From rich men’s mansions to affluent middle class suburb: Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels

In Hong Kong, the value of real estate goes one way – up. Literally. The higher you ascend, the more expensive properties become, from shoebox flats near the harbour to the multibillion-dollar mansions of The Peak. In between, there is a peculiarly Hong Kong kind of middle: the Mid-Levels.

It is one of the best known and most historic places in Hong Kong, and yet its existential state of middleness seems to have left it with a banal reputation as a kind of affluent suburb in the sky. But a walk through the Mid-Levels reveals some of the oldest roads, trees and buildings in Hong Kong, and it says a lot about this city’s ad hoc approach to urban planning.

The Mid-Levels began to develop soon after the British arrived in Hong Kong. With Central and Sheung Wan increasingly dominated by businesses and migrants from China, and The Peak an arduous journey by sedan chair, the colony’s elite turned their gaze up to the scrubby mountainside just above the city. They were escaping disease exacerbated by overcrowded living conditions, but this being the late 19th century, they were also driven by prejudice towards the Chinese.

“The natural growth and prosperity of the European Community, and the then unchecked invasion of the centre of the city by the Chinese, gradually constrained the few who could afford it to seek quiet and comfort on the higher levels,” reported the Hong Kong Telegraph in 1889.

“Every year saw the select little colony of ‘mansions in the skies’ growing larger, and house property increasing in value.”

A walk up the Central Mid-Levels Escalator and west along Caine Road takes you through the heart of the old Mid-Levels. On the way up the hill, you will pass by the site of one of the earliest buildings in the Mid-Levels was Rose Hill, built near Caine Road and Old Bailey Street in 1849 by Warren Delano, an old-money American, opium smuggler and the grandfather of future US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.