Causeway Bay

One round goes off at midday. A trading house has kept the custom since the 1800s. A member of its staff still strikes the bell eight times before firing. Reaching the gun means a tunnel out of a shopping centre car park.

This is the largest park on Hong Kong Island. Football pitches, a swimming pool and a pond for model boats all share one boundary wall, and the lawns are cleared for the flower fair in the last days before the new lunar year.

Three nights around Mid-Autumn are the only ones it runs. A straw dragon over 60m long is studded with lit incense and carried through the lanes, a practice traced to the 1880s and to a plague. The lanes are narrow, so anyone arriving late sees backs.

The empty plaza in front does more work than the tower behind it. People arrange to meet here, sitting on the steps to wait, and on the night of 31 December the countdown happens on that paving. Inside the mall, each floor goes to one kind of shop.

You do not need a card to walk in. The twelve-storey building opened in 2001, and the upper reading rooms face Victoria Park, which is why the afternoon light is good up there.

You board at the back, leave at the front and pay on the way out. It opened in 1904 with single-deck cars, and upper decks came in 1912. The fare is flat, so one stop costs what the whole line costs. If the front seat upstairs is empty, take it.

Small boats lie packed together behind the breakwater. It was dug as water for fishing junks to run into ahead of a storm, and yachts now float among the boats people still live on. A short path follows the edge of it.

Built against a rock, its front curves into a half circle, a plan few Hong Kong temples share. The temple goes back to 1863, and one interior wall is the bare rock itself. It sits deep in the Tai Hang lanes and is not something you stumble on.

Come on a Wednesday night. That is when the floodlit meetings run, September through July. The infield enclosure is the cheap way in provided you are happy standing. The track was laid over drained marsh in 1846 and now has flats on all four sides.

Forty thousand seats sit in the middle of a residential valley, which is why limits are placed on the noise it may make at night. The rugby sevens, played here for decades, moved to Kai Tak Stadium in 2025.

A curving lane hidden among the malls, its stalls of clothes, socks and phone cases pressed together under awnings that roof it over. Carry on into neighbouring Jardine's Bazaar for old noodle shops and fruit sellers. Prices drop a little if you bargain.

A Protestant burial ground used since 1845, its headstones terraced up the slope opposite the racecourse. Early traders, missionaries and war dead share it, and the inscriptions read like early Hong Kong history. Dense trees keep it cool even at midday.

Tram tracks run down the middle of this North Point wet market lane. As a tram rings its way in, traders drag their stalls back, then push them out again behind it. Ride a North Point tram from Causeway Bay and it threads this lane just before the terminus.

Aw Boon Haw, rich from Tiger Balm, built this Tai Hang hillside house in 1935. The Tiger Balm Garden in front is gone. A new operator plans to reopen it in 2026 as Villa Haw Par, an arts venue; check it has opened and how to book first.

Five ageing residential blocks in Quarry Bay join round a courtyard, and from below the windows wall off the sky. Transformers filmed here, which made it famous. People live here, so signs in the courtyard forbid photography.