Born From the Waves of the Sea: Land Reclamation in Hong Kong

“The legendary city of Victoria was, like Venus, born from the waves of the sea. It is not known how it disappeared in the end.”

This is how Dung Kai-cheung introduces the fictionalised version of Hong Kong he depicts in his 2012 book Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. It’s a fitting description for a place in a constant state of doing and undoing, not only in a metaphorical sense but in a literal one. 

We’re talking about land reclamation, of course: the act of filling in the sea to create usable land. If you’re reading this in Hong Kong, there’s a good chance you’re sitting on land that didn’t exist 50 or 100 years ago. Over the course of its history, Hong Kong has reclaimed over 70 square kilometres of land, accounting for more than a quarter of the city’s developed area. 

This isn’t unique. Venice famously sits on a series of artificial islands. Tokyo has been reclaiming land since the middle of the 17th century. Singapore has expanded its land area by nearly 25 percent over the past half-century. But there’s something that sets Hong Kong apart from the many other cities that have expanded their footprint into rivers, lakes and oceans. Here, land reclamation isn’t a distant historical memory or some hazy activity happening on the periphery: it’s a process of transformation that has been central to the city’s identity, economy and politics. Without reclamation, there simply wouldn’t be Hong Kong as we know it today. 

A city on the make

The history of land reclamation in Hong Kong goes back several hundred years. The first recorded project was in 1279, when the Man family — one of the “five great clans” of the northwestern New Territories, along with the Tangs, Pangs, Haus and Lius — filled in swampy areas near the Mai Po Marshes to create rice paddies and other agricultural land. 

But it was only after 1841, when the British arrived on Hong Kong Island, that the shores of Victoria Harbour began to be altered. The earliest of these reclamation projects were essentially ad hoc: rubble from land clearance and construction was dumped by private businesses into harbourfront lots in order to create more space for docks and buildings. When a fire ripped through Queen’s Road Central in 1851, the debris was simply shovelled into the harbour to create land for a new road, Bonham Strand. 

The Praya Reclamation Scheme marked the beginning of ambitious, large-scale land reclamation in Hong Kong. This was the brainchild of Indo-Armenian entrepreneur Catchick Paul Chater, who had been lobbying the Hong Kong government for years to more radically extend the harbourfront. “Night after night in the late 1860s, he hired a sampan and sailed it along the shores of Victoria Harbour, taking soundings in order to chart with precision every curve and crevice of the seabed,” we wrote in our profile of this Calcutta orphan made good. “It was peculiar enough that Hong Kong’s leading newspaper at the time, The China Mail, ran an item about the mysterious behaviour of the young entrepreneur.”

Chater finally convinced the government after a typhoon devastated Central in 1874 and damaged Hong Kong’s economic reputation. His reclamation scheme was approved in 1889, laying the foundations for the modern-day power centre of Central: Statue Square and Chater Road. Chater’s company, Hongkong Land, developed the land around it, making him fabulously rich and influential. 

Other businesses followed suit. Jardines reclaimed land in East Point — today the heart of Causeway Bay — for an ice factory that helped sustain another one of its businesses, Dairy Farm. Swire reclaimed land in Quarry Bay to create a model industrial town that included a sugar refinery, dockyard and workers’ housing. Across the harbour, land was reclaimed for the Hutchison Whampoa dockyard and the terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Shorelines once lined by rocky outcrops and natural beaches gave way to oil depots, warehouses, housing and amusement parks: an entirely new city born from the waves of the sea. 

Levelling up   

These early 20th century reclamation projects created the bulk of present-day neighbourhoods like Kennedy Town, Wan Chai and Sham Shui Po. (Happy Valley was also created through land reclamation of a sort, as its marshlands were drained for the famous racecourse.) And yet the total land area created by reclamation between 1841 and 1941 was just five square kilometres: significant only in the context of prewar Hong Kong’s extremely compact urban footprint. 

