11 Best Places to Visit in Hong Kong

Seven days over Chinese New Year, walking a city of rediscovered reservoirs, a retired cattle depot, a flower tunnel between apartment blocks, a Hakka village behind a wall built to keep out bad luck, and beaches that take real effort to reach, with the food, the ferries, the hotel bills.

My flight landed at Chek Lap Kok two days before Chinese New Year, and Wing was waiting past the arrivals gate with a paper bag of pineapple buns already going soft from the warmth of his jacket pocket. We had grown up two streets apart before his family moved back to Hong Kong when we were teenagers, and every few years I fly out and he spends the week walking me through a version of his city that never once appears on the guided bus tours. This time he had a full week planned, and he made me promise before we even left the airport that I would not ask to see Victoria Peak until the very last evening, if at all.

We took the Airport Express into Kowloon, tapped our Octopus cards at the barrier, and Wing talked me through the plan on the train. Six areas, spread across Kowloon, Hong Kong Island, the New Territories, and three separate outlying islands, stitched together so that we would never backtrack more than we had to. We were staying at a small guesthouse in Sham Shui Po, the kind with a lift barely wide enough for two suitcases and a landlady who left a thermos of chrysanthemum tea outside our door every morning, at a rate that worked out to about HK$420 a night for a clean double room with a window, cheaper than almost anything across the harbour in Tsim Sha Tsui and close enough to walk to our first stop.

1Ex-Sham Shui Po Service Reservoir

The chamber that hid under a hill for a hundred years

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We dropped our bags, ate a bowl of beef brisket noodles at a shop two doors down from the guesthouse, and started climbing Bishop Hill before the morning crowds arrived. Wing kept the destination a secret on purpose, only telling me to trust him on the stairs, which kept coming in long, steep flights that had both of us stopping twice to catch our breath and take in the view of Kowloon spreading out below. He wanted the reveal to hit the way it had hit him the first time he came here, and it did.

In December 2020, a government crew began what they thought was a routine demolition of an unremarkable water tank on top of the hill. Within days they had broken through into a chamber nobody living had ever seen, a circular hall ringed by 108 granite pillars and Romanesque brick arches, built in 1904 to hold nearly ten thousand cubic metres of drinking water for a rapidly growing Kowloon. What happened next is the part Wing tells with real pride in his voice. A resident noticed the demolition crew at work, alerted the press, and by December 28 people were physically standing in front of the machinery to stop it. The government suspended the work the next day. Eighteen months later the Antiquities Advisory Board granted the reservoir Grade 1 historic status, the highest tier Hong Kong gives a building.

Wing told me the reservoir sat sealed under that hill for so long that most people who grew up in Sham Shui Po walked past it every single day of their childhood without knowing a hidden Roman looking hall was under their feet the entire time. His own mother, he said, refused to believe it was real until she stood inside it herself.

Inside, yellow light plays across the brick, and because we had come in the late morning session, low sun through the steel and glass roof turned the whole chamber gold while we walked its full circle twice. There is a free self guided audio tour you access with a QR code once you are inside, and Wing insisted the best photograph is not from the centre of the chamber but from one of the corner arches looking diagonally across, where you get the full sweep of the pillars receding into shadow. We spent close to an hour there, longer than either of us expected, mostly because neither of us wanted to be the one to say we should move on.

Walking back down, we cut through the Sham Shui Po street markets on Apliu Street, where stalls sell everything from second hand phone parts to bootleg action figures stacked in cardboard boxes, and Wing haggled a vendor down for a phone charging cable we did not strictly need, purely for the sport of it. We ate a second, smaller lunch there too, a plate of cheung fun rice noodles from a stall that had clearly been in the same spot for decades, the owner recognising Wing from a previous visit years earlier and asking after his mother by name.

2Cattle Depot Artist Village

The slaughterhouse that nobody else wanted

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We took the MTR across to Sung Wong Toi station in the early afternoon, Wing narrating the whole ride the way he does whenever a place holds a story he is fond of. The cluster of red brick buildings we walked toward, most taxi drivers still call the cattle depot out of habit rather than accuracy. Built in 1908 as the Ma Tau Kok Animal Quarantine Depot, this was, for ninety years, the last old fashioned slaughterhouse operating inside urban Hong Kong, holding up to 120 cattle, 200 lambs, and 400 pigs at a time before they went to market. Neighbours complained for decades about the smell and the noise, and in 1999 the government finally shut it down and moved operations to Sheung Shui.

