Hong Kong’s Maritime Trade, Part VIV: The Container Revolution

As the sun rose over Victoria Harbour on September 5, 1972, a large ship called the Tokyo Bay docked at the Kwai Chung Container Terminal, becoming the very first vessel to berth at Hong Kong’s new container port. It was a moment that changed Hong Kong forever. But it almost never happened. 

At the time, world trade was undergoing a revolution that few ordinary people would have noticed. In 1955, an American trucking executive named Malcolm McLean joined forces with engineer Keith Tantlinger to design a metal container that could be easily loaded onto ships in order to make it cheaper, faster and more efficient to transport goods around the world. Containers were already used on trains and trucks, and to a limited extent on ships, but they were generally small and inefficient; most cargo was still loaded manually. McLean dreamed of a way to make containers more standardised and the shipping process more streamlined. 

With that goal in mind, Tantlinger developed a metal container, eight feet tall, eight feet wide and 10 feet long, with a twistlock mechanism on each corner that made it easy for cranes to lift and stack the containers. It was a boon for McLean’s company, SeaLand, but Tatlinger saw even bigger potential. In 1963, he convinced McLean to relinquish SeaLand’s patent rights to the container design. After two years of negotiation and fine-tuning, SeaLand finally released a modified version of its design to be used as a new international standard. The modern container era had begun.

The tin can that changed everything

It’s a story that has “all the romance of a tin can,” as historian Marc Levinson notes in his 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. But the introduction of a standardised global system of shipping containers had “sweeping consequences for workers and consumers all around the globe,” he writes, ushering in a “new era of global trade” that had far-reaching economic, social, political and environmental consequences. 

Hong Kong almost missed out. “We were a bit slow catching onto containerisation,” says Tim Huxley, director of Hong Kong-based Mandarin Shipping and a frequent commentator on Hong Kong’s maritime history. “But we quickly caught up.”

The Port of New York and New Jersey was the first to embrace containerisation, opening a container terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1962. Rotterdam and Kobe followed in 1967. The trend was not lost on Hong Kong’s colonial leaders. Governor David Trench appointed a Container Committee in July 1966; over the next year and a half, it produced two reports recommending the construction of a container terminal on the Rambler Channel in Kwai Chung, which offered deep water, easy access to shipping channels and growing industrial areas, and more room for development than around existing docks in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hung Hom and Quarry Bay.

But the government couldn’t decide exactly who would build and operate the new container port. As with so many things, Hong Kong’s leaders looked south to Singapore, which was embarking on the development of its own state-owned-and-operated container port. But that didn’t appeal to the laissez-faire economic ethos that prevailed under Trench’s administration and nearly all of the previous colonial administrations.

And so the government dragged its feet, as it was doing with the planning of the MTR, which was also being studied at the time. In the meantime, container ships were already on their way to Hong Kong: the first one, the SS San Juan, docked at Ocean Terminal in 1969. And container ports were opening all over the world, including in Japan and Taiwan, with more planned in South Korea — and of course Singapore. “The building of these berths is urgent, and Hong Kong must contin­ue to move ahead fast,” said Dudley Perkins, the director of London’s port authority, Dudley Perkins, in May 1970. “While Hongkong has left it late, it is not too late,” he said. 

The Hong Kong government finally took action later that summer. In August 1970, the government awarded tenders to three private companies — Modern Terminals, Kowloon Container Warehouse and SeaLand — to build and operate container terminals on newly-reclaimed land in Kwai Chung. 

When the Tokyo Bay finally berthed, portions of the adjacent terminal were still under construction. But in its coverage, the South China Morning Post couldn’t help making a jab at Singapore, whose own container port had opened three months earlier: “Despite this, the crane operator at Kwai Chung yesterday could have taken three-quarters of the day off and still run rings around his Singapore counterparts.”

A very Hong Kong approach

“Hong Kong is a very photographic place for ships to come into,” notes Keith Macgregor, a photographer who — along with documenting neon signs in Hong Kong’s streets — was hired to document SeaLand’s vessels in the 1970s. “I found out I was in the middle of an extraordinary revolution in shipping,” he recalls. 

To get his shots, he would hire a helicopter and fly over to the East Lamma Channel, the main shipping lane leading from the open ocean to Kwai Chung. As enormous, steam-powered SL-7 cargo ships came up the channel, with the mountains of Hong Kong Island on one side and Lamma Island on the other, “we would plant the helicopter right in front of the bow of the ship going 17 knots,” says Macgregor. “It was a hell of a fun thing to do.”

It isn’t just the approach that makes Hong Kong a spectacular place to photograph container ships: it’s the port, too. Though the Kwai Chung terminals may have been built on newly reclaimed land, it’s hardly a vast, clean-sheet port landscape. Squeezed into a compact basin along the Rambler Channel, terminals wrap around both sides, with roads squeezed between hills, factories, housing estates and — later — epic bridge infrastructure that swoops between mountain peaks.

