city, but Causeway Bay has changed even more rapidly than most other neighbourhoods. It has evolved from an industrial area to a shopping hub, with community organisations, residential areas and increasingly upmarket offices thrown into the mix. With every step of the neighbourhood’s transformation, a little bit of the past is left behind, creating a melting pot unlike any other.

Some of these traces are less obvious than others. Few traces remain of the original wave of development that brought Causeway Bay into Hong Kong’s urban fold. Back then, Causeway Bay lived up to its name – it was a broad inlet known in Chinese as Tung Lo Wan, or Copper Gong Bay. To the south was the old Hakka village of Tai Hang; to the west, a hill that tapered out into a peninsula that came to be known as East Point.

East Point was one of the first pieces of land sold off by the British colonial government when it was established in 1841. A Canton-based trading firm called Jardine, Matheson and Company bought it for £565 and built an office on the waterfront. The next year, it built an ornate headquarters known as the Palace on the nearby butte, which was named Jardine’s Hill after the company.

Jardine’s chief, known as the taipan — derived from the Cantonese word for “big boss” — took up residence in the Palace, and over the next few decades, he watched as East Point became Hong Kong’s first major industrial area. Shipyards, warehouses and factories were built, including Hong Kong’s first sugar refinery, which opened in 1878. It was followed two years later by Hong Kong’s first ice factory ; until then, ice had been imported all the way from New England. Hong Kong’s coins were produced on Royal Mint Street, which long ago disappeared from the map.

This industry attracted plenty of other businesses. One of Hong Kong’s first street markets emerged on Jardine’s Bazaar, which ran between East Point and Jardine’s Hill, and Chinese tenements were built along a small web of commercial and residential streets to the west, including Percival Street, Sharp Street and Russell Street. Hong Kong’s first public park opened nearby, on the site of the present-day Craigengower Cricket Club.

Mark Tung, Director of the Lee Gardens Association, the area’s business association, says it was a good business opportunity at the time. “Most of the leisure activities at the time were reserved for Europeans, so if you had a place for middle-class Chinese to hang out, you’d have a market,” he says, sitting in a 49th floor meeting room in Lee Garden One, looking over a sweeping view of Causeway Bay.

Lee Garden also pitched itself to tourists: a 1926 advertisement in the South China Morning Post describes it as “a monster al fresco Chinese cabaret with abundant sideshows.” It promised “ancient Chinese architecture and attractive Chinese art” in a lush natural setting with “many very old trees on the top of the hill which are decorated with thousands of coloured bulbs at night.” Every night, from 7pm to midnight, there were variety shows, acrobats, “lady equestriennes,” singers from across China, magicians, movies, and music – all for an admission fee of 30 cents.

When the park opened, Lee Hysan invited poets from around southern China to visit the site and turn their impressions into poetry. “The poems are still being studied by scholars,” says Tung. Lee’s ambitions extended beyond the amusement park, too. He built the Lee Theatre in 1927 and it quickly became one of Hong Kong’s most prominent venues for Cantonese opera. There was even a special late-night tram service from the theatre to Shek Tong Tsui, which at the time was the epicentre of Hong Kong nightlife.

When retail rents mushroomed in the early 2010s, in response to a surge in mainland tourism, a number of longstanding businesses like the Shanghainese hairy crab shops on Russell Street were forced to close. That led some to worry that Causeway Bay’s character was being wiped out as distinctive local businesses were replaced by watch and jewellery shops that appealed to cross-border shoppers. But Bradstreet says the trend has reversed, with street-level rents plummeting by up to 50 percent as new developments provide more space.

That means Causeway Bay will continue to forge its own distinct path – just as it has always done. “It’s absolutely unique,” says Tung, with no small measure of admiration. Where else is there such a fine-grained mix of the luxurious and the economical, where vertical shopping malls tower over walkup tenements packed with independent businesses, all of it ringed by green spaces and historic institutions? The trams may no longer sleep on Russell Street, and you can’t see the mountains from Hennessy Road, but the crowds still flock to Causeway Bay, looking for a place unlike any other.