If you have ever stood on Des Voeux Road in Central at rush hour, you have heard it before you have seen it. A soft, metallic ding — ding. A double-decker tram, painted a slightly weathered green and plastered in advertising, grinds past at 11 kilometres per hour. People get on, people get off, the fare is HK$3 regardless of distance, and the whole thing has been happening — more or less unchanged — since 30 July 1904.
The Hong Kong tram is older than the MTR, older than the Star Ferry's current fleet, older than most of the buildings it passes. In a city that demolishes everything, somehow the slowest thing on wheels has survived.
A 1904 British colonial idea that refused to die
The tram system opened on 30 July 1904 with 26 single-deck wooden tramcars running along the north shore of Hong Kong Island. The British colonial government had planned a railway along the harbour-front for the thriving Victoria City; the operator, Hongkong Tramway Electric Company Limited, opted for an electric tram because the terrain was flat and the population dense.
Double-deckers followed in 1912. The upper deck started as open-top. In 1923 they added a canvas roof. In 1925 they finally added a permanent one. The design has evolved cosmetically but never structurally — a 2026 Hong Kong tram still looks remarkably like a 1925 one.
Why they are called 叮叮
Older Hong Kongers rarely say "tram". They say 叮叮 (ding1 ding1) — a direct onomatopoeia of the double-strike bell the driver rings to warn pedestrians, cyclists and taxis. The bell is still mechanical, still worked by a foot pedal, and still sounds exactly like it did in 1904. In a city that updated almost everything, the sound of the tram is the sound of the island.
The 叮叮 is such a deep part of Hong Kong vocabulary that children learn the word before they learn the formal 電車 (din6 ce1 — "electric vehicle"). Ask any Cantonese mum where to catch the tram and she will say "等埋叮叮" — "wait for the ding ding".
🚋 Six routes, one price, three ferry transfers
The tram runs on six routes along a 13-kilometre east-west corridor on Hong Kong Island — Shau Kei Wan on the east end to Kennedy Town on the west, plus a loop through Happy Valley. A single journey costs HK$3 for adults regardless of how far you travel, making it the cheapest form of transport in a city not generally known for cheap transport.
The world's largest fleet of double-decker trams
Hong Kong Tramways operates approximately 165 trams in daily service, and it is the only tram system in the world that uses exclusively double-deckers for its entire passenger fleet. The system carries around 150,000 passengers per weekday. For context, that is more than many European cities carry on their entire metro networks.
The trams are built in-house at the Whitty Street depot in Sai Ying Pun. The chassis are produced from scratch; the bodies are hand-finished; the interiors are fitted with wooden slat seats on some older models and plastic bench seats on newer ones. The whole process is more coachwork than car assembly — closer to how Rolls-Royce used to build bodies in the 1930s than how any 2026 vehicle is manufactured.
If you want a soft-touch nod to Hong Kong's layered street life — the kind you only really see from the top deck of a tram — the Cotton Tree Flower Shopping Bag carries one of the most iconic motifs along the tram route.
The 2015 proposal that was defeated by the whole city
In August 2015, a consultant filed a formal submission to the Hong Kong Town Planning Board proposing that the tram be scrapped on sections of Central and Admiralty, on the argument that it slowed down other traffic. The reaction was almost unanimous public outrage. Over 20,000 submissions objected. The Town Planning Board rejected the proposal in June 2017.
The lesson was clear: Hong Kongers do not just tolerate the tram, they protect it. It is one of the few civic objects — along with the Star Ferry and the red taxi — that commands universal, cross-generational loyalty. You can hate the heat, hate the humidity, hate the rent. You will not hear a Hong Konger say they hate the tram.
A moving view of a city that keeps rebuilding itself
Taking the tram across Hong Kong Island — especially the two-hour run from Shau Kei Wan to Kennedy Town — is the cheapest and best sightseeing in the city. From the top deck you look down into fruit markets, up into tenement balconies, sideways into the gold shops, back towards the Peak and forward into the glass of IFC. The street is at eye level in a way it isn't from any other vehicle.
Local writers have called the tram "Hong Kong's slowest time machine". It passes buildings that were built in the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and 2020s all in the same block. It stops at colonial-era market halls and glass towers in the same five minutes. It is the only vehicle in Hong Kong that lets you watch the city be two centuries at once.
If you grew up watching the city through those windows, the 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY Oversized T-shirt is the Cantonese shorthand for everything that view holds — a three-character answer to "where are you from?".
The ding that outlasted everything
Governments changed. The handover came and went. The Peak Tram was rebuilt twice. The Star Ferry route to Edinburgh Place was permanently closed. The red minibuses switched to electronic signs. The British double-deckers were replaced with new models. Through all of it, the tram just kept running — same gauge, same voltage, same bell.
That is the deeper point about the 叮叮. It is not a tourist attraction that happens to be a transport system. It is a transport system that happens to be a cultural object. 150,000 people a day actually use it to get to work. They use it because it is cheap, convenient, and theirs.
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