Stories behind Hong Kong districts: Admiralty, always a place apart

Hong Kong in the 1840s was a rough place. “The European inhabitants are obliged to sleep with loaded pistols,” wrote Colonial Treasurer Robert Montgomery Martin, who described gangs of armed robbers that prowled the streets, “ready to sacrifice their number if they can obtain a large plunder.”

The city’s large military garrison was no exception. Soldiers lived in disease-ridden squalor – nearly a quarter of them were infected with syphilis, while hundreds of others perished from malaria. Barely a year after the British established themselves in Hong Kong, soldiers were deserting their post and trying to sneak away on American whaling ships.

The military’s solution was to build a base in the heart of the city. Soldiers would no longer have to sleep in bamboo huts; instead, they would have a bed in imposing stone structures with spacious verandahs, surrounded by lush greenery. These were the beginnings of the district known today as Admiralty. Today, 175 years later, it is an upscale enclave of shopping malls, hotels and public institutions. Traces of its military past are few and far between.

And yet few other places shaped Hong Kong’s development as much as Admiralty, which for more than a century was known as the Victoria Cantonment.

“I was really surprised by what a contentious piece of land it had been from the very beginning,” says Katie Cummer, director of the University of Hong Kong’s undergraduate architectural conservation programme. Cummer began researching the area a few years ago for a book published by the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, Heritage Revealed.