As global trade boomed thanks to the efficiency of container shipping, many other cities expanded their ports or moved them further away from urban centres. The Port of Rotterdam, for instance, sprawls over a whopping 105 square kilometres. Hong Kong intensified in place. With no real alternatives due to the city’s limited land area, it deepened the Kwai Tsing basin, stacked higher, relied heavily on trucks and barges, and kept mid-stream and river trade operations serving the Pearl River Delta as part of the system. 

The space constraints mean that more than a quarter of container throughput is actually handled outside the main Kwai Chung terminals, including mid-stream handling — which means unloading while anchored offshore — the river trade terminal in Tuen Mun, and public cargo working areas where small numbers of containers may be offloaded from barges. This hybrid system is very Hong Kong: formal deep-water terminals on one hand, flexible barge and mid-stream handling on the other. It suited the surrounding region before nearby ports in mainland China were fully modernised. It let Hong Kong connect ocean carriers, river barges, trucks, warehouses, manufacturers and trading houses through a highly adaptable commercial ecology.

That kind of environment suited Alan Lee Goldstein perfectly well. “Give me a problem, and I can find an opportunity,” says the Bronx-born maritime engineer, who still has a distinct New York accent after more than half a century in Hong Kong. After getting his start by supervising the construction of a container terminal on Staten Island in New York, he was employed by Sea Land and sent to Italy, where he designed and supervised construction of container terminals around Europe, and then came to Hong Kong to supervise the construction of Terminal Three in Kwai Chung, which opened in 1973. 

Hong Kong’s container port was soon one of the busiest in the world. Factories from around the world relocated to Hong Kong. Goldstein noted that there was a shortage of storage capability for the huge factory production taking place. In 1976, he presented the concept of a logistics building that used the air rights over Terminal Three to David Akers-Jones, then Secretary for the New Territories. The concept was approved by the government.

By the early 1990s, Hong Kong ranked second, after Singapore and ahead of Rotterdam — a sign that the epicentre of world trade was shifting away from Europe and America and towards Asia. (In 1990, six of the world’s 10 busiest ports were in Asia.) The shortage of storage in Hong Kong’s factories was only getting worse. That’s when Goldstein’s idea for providing a logistics building over the container terminal finally came to fruition.

“What I wanted to do was a unique design that made every floor like the ground floor,” he explains. By building a podium over the container yard, with rails and automated systems underneath to stack containers, he could create a high-rise, high-ceilinged logistics center over the podium. The plan included an elevated roadway to provide access to each floor, with a three-lane ramp, so trucks could drive directly up to different floors to unload and retrieve cargo. The result was the ATL Logistics Centre, a 15-storey, 865,937-square-metre behemoth, when the last phase was completed in 1994 and still holds the Guinness World Record for world’s largest multistory industrial building.

What next?

Hong Kong’s container port worked because it sat at the intersection of four forces: the rise of container shipping, the growth of Asian export manufacturing, Hong Kong’s free-port status, and the economic development of the Pearl River Delta under Deng Xiaoping, who instituted sweeping economic reforms in China in 1978. It became the offshore logistics interface for southern China before any mainland port could handle the same cargo directly.

In that sense, Hong Kong’s advantage was not just physical. It was legal, financial and commercial. It had shipping agents, insurers, banks, traders, experienced terminal operators, low customs friction and a reputation for fast turnaround. The port was less a standalone piece of infrastructure than a platform for Hong Kong’s wider trading system.

But its limitations are now showing. Having a huge port in the middle of a densely-packed city has a serious environmental impact; the area around Kwai Chung has much worse air pollution than the rest of Hong Kong due to emissions from ships and trucks. 

And Hong Kong’s geographical constraints, combined with the development of mainland China’s own container ports, mean that its importance to global shipping is in decline. In 2005, Hong Kong’s container port was the busiest in the world, handling 22.6 million TEUs of cargo. (TEUs stands for twenty-foot-equivalent-unit and is the standard way to measure cargo volume.) In 2025, it was the 12th ranking port, handling 12.99 million TEUs — more than four times less than Shanghai and Singapore, the two busiest ports. Nearby Shenzhen, which handled 16.2 million TEUs in 2005, now handles 33.4 million per year.

Some — including Goldstein — think that Hong Kong needs a port authority to help guide long-term development. But shipping companies and terminal operators have long resisted the idea. “We’ve had adaptability, but at the same time you haven’t seen so much radical thinking you might see elsewhere,” notes Huxley. 

For now, Hong Kong’s port remains as spectacular as ever. Every day, ships much larger than the Tokyo Bay sail up the East Lamma Channel, past skyscraping towers of stacked containers, cranes looming above them. The landscape of trade may be shifting, but the container revolution hasn’t yet run its course.