A single ticket on the Hong Kong Star Ferry costs about HK$5 on the lower deck. That's less than a bottle of water from the vending machine at the pier. For the money, you get a 10-minute crossing of Victoria Harbour on a green-and-white diesel-electric ferry that has been running the same route, more or less, since Benjamin Harrison was President of the United States. There is no better bargain in Hong Kong.
The Star Ferry is older than the Hong Kong tram, older than the MTR, older than most of the buildings it ferries you between. It has survived five changes of flag, two world wars, one Japanese occupation, a 1966 riot sparked by a fare increase of five cents, and a 2006 demolition protest that briefly stopped the government in its tracks. It is one of the three or four objects a 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY will fight you over if you call it a tourist attraction.
A Parsee merchant and a Tennyson poem
The ferry's founding story is one of the stranger ones in Hong Kong's commercial history. In 1888, a Parsee businessman named Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala — who had already made a modest fortune running a small-boat service across the harbour — bought a steam vessel from a man called Grant Smith and formally registered what he called the Kowloon Ferry Company. For the first decade, the boats carried no particularly memorable name. Then in 1898, the company was reorganised as the Star Ferry Co Ltd, with the "Star" taken from the final stanza of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1889 poem Crossing the Bar:
Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me!
Every subsequent vessel was given a star name. The first four were Morning Star, Evening Star, Rising Star and Guiding Star. The current fleet — nine diesel-electric ferries and one tug, running two cross-harbour routes — still follows the convention: Electric Star, Golden Star, Celestial Star, Meridian Star, Night Star. If you catch the right Monday morning crossing, you can ride a boat whose nameplate was handed down from an older sibling vessel scrapped a generation ago.
The five-cent riot
In April 1966, the Star Ferry Company's application to raise the first-class fare by five cents — a 25 percent increase — pushed a 27-year-old translator named So Sau-chung to the Edinburgh Place pier in Central, where he began a solo hunger strike. He was arrested on 5 April and sentenced to two months in prison the next day. The arrest sparked three nights of rioting across Kowloon that forced a curfew, left one person dead, dozens injured and more than 1,800 arrested, and permanently changed the relationship between the Hong Kong colonial government and the city it governed. The 1967 leftist disturbances followed within a year, and the slow process of post-war Hong Kong reform — in housing, policing, labour rights, and corruption — can be dated, in large part, to those five cents on a ferry.
The 2006 demolition
On 11 November 2006, the government closed the Edinburgh Place pier — the Central terminal of the Star Ferry since 1957 — and moved the service to a new pier about 300 metres further out into the reclaimed harbour. The clock tower on the old pier was due to be torn down with it. The move was framed as part of a broader waterfront redevelopment plan, and officials had assumed, as officials often do, that it would pass quietly.
It did not. Hundreds of protesters, mostly in their twenties and thirties, occupied the pier before and during the demolition. One of them chained himself to the clock tower. The protests failed to save the building — demolition began on 12 December 2006 and the clock tower itself was lifted off in one piece on 15 December — but they succeeded in rewriting Hong Kong's heritage conversation. The Queen's Pier campaign followed in 2007. The term 集體回憶 (zaap6 tai2 wui4 jik1 — "collective memory") became part of everyday Hong Kong vocabulary. And a generation of Hong Kongers who had never thought of themselves as activists discovered that they very much were, once a ferry pier was involved.
What a 10-minute crossing feels like
If you have never been on one: you walk down a ramp onto the lower deck, pay with a HK$5 coin, swing open a chest-high gate, and sit on a wooden slatted bench whose backrest flips from forward-facing to rear-facing in a single swing — because when the ferry docks at the other side, it doesn't turn around. The crew just points the whole boat the other way. The 10 minutes between piers are the quietest 10 minutes you will have in Central or Tsim Sha Tsui. The engines hum. The city skyline moves past at ferry speed. You can see the Peak if the air is clear, and the Jardine House if it isn't. If any Hong Kong experience earns the word Hea, it is this one — a 10-minute, HK$5 ritual of doing nothing, enforced by a boat.
What the Star Ferry means now
Each year the two routes still carry about 26 million passengers between Central, Wan Chai and Tsim Sha Tsui — a figure that would make any ferry company in the world sit up, and that for the Star Ferry barely registers against the volume it moved before the Cross-Harbour Tunnel opened in 1972 and the MTR opened in 1979. The company runs on a government franchise last renewed in March 2018, and fares were updated in February 2021. There is persistent discussion about subsidies and route cuts. The pier at Central has moved. The ferries themselves are smaller and newer. The green-and-white livery is the same.
What's harder to measure is what the ferry does for the city that still rides it. A Hong Konger born in Yau Ma Tei in 1962 and a Hong Konger born in Vancouver in 2005 can step onto the same bench and have — within the margins of weather and skyline — exactly the same crossing. That continuity is one of the few things in modern Hong Kong that money can't buy, chains can't replace, and gentrification can't erase. In the Cotton Tree Flower shopping bag we print our city's heritage flower on, this is the kind of heritage we're thinking about: not a monument that sits still, but a working object that keeps crossing the water.
📖 Related Articles
👉 Shop the Accessories collection
Modern streetwear for the global Cantonese community.