More than 70% of Business in Hong Kong is Carried on Reclaimed Land

In the early years of the colony of Hong Kong, when the British started developing the City of Victoria (northwestern Hong Kong Island), they quickly encountered an important issue: Hong Kong Island was little more than a mountain jutting out from the South China Sea on which constructible land was very scarce or, as the then British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put it, "a barren rock with nary a house upon it."

Faced with chronic overcrowding, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the colony had to increase its available land. The cession of Kowloon to the British Empire in 1860 and the lease of the New Territories in 1898 somewhat helped ease this land scarcity. However, both Kowloon and the New Territories suffered from the same problem as Hong Kong Island: they primarily consisted of mountainous terrain.

As time passed, overpopulation in Hong Kong grew exponentially as Chinese immigrants continued to pour into the city—first following the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century; then after the Boxer Rebellion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; and again after the Communist victory in Mainland China in the mid-twentieth century.

Reclaiming land from the sea became the solution adopted by Hong Kong to prevent overcrowding. Between 1877 and 2020, no less than 70 square kilometres (27 square miles) of land had been reclaimed. As of 2018, although this only represents 6% of Hong Kong’s total area, about 70% of all business activity is carried out on this reclaimed land.