During World War II, the occupying Japanese military reclaimed land to create a new runway for Kai Tak Airport. But it was after the war that the returning British colonial government truly embraced reclamation as a tool for economic development. “It became a state project to develop land without having to deal with existing land owners,” says Dorothy Tang, a landscape architect and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, who has studied Hong Kong’s history of land reclamation. “There’s always a rationale for needing more infrastructure like roads, and that rationale was really important for the colonial government to not only develop the infrastructure that was necessary for the city to grow, but also as a way to make profit.”

That’s because, under the low-tax, laissez-faire economic regime maintained by the colonial government since 1841, leasing crown land was the only surefire way for the government to make money. “And reclamation is the easiest way to gain land,” says Tang. As waves of mainland Chinese migrants poured into Hong Kong after the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the government reclaimed more and more land for industrial and residential development. In the 1950s, Kwun Tong’s historic salt ponds were filled in to create a new industrial area — one of many that would be developed in waterfront locations in the following two decades. In the 1960s, plans were drawn up for vast new towns on reclaimed land in Sha Tin, Tai Po, Tsuen Wan and Tuen Mun. That was followed by the 1980s reclamation of Junk Bay and Rennie’s Mill for the Tseung Kwan O new town. 

That decade also marked the beginning of Hong Kong’s most epic reclamation scheme yet: the Rose Garden Project, officially known as the Port and Airport Development Strategy. It was unlike anything Hong Kong had ever seen. The small island of Chek Lap Kok would be expanded through reclamation to create a home for a vast new international airport — the world’s largest at the time. That would be accompanied by new roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, expanded container ports and plenty of new land for residential and commercial development. 

“There were a number of different things that happened in the 80s and 90s that enabled this project,” explains Tang. “There was enough expertise to figure out how to do land reclamation on a larger scale. There was also the reform and opening up of China. And there was sand scouring in the Pearl River Delta.” Hong Kong had exhausted its usual sources of new fill, but the liberalisation of China’s economy in the 1980s meant its sand deposits were now available for export. “What we see in the 80s is these large sand barges going up and down the Pearl River bringing fill from China,” says Tang. 

It’s hard to understate just how much this changed Hong Kong’s geography. You need only look at photographer Gretchen So’s series Evolving Territories, which depicts the airport-related reclamation as it progressed in the 1990s, to be reminded of how revolutionary this scheme was. 

Its impact is still being felt. Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok were once bustling harbourfront neighbourhoods where land and sea commingled in the floating village of the typhoon shelter. Today, the harbour is nearly a kilometre away, past a vast spaghetti junction of roadways, and many of the streets close to the former shore feel oddly forlorn; they have been stripped of purpose. In exchange we now have the West Kowloon Cultural District and the city-within-a-city atop Kowloon Station. 

Enough is enough?

All told, more than 17 square kilometres of new land were created through the Rose Garden Project. That was only meant to be the beginning. With the land occupied by Kai Tak soon to be freed up for redevelopment, plans were drawn up to fill in almost the entirety of Kowloon Bay with 124 hectares of new land; another proposal was made to expand the northwestern shore of Hong Kong Island by reclaiming 70 hectares of land between Kennedy Town and Green Island. All told, planners aimed to reclaim a further 1,297 hectares of land from the harbour, reducing it to just 40 percent of its original size.  

“It was in danger of becoming Victoria River,” said Winston Chu, a lawyer and member of the Town Planning Board from 1988 to 1996. Speaking to the South China Morning Post in 2003, he recalled how, a decade earlier, the government’s plans motivated him to launch the Society for the Protection of the Harbour, which lobbied against any further harbourfront reclamation. Chu found an ally in Legislative Council member Christine Loh, who introduced the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance in November 1996, which would ban any further reclamation unless there was an overriding public need. It was passed into law on June 30, 1997 — the eve of Hong Kong’s handover to China. “We never expected it would pass,” Loh later told China Daily. 

