Wan Chai

Nobody chose the blue. The story goes it was the only paint left in the store when the walls were done. The tenement dates from the 1920s, and the restoration is known for keeping residents in place through the work. A small exhibition room is downstairs.

The roof reaches out over the water as a wing. That wing is the extension built on reclaimed ground so the 1997 handover ceremony could be held in it, and the whole line of it reads from the waterfront path without going inside.

The flag is raised at 7:50 in the morning; the ceremony takes about 10 minutes. On the first of each month a police guard is added and the whole thing grows. The gilt bauhinia in the middle was a gift made in 1997.

It is the oldest surviving post office building in Hong Kong. Put up in 1913, its plan is skewed to fit the sloping corner it stands on. No mail passes through it now; the rooms hold an environmental resource centre.

South of the main road there is a wide walled forecourt. It is where people in Wan Chai go to be somewhere empty. The buildings inside the wall are of 1863, and the 3m copper figure in the main hall was cast in Guangdong under the Ming and carried here.

Come to this lane for toys. Stalls line both sides with plastic toys, stationery and household odds and ends, and anything without a price on it has to be asked about.

The plot was a triangle, so the plan is a triangle and the motif carries into the stair landings and the windows. It opened in 1977, and the upper galleries are usually free, which makes them easy to drop into.

Of the 1937 market only the curved front was kept, and a residential block was built on top of it. The rounded corner and the long horizontal windows belong to the style of that decade; the inside is a grocery now.

Get out on the 17th floor and you walk straight onto a road halfway up the hill. The cylindrical 64-storey tower of 1980 meets the slope behind it at that level, and the glass lift bolted to the outside drops the roofs of Wan Chai away beneath you on the ride.

This was the street of wedding-card printers. It was cleared in the 2000s and reopened in 2015 as a pedestrian lane with several old signboards mounted on the walls, though none of the printers came back.

A level hillside path laid over an old water main, with hardly a car on it, so mornings bring runners and dog walkers. Midway, the upright Lovers' Rock gathers incense from women praying for a match, busiest on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

A small museum in the former Wan Chai Gap police station. The triad and narcotics gallery shows seized weapons and opium gear. Admission costs nothing and Mondays it shuts; take the 15 bus from Central to the Wan Chai Gap Road stop and walk a short way up.

Hong Kong's first power station stood on this slope in 1890, which is why the streets are named Star, Sun, Moon and Electric. Small cafes and boutiques now fill the stepped lanes. Walk up from behind Pacific Place and the main road falls silent.

A shrine to Hung Shing, god of the sea, which had the shoreline right at its door when built in 1847. Reclamation pushed the water far away, and it now sits wedged between towers on Queen's Road East. People also come to pray for marriage and children.

Ten balcony-type tenement houses from the 1910s and 1920s, joined up and restored; their once-green walls gave the old name Green House. Since 2024 the third floor has held the Museum of Hong Kong Literature, with cafes and shops on the floors below.