What happened to the empty compound afterward is the part Wing finds more interesting than the slaughterhouse years themselves. In 2001 a group of artists, evicted from the Oil Street Arts Village in North Point, moved into the abandoned depot because nobody else wanted it and the rent was close to nothing. One tenant, a founding member of the media art group Videotage, has said even the feng shui of the place was considered so bad, given what it had been used for, that there was almost no competition for studio space. Today around twenty artists and organisations still keep working here, in rooms that still have the original cattle shackles bolted to the floor and green metal window frames from a century ago.

Wing put it the way one of the artists once put it to him directly. It will never be a polished gallery district with a catchy acronym and gift shops selling framed prints. It is a sincere neighbourhood, and that is exactly the point of it staying that way.

We wandered into two open studios that afternoon, one belonging to a painter who works almost entirely in ink on rice paper and who let us watch her finish a piece while we stood quietly in the doorway, and another run by a small collective printing risograph zines about the neighbourhood's history, a few of which Wing bought on the spot. The rear section, revitalised in 2019 as Cattle Depot Art Park, gave us a place to sit on a bench among the ruins of the old animal pens and eat the egg tarts we had picked up on the way, flaky pastry still warm from the oven, before continuing on.

3Un Chau Estate Flower Tunnel

A curtain of bougainvillea between apartment blocks

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Wing had been saving this one for the tail end of our Kowloon day, mostly because he finds it genuinely funny how many tourists fly all the way to Japan for cherry blossoms without knowing there is a thirty metre tunnel of blooming bougainvillea tucked inside a public housing estate a ten minute MTR ride from where they are staying. Un Chau Estate in Cheung Sha Wan is, by every ordinary measure, an unremarkable government housing complex, fourteen residential blocks built in phases between 1998 and 2012. But near exit C2 of the MTR station, the estate's landscaping team trained bougainvillea spectabilis over a white arched metal frame, and over the years it has grown into a dense corridor of magenta and white blossoms that cascades down like a curtain of falling petals.

We arrived just as the light was softening toward evening, and Wing was right that a weekday visit spares you the queue that forms on weekend afternoons. The tunnel blooms most fully in spring, though bougainvillea in Hong Kong's mild winters will often throw an early flush around Chinese New Year if the weeks before have been dry and sunny, and we caught it about half full, enough magenta against the white apartment blocks behind it to make the whole scene feel staged even though nobody had arranged a single flower for our benefit.

What struck Wing most was not the flowers themselves but how unbothered the residents living in the blocks around it seemed, going about their evening shopping and dog walks while a small crowd of strangers photographed their front garden as if it were a tourist attraction, which, at this point, it quietly has become.

We picked up dinner from a cha chaan teng across the road afterward, a working class Hong Kong style cafe serving milk tea thick enough to stand a spoon in and a plate of char siu over rice that cost us less than a coffee back home, the kind of meal Wing insists tells you more about ordinary Hong Kong life than any restaurant with a view ever could.

4Chun Yeung Street

The tram that drives through a wet market

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Our second full day started on Hong Kong Island, and Wing insisted we ride an eastbound tram from Central specifically to experience what he calls the strangest five minutes of transit in the entire city, rather than take the faster MTR route straight there. Past Fortress Hill, the tram swung without warning off the wide lanes of King's Road onto a narrow lane packed with fruit stalls, fish tanks, and hanging poultry. This is Chun Yeung Street, and it is one of the only places in the world where a functioning tram line runs directly through the middle of an open air wet market, traders and shoppers stepping out of the way as the tram inched through at walking pace, close enough that I could have reached out and touched a crate of oranges from my seat by the window.

The street takes its name from Kwok Chun Yeung, a Fujianese sugar merchant who bought land here in 1921 to build a factory. During the upheaval of the Second World War, the area became a landing point for refugees from Shanghai and Fujian, and North Point earned the nicknames Little Fukien and Little Shanghai. That layered migration history is still audible on the street today, in the Hokkien and Shanghainese dialects traders use with each other, and in the stalls selling Fujianese specialities like sacha sauce and mee sua wheat noodles that are hard to find in other Hong Kong markets.

Wing pointed out that the tram driver never once looked nervous the whole way through. He eased through gaps in the crowd the way you would treat pedestrians at a slow crosswalk, a patience that suggested he had done this ten thousand times before and expected to do it ten thousand more.

We got off at the far end and bought breakfast directly from the market, a bag of freshly fried youtiao dough sticks and two cups of strong milk tea from a stall that had a line of local aunties ahead of us, a better and cheaper start to the day than anything the hotel breakfast buffets nearby could have offered. From there we walked the short distance to North Point Ferry Pier, where Wing wanted to check the timetable for a possible detour to the outlying islands later in the week, watching commuter ferries pull in and out while we finished our tea leaning against the railing.

