Hong Kong and Macau_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 14th Edition) - Andrew Stone [55]
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KOWLOON
Islandsiders might sniffily remark that the best experience you can have in Kowloon is to turn your back on it and look back towards Hong Kong Island’s startling skyline. While there is a sense that Central’s busy but scruffier neighbour is forever gazing enviously across the water at it (and, yes, those Island views are amazing), Kowloon has a great deal to offer.
This thriving, rumbustious area contains some of Hong Kong’s best museums, sights, hotels and shopping. It is also where you start to leave behind sleek commercialism for a more absorbing and human-scale neighbourhood life of markets, temples, traditional shopping streets and crumbling tenement blocks.
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top picks
KOWLOON
Star Ferry (Click here)
Symphony of the Stars lightshow ( Click here)
Former Maritime Police Headquarters ( Click here)
Tsim Sha Tsui East Promenade ( Click here)
Hong Kong Museum of Art (below)
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Kowloon proper, the area ceded ‘in perpetuity’ to Britain by the Convention of Peking in 1860, extends north from the waterfront as far as Boundary St in Mong Kok. It covers about 12 sq km, but land reclamation and encroachment into the New Territories – the so-called New Kowloon – over the past 150-odd years has more than quadrupled its size.
Kowloon’s most important area, Tsim Sha Tsui, has none of the slickness or sophistication of Hong Kong Island’s Central, except within the confines of its top-end hotels. ‘Tsimsy’ is a riot of commerce and tourism.
While Kowloon’s architecture has traditionally been less exciting than Hong Kong Island’s, things are changing fast as the skyline creeps ever higher. The waterfront Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui was a stab at turning Hong Kong into something more than a territory obsessed with wealth (although the resultant building is hardly a triumph). The Peninsula Hotel is housed in one of Hong Kong’s greatest colonial buildings and, at night, the promenade running east and northeast along Victoria Harbour from Star Ferry pier offers a technicolour backdrop of Central and Wan Chai.
There are some green spaces as well, including Kowloon Park with its aviary, pool and sculpture garden.
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TSIM SHA TSUI
Shopping Click here; Eating Click here; Drinking Click here; The Arts Click here; Sleeping Click here
Tsim Sha Tsui ( Map; roughly pronounced ‘j’ìm-s’àa-j’éui’ and meaning ‘Sharp Sandy Point’) is Hong Kong’s tourist ghetto. It is packed with hotels and inexpensive guesthouses, and the dining and drinking options are plentiful, if not as glittering as the ones across the water.
Tsim Sha Tsui is also a shopping destin-ation. Clothing and shoe shops, restaurants, camera and electronics stores, and hotels are crammed into an area not much bigger than 1 sq km. Around Ashley, Hankow and Lock Rds is a warren of shops, restaurants and bars. Nightlife areas include Knutsford Tce and Minden Ave. Wandering these teeming, neon-blazing streets at night offers a unique buzz you just don’t seem to get on Hong Kong Island.
The hotel and shopping district of Tsim Sha Tsui (‘Tsimsy’ or just ‘TST’ to locals) lies at the very tip of the Kowloon Peninsula to the south of Austin Rd. (The area between Austin and Jordan Rds is usually called Jordan by Hong Kong residents, but it can still be considered Tsim Sha Tsui here.) Chatham Rd South separates it from the hotels and shops of Tsim Sha Tsui East and the transport hub of Hung Hom.
Tsim Sha Tsui’s western and southern boundaries – Victoria Harbour – are lined with top-end hotels, shopping centres as well as cultural venues.
HONG KONG MUSEUM OF ART Map
2721 0116; www.lcsd.gov.hk/hkma; 10 Salisbury Rd; adult/concession $10/5, admission free Wed; 10am-6pm Fri-Wed, 10am-8pm Sat; Star Ferry
Southeast of the Hong Kong Cultural