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This area covers Hong Kong and traces how colonial governance and defense shaped early urban growth, with Admiralty marking the shift from garrison grounds to administrative and transport corridors.
In the early 20th century, port commerce expanded with reclamation around Victoria Harbour, extending market towns into new streets and drawing shipyards, ferry routes, and depots into a continuous waterfront. By the mid-20th century, wartime disruption and postwar migration drove rapid housing construction and factory zones across Kowloon, building dense districts organized around markets, schools, and civic facilities. In the late 20th century, finance, retail, and tourism consolidated Central and Tsim Sha Tsui skylines as older barracks, customs compounds, and piers were reused or redeveloped, and museums reframed colonial-era buildings as public venues. In recent decades, transport expansion and planning have turned former industrial and airport lands into mixed-use clusters, exemplified by AIRSIDE at Kai Tak as the city shifted toward integrated commercial and residential hubs.
At Man's Ancestral Hall in Yuen Long, Wen clan leaders organized meetings in 1898 to coordinate resistance to the British takeover and negotiated with colonial officials to safeguard villagers’ land rights. During the 1941 Japanese occupation, the hall stored clan records and artifacts to prevent loss.
Murray House was dismantled in 1982 to clear the Central site for the Bank of China Tower, with over 3,000 granite blocks labeled and stored. Reassembled in Stanley in 1998–1999, the building later housed the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and commercial venues.
At the Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence, the East River Column’s Hong Kong–Kowloon Independent Battalion is documented for its 1941–45 sabotage and rescues through recovered weapons, uniforms, and testimonies. The exhibit preserves the unit’s field records for public study from the former Lei Yue Mun Fort site.
At Yau Ma Tei Tin Hau Temple, community leaders under the Yau Ma Tei Five Districts Association decided in 1876 to relocate the 1865 waterfront shrine inland as reclamation advanced, completing a larger complex in 1878. The expanded site added arbitration and educational functions to serve a growing mixed settlement.
Kat Hing Wai
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