5Waterfall Bay Park

The cascade that may have named the city

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Of everything Wing showed me that week, this was the stop that changed how I thought about the city's name. Hong Kong translates roughly to fragrant harbour, and one long standing theory, which Wing repeated with the caveat that historians still argue over it, traces that name to a freshwater cascade on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island that once drew British and Chinese sailors ashore to refill their water barrels. That cascade still exists, tucked beside the Wah Fu public housing estate near Pok Fu Lam, inside a modest park that most guidebooks skip entirely in favour of Repulse Bay Beach a short drive further along the same coast.

We took a bus from near the ferry pier, timing it deliberately for late afternoon, and the waterfall itself turned out smaller than the legend suggests, a narrow ribbon of water dropping from cliffside greenery into a small tidal pool before the sea. The setting more than made up for the scale. The promenade looks out toward Lamma Island, the water below is genuinely clear, and there are relics from the Second World War, a pillbox and an old searchlight position, worked into the hillside if you know where to look, which Wing did, having come here as a teenager to skip school with friends.

An older fisherman resting near the rocks told Wing that his grandfather used to say the water here tasted sweeter than anywhere else on the island, which is probably why the sailors kept coming back for it long after other sources became available.

By the time we left, the sky over Lamma had turned the kind of orange that makes every phone camera look like a professional one, and we sat on a low wall eating shrimp paste toast bought from a small stand near the bus stop, watching container ships cross the horizon while the light dropped. Wing mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that on a clearer evening you can also see the lights of Ap Lei Chau flicker on one by one, a detail I would not have known to look for without him.

6Ping Shan Heritage Trail

Nine hundred years of one family's history

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We needed a full afternoon in the New Territories for this stop, and Wing warned me in advance that Ping Shan is less a single attraction than a slow unspooling of one family's history across nine centuries. We took the West Rail line out to Tin Shui Wai, a journey that gave us time to eat a packed lunch of rice dumplings Wing's mother had insisted on preparing for us that morning, still warm when we unwrapped them on the train.

The Tang clan, one of the so called Five Great Clans of the New Territories, trace their move to this corner of Yuen Long back to the twelfth century, and Hong Kong's first ever heritage trail, opened in 1993, links fourteen of their surviving buildings across a walk of just over a kilometre. We started at the Tsui Sing Lau Pagoda, the only ancient pagoda still standing anywhere in Hong Kong, built roughly six hundred years ago not for defence but for feng shui, meant to protect the settlement from flooding and to channel good fortune. Its top floor houses a shrine to Fui Shing, the deity of examination success, and Wing said local parents still occasionally slip a note here before their children sit important school exams, a habit his own aunt kept up for three consecutive years during his cousin's university entrance exams.

From there the trail wound past the Kun Ting Study Hall, built in the 1870s specifically to prepare Tang clan sons for the imperial civil service examinations, and the Hung Shing Temple, raised in 1767 for the god who watches over fishermen and anyone whose livelihood depends on the sea. We lit incense there alongside two elderly women doing the same, neither of whom seemed at all surprised to see a visitor joining in.

The Yu Kiu Ancestral Hall, Wing explained, was not just for worship. It doubled as the neighbourhood school for centuries, so the line between honouring ancestors and educating children was never really a line at all in the way the Tang clan saw it.

The trail ends at the old Ping Shan Police Station, a colonial building the British constructed as much to watch the coastline as to keep an eye on the powerful clan itself, now converted into a small museum with clan relics and old photographs. We finished the afternoon with a short bus ride to Hong Kong Wetland Park nearby, walking its boardwalks as the light faded and a heron picked its way through the shallows, a quiet, unhurried close to a day that had started with dumplings on a train.

7Lai Chi Wo

The village behind a wall built to keep out bad luck

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Getting to Lai Chi Wo took real planning, and it became its own full day. We caught an early bus to Sha Tau Kok, then walked through Plover Cove Country Park for the better part of an hour, Wing setting a pace slow enough that we could actually talk instead of just breathing hard. This is one of Hong Kong's best preserved Hakka walled villages, founded more than three hundred years ago by the Tsang and Wong families, and it earned UNESCO recognition in 2020 for the way its community has revived a village that had nearly emptied out completely by the 1980s.

