Star Ferry

The nine-minute crossing of Victoria Harbour on a green-and-white Star Ferry is among the most celebrated short journeys in the world — a nine-minute lesson in why Hong Kong was built where it was, and how it made its living from the sea.

From the upper deck the view is unhurried: Hong Kong Island's eastern face rising steeply from the water with the tiers of the CBD stacked above the ferry piers, and Kowloon's waterfront spreading wide on the port side, a panorama that has featured in a thousand travel photographs yet remains genuinely impressive in person.

The harbour below is still working — ferries and hydrofoils crossing, cargo vessels anchored in the roads, the occasional wooden junk with cotton sails that looks unchanged from the 19th century. The scale of Victoria Harbour becomes clear only from the water.

The Star Ferry service was founded in 1888 as the Kowloon Ferry Company and received its current name in 1898; the current fleet of twelve vessels operates two routes across the harbour, carrying over 70,000 passengers a day. The ferries were originally painted white with green gunwale stripes, a livery that has remained largely unchanged.

Even though the harbour is now crossed by multiple road and railway tunnels, the Star Ferry continues to operate — a testament to the harbour's physical scale and to the ferry's enduring combination of low cost, reliability and the view that no tunnel can match.

The evening crossing is particularly recommended: the lights of the Hong Kong Island skyline come on in sequence, the buildings becoming luminous columns in the dusk, and the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade fills with spectators waiting for the nightly Symphony of Lights show that begins at 8 pm.

The Star Ferry has featured in the collective memory of Hong Kong for over a century and has been the subject of poems, films and countless family photographs. It is one of the few surviving pieces of Hong Kong's maritime heritage that remains in daily operational use.

The ferry boats themselves have changed over the decades — the original wooden vessels were replaced by steel-hulled ferries in the early 20th century, and the current green-and-white fleet dates from various periods of refit — but the essential experience of crossing the harbour in an open-sided boat has remained continuous. The design of the ferries, with their wooden benches and open bow seating, reflects an era when the harbour was the primary public space of the city.

A lesser-known fact is that the Star Ferry also operates a route between Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island and Hung Hom in Kowloon, a crossing that takes in the eastern end of the harbour and passes the naval base and container port approaches. This route is less tourist-oriented and gives a fuller picture of the working harbour.

The Victoria Harbour crossing from the Star Ferry upper deck offers one of the world's great short harbour panoramas — the full scale of the harbour and both its built shores visible from the water at minimal cost.

The Star Ferry service has operated continuously since 1888, making it one of the oldest continuously operating ferry services in the world and a living piece of Hong Kong's maritime heritage.

Even in an era of road and rail tunnels beneath the harbour, the ferry remains a practical and popular crossing — the view from the deck cannot be replicated by any tunnel.