Part of the opposition to land reclamation was environmental. In the mid-1990s, dozens of dead pink dolphins washed up on Hong Kong beaches. Activists pointed the finger at the increased boat traffic caused by airport construction, which was located in the heart of the dolphins’ habitat in the Pearl River estuary. “The dolphins almost became a mascot of the city,” says Tang. Not just almost — literally, as the dolphin was chosen to represent Hong Kong during the 1997 handover ceremony.

The dolphins’ potential demise was part of a growing list of environmental concerns in the 1990s. Hong Kong’s waterways were growing increasingly polluted; its air quality was rapidly deteriorating, with increasingly thick smog blanketing the city each winter. Green groups became increasingly influential in the years after the handover. 

Anthropologist Tim Choy documents this contentious period of Hong Kong politics in his 2011 book Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Despite the dry title, it’s a lively, engagingly written account of a transformative period in Hong Kong history, when the city was coming to grips with its own identity in the wake of the British colonial era. As Choy notes, Hong Kong environmentalism was wrapped up in what he calls the “politics of endangerment”: not only were the dolphins under threat, so were the things that made Hong Kong unique. 

The harbour was one of those. And so were the harbourfront structures that had become engrained in Hong Kong’s collective memory, a term that enjoyed new prominence as activists raced to save the Central Star Ferry Pier from demolition. Built in 1957 as part of the Edinburgh Place civic centre that also includes City Hall, the Streamline Moderne structure with its distinctive clock tower was due to be knocked down for the third and final phase of the Central and Wan Chai Reclamation. Despite legal efforts by the Society for the Protection of the Harbour to stop this last phase of reclamation, the High Court ruled that it could proceed, as it had been approved before the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance had passed. 

In 2006, a motley group of artists and activists occupied the ferry pier in an attempt to stave off its destruction. They failed — but succeeded in launching a new cultural and political movement that defined Hong Kong for the following decade. A city that had once been aloof to its own history and heritage gradually became obsessed with local identity; the Star Ferry protests helped cultivate the land justice movement, which reshaped local politics and played an influential role in both the 2014 Umbrella Movement and 2019 pro-democracy protests. You could even argue that the campaign to save the Star Ferry pier was a turning point in protection for built heritage, giving ammunition to activists who helped save Tai Kwun, PMQ and other historic structures from redevelopment.

The legacy of land reclamation in Hong Kong isn’t just physical: it is cultural, political, even psychological. What does it mean to live in a city whose very form is always changing, whose very ground is uncertain and ambiguous? Hong Kong’s layers are not only vertical but horizontal, as old shorelines are abandoned and forgotten. And with each expansion of space comes an opportunity to shrug off the past and create something novel: a city refashioned with every new hectare of land. The city emerges and disappears in equal measure.

Future reclamation

Will there be more reclamation in the future? Almost certainly. The Society for the Protection of the Harbour disbanded suddenly in August 2025 — not because its work was finished, but because the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance has been revised in a way that removes the guardrails against unnecessary reclamation, according to the society. 

The revision intends to streamline small-scale reclamation projects of less than 0.8 hectares, with the goal of creating more public spaces along the harbour. But critics have pointed out that it also gives the government more power to reclaim land as it sees fit, without as much of a need to prove its public benefit. Lawmaker Tik Chi-yuen, who abstained from voting on the changes to the law, told the South China Morning Post that there is now “a lack of an effective monitoring scheme.”

Meanwhile, it is unclear whether Hong Kong’s latest reclamation mega-scheme will go forward. First announced in 2014, the Lantau Tomorrow Vision calls for the creation of 1,700 hectares of land off the eastern coast of Lantau Island, linked to the rest of Hong Kong by a new road tunnel and MTR lines. It was officially postponed in 2024, though the government insists that it has not been cancelled. After all, Hong Kong has been constantly reclaiming land for nearly two centuries: this is not a story that will end anytime soon.