The layout follows strict feng shui logic, more than two hundred houses arranged in three vertical rows and nine horizontal lanes climbing gently toward the hills behind, with the mountains at its back and the sea in front, a configuration believed to channel prosperity. In front of the village stands a low stone wall that Wing pointed out is the real reason the place has a reputation beyond its architecture.

According to the story Wing grew up hearing from his grandmother, Lai Chi Wo was once a poor village until an elder consulted a geomancer, who told them to build a wall to hold their wealth in and keep bad spirits out. Soon after, the village produced several scholars and its fortunes genuinely turned, which is exactly the kind of coincidence that becomes an unshakeable belief within a generation.

Behind the houses grows a dense fung shui wood, planted by the villagers themselves and protected for centuries by custom rather than law, home to more than a hundred native plant species including a centuries old hollow tree and a giant camphor. We walked the mangrove loop together in the early afternoon, Wing naming plants as we passed them, and I lost count of how many times he stopped to point out a root system or a bird call I would otherwise have walked straight past. At the Lai Chi Wo Cultural Hub, restored village houses now display farming tools, Hakka clothing, and oral histories collected from the village's remaining elders, alongside newly revived fields of organic rice, turmeric, and winter melon.

We ate lunch at one of the two village stalls that open on weekends, a plate of Hakka salted chicken and braised pork belly with black fungus, simple food cooked in a kitchen that looked barely changed from decades earlier, followed by a small dish of sweetened tofu that Wing said his grandmother used to make the same way. A local dog, someone's unofficial village mascot, followed us for most of the afternoon without ever asking for anything more than an occasional scratch behind the ears.

8Yellow Dragon Gorge, Wong Lung Hang

Chasing a stream named for a dragon

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On Lantau Island, past Tung Chung, a stream called Wong Lung Hang cuts down from the hills, its name translating to Yellow Dragon. Wing had wanted to hike the full stream trail with me, past a sequence of pools locals nickname Yellow Dragon, Left Dragon, Right Dragon, and finally the Dragon Tail Waterfall, but January currents and a stretch of dry weather meant the pools were running lower than usual, so we settled for the introductory section and a promise between us to return in summer for the full route, ropes and all, when the rains fill every one of the dragon pools to swimming depth.

Even at a modest flow, the gorge had a wildness to it that was hard to reconcile with how close it sits to Tung Chung's high rises and the airport express line we had ridden in on days earlier. The trail followed the stream bed itself in places, weaving between boulders, with the final approach to Wong Lung Hang Picnic Area giving way to a genuinely quiet valley where the only sound was water and the occasional bird.

Wing said the name comes from the way sunlight hits the water at certain times of day, turning the spray a faint gold, though he admitted with a laugh that this might just be a story hikers tell each other to make an ordinary stream sound more mythical than it actually is.

We finished the short loop with a picnic of siu mai dumplings and sesame balls bought that morning from a Tung Chung bakery, sitting on a flat rock with our feet in the shallow part of the stream. On the walk back, Wing pointed out the cable car towers of Ngong Ping 360 threading up the mountainside in the distance, and we debated riding it out to see the Tian Tan Buddha the next morning before deciding we would rather save that half day for the beaches further ahead in the week.

9Peng Chau Island

The island where the ferry decides your day

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Peng Chau sits close enough to Discovery Bay that ferries between the two run constantly, yet the island itself feels decades removed from anything nearby. Wing insisted we take the slow ferry from Central Pier 6 rather than the fast one, purely so we would arrive already at the island's pace rather than fighting against it, and by the time the boat docked I understood exactly what he meant. There are no cars here beyond a handful of small utility vehicles, and the loudest sound on the pier was a rooster somewhere behind the seafood restaurants.

Peng Chau's history runs through lime, not tourism. People here have burned oyster shells and coral into lime for construction and papermaking for at least a thousand years, and the island once held eleven separate lime kilns, the remains of one still standing along the heritage trail. In the twentieth century, a Shanghai businessman known as the Match King built the Great China Match Factory here in 1939, at one point the largest match factory in Southeast Asia and Peng Chau's only real industrial employer until it closed in the 1970s.

The island's spiritual life is just as layered. The Tin Hau Temple, built in 1792, still keeps an eight foot whale bone inside, placed there generations ago by fishermen as an offering to the sea goddess. Nearby stands the Lung Mo Temple, dedicated to the Dragon Mother, where locals believe touching the temple's dragon bed brings good fortune, and the smaller Golden Flower Shrine, whose Bodhisattva Festival still draws a small crowd of devotees each year.

An old fisherman we spoke to near the pier told Wing that when he was a boy, every household on Peng Chau either worked the lime kilns or the match factory, and that the sound of match boxes being packed used to carry across the whole waterfront in the evenings.

We spent the afternoon eating our way slowly around the island, starting with a plate of salt and pepper squid at a seafood restaurant right on the waterfront, noticeably cheaper than the same dish would cost on Lamma or Cheung Chau, followed by a stop at a tiny bakery for egg waffles eaten hot off the griddle while we sat on the sea wall watching the tide come in. Wing rented two bicycles for an hour, the easiest and cheapest way to cover the whole island, and we rode slow loops past the old lime kiln ruins until the light started to fade and we had to catch the last comfortable ferry back.

10Long Ke Wan and the Tai Long Wan Beaches

The beaches at the end of a long trail

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This was the most physically demanding day of the entire trip, and Wing warned me about it days in advance, telling me to wear proper shoes, eat a real breakfast, and pack more water than felt necessary. We took a taxi from Sai Kung Town, itself worth a slow wander for its seafood stalls and waterfront promenade, to the High Island Reservoir East Dam, joining the MacLehose Trail past dramatic hexagonal volcanic rock columns before dropping to Long Ke Wan, a crescent of soft white sand and startlingly clear water that most visitors to Hong Kong never see because it takes real effort to reach.

From Long Ke the trail climbed again, over Sai Wan Shan at 313 metres, the highest point of the route, before descending toward the string of beaches collectively known as Tai Long Wan, big wave bay. Along the way we passed the crumbling houses of an abandoned Hakka village near Chek Keng, roofs long gone, walls slowly disappearing back into the jungle, a genuinely eerie contrast to the postcard beaches waiting just beyond the next ridge.

Wing told me the families who once lived in that village left decades ago for better opportunities in the city or overseas, and that a few descendants still return once a year to sweep the ancestral graves nearby, even though nobody has lived in the houses themselves for a generation.

Sai Wan and Ham Tin Wan are the two beaches with any facilities at all, a couple of simple family run restaurants serving instant noodles, fried rice, and cold drinks to hikers who have earned every bite. We stopped at Ham Tin for a late lunch, sitting with our feet in the sand while the restaurant owner brought out a plate of stir fried greens alongside the noodles without being asked, the kind of small hospitality Wing said is standard out here rather than an exception. Beyond Ham Tin, Tai Wan stretched out empty and untouched, framed by the dramatic profile of Sharp Peak, and this is the beach Wing quietly told me is the most beautiful in all of Hong Kong, precisely because reaching it requires enough effort to keep the crowds away.

11Cape D'Aguilar

Where the city finally runs out of road

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Our last full day together was the quietest, a walk out to the southeastern tip of Hong Kong Island where the city runs out entirely. We took a bus from Shau Kei Wan toward Shek O, Wing pointing out Repulse Bay Beach through the window as we passed the turnoff, a beach he says is worth an hour if you have never seen it but not worth building a whole day around given how much better the coastline gets further along.

Cape D'Aguilar takes its English name from Major General Sir George Charles d'Aguilar, a British commander who governed here in the 1840s, though its Chinese name, Hok Tsui, comes independently from the nearby fishing village and simply means crane's beak, a reference to the shape of the headland itself. At the tip stands Hong Kong's oldest surviving lighthouse, put into service in April 1875 and decommissioned only two decades later once the more powerful Waglan Island light took over.

The whole cape is now protected as Hong Kong's only marine reserve, twenty hectares of rocky shoreline where swimming, diving, and even collecting shells are all strictly prohibited to protect the subtidal habitats researchers from the University of Hong Kong's Swire Institute of Marine Science study here year round. We walked far enough along the rocks to reach Thunder Cave, which booms audibly when waves crash into it, and the aptly named Crab's Eye rock formation just beyond, Wing timing our arrival for a moment when the tide was pushing in hard enough that the boom was unmistakable.

Wing pointed out the ruins of the old Bokhara Battery near the lighthouse, built for coastal defence and used briefly during the fighting in December 1941, a reminder that even this remote, wind battered corner of the island carries its own quiet weight of history beneath the calm.

Near the Swire Institute building sits the skeleton of a fin whale, recovered from Victoria Harbour in 1955 and preserved here as a permanent, slightly surreal landmark for anyone who makes the walk out this far. We sat on the rocks near the lighthouse for close to an hour afterward, eating the last of our snacks and watching the light change over the water, before starting the long walk back toward the bus stop and, eventually, toward the first proper sit down dinner we had allowed ourselves all week, a slow, unhurried meal of clay pot rice in Shau Kei Wan that felt like the right way to close out the trip.