For about the price of a convenience-store soft drink, you can still cross Victoria Harbour the way Hong Kongers have been crossing it for 137 years. The Star Ferry (天星小輪) is one of the few things in Hong Kong that time has refused to update. Wooden-slat seats that flip back and forth so passengers always face forward. Green-and-white hulls painted the same colours since the 1920s. Deckhands lassoing ropes around bollards with the same wrist-flick their grandfathers used. If you only ride one piece of public transport in Hong Kong, make it this one.
The Star Ferry is older than every modern Hong Kong institution it serves. Older than the MTR. Older than Hong Kong Tramways. Older than the colony's airport. Founded in 1888 by a Parsee merchant who sold milk by day and ran a passenger launch by night, it has survived two world wars, a Japanese occupation, the 1966 Hong Kong riots, a cross-harbour tunnel, and the opening of a 55-kilometre bridge to Macau. And it still runs.
The Parsee milkman who started it
In the 1870s, Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala arrived in Hong Kong from Bombay. He opened a bakery, sold milk, and ran a boarding house. Then in 1888 he launched a passenger ferry company to shuttle Cantonese residents between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon — the two halves of the colony separated by Victoria Harbour. His fleet was small: four single-decker steamboats called Morning Star, Evening Star, Rising Star, and Guiding Star. Each carried about 100 passengers.
In 1898, the company was renamed the Star Ferry Company, with every vessel in the fleet carrying a "Star" name — a tradition that still holds today. The name itself was inspired by Tennyson's poem "Crossing the Bar." Over a century later, that line of poetry is still painted into Hong Kong's harbour every day. You can feel the weight of it on the top deck at sunset, with Central's towers lit up on one shore and Tsim Sha Tsui's Avenue of Stars behind you.
The ferry became, almost accidentally, the artery of Cantonese Hong Kong. For decades it was the only way for most people to cross the harbour. Office clerks from Central, dockworkers from Yau Ma Tei, schoolchildren from Mongkok, housewives from Wan Chai — everyone shared the same wooden benches. We think about this history every time we design new pieces for the Cantonese Guy best-seller collection: the Star Ferry is the kind of everyday Cantonese object that deserves to be remembered on streetwear.
The 1966 riots: when a 5-cent fare hike broke the city
In April 1966, the Star Ferry Company applied to raise its first-class fare by 5 Hong Kong cents — from 20 cents to 25. A 27-year-old named So Sau-chung staged a hunger strike at the Central pier in protest. The British colonial government arrested him. Within days, the arrest sparked some of the most severe civil unrest Hong Kong had seen since the 1950s. Mobs smashed property across Kowloon. One person died. Over 1,400 were arrested. The city was placed under curfew.
The fare increase was approved anyway, but the 1966 Hong Kong riots became a political turning point. For the first time, young Hong Kongers — many of them Cantonese immigrants or children of immigrants — had organised publicly against colonial authority. The incident helped kick off the social reforms of the 1970s. All of it over a 5-cent ferry fare. The Hong Kong Tram article covers the city's other great cheap-ride institution; between the two, you have the price-sensitive heart of working-class Cantonese Hong Kong.
The piers that moved three times
The Star Ferry has outlived most of its own piers. The original Central pier was built in 1898. It was replaced in 1912, again in 1957, and demolished amid controversy in 2006 when a new reclamation project pushed the pier farther from the city centre. The 1957 Edinburgh Place Ferry Pier with its clock tower was a beloved Hong Kong landmark; thousands protested its demolition. The protests failed, but they marked the beginning of modern Hong Kong's heritage preservation movement.
On the Kowloon side, the Tsim Sha Tsui pier sits at the base of the old Kowloon-Canton Railway Clock Tower — the only surviving fragment of the historic 1915 railway terminus. Together with the clock tower, the pier forms one of the most photographed waterfront scenes in Asia. If you've ever caught a sunset there, you understand why Hong Kong's identity is tangled up with the harbour crossing itself.
⭐ The names of the stars
Every vessel in the Star Ferry fleet is a Star. The oldest in service, Celestial Star, was built in 1956. Meridian Star followed in 1958. Over the decades the fleet has included Morning Star, Evening Star, Shining Star, Twinkling Star, Day Star, Night Star, Northern Star, Southern Star, and the beloved Golden Star. Each ferry is powered by a diesel-electric drive — a 1930s technology that was once cutting edge and is now almost nostalgic.
What a ride costs today
The Central-Tsim Sha Tsui route is still one of the cheapest commutes in any major world city. Lower-deck weekday fares sit at HK$4 (about US$0.50); upper-deck weekend fares peak at HK$6.50. The ferry carries over 70,000 passengers a day — around 26 million a year — many of them tourists now, but a surprising number of Cantonese commuters who still prefer the open-air crossing to the MTR tunnel. There's something almost defiantly Cantonese about choosing the slower, cheaper, more beautiful route home.
If you want to feel like a local on the ferry, dress like one. A CANTONESE GUY hat and a bowl of wonton noodles waiting on the Kowloon side is basically the standard-issue Hong Kong Saturday afternoon.
Why the Star Ferry still matters
In an era of 55-kilometre bridges and underwater MTR tunnels, the Star Ferry is deliberately slow. The crossing takes about eight minutes. It is loud with harbour wind and seagulls. The engines growl. Water sprays onto the lower deck. Ferries bump the dock with a thump you feel in your knees. This is Cantonese Hong Kong at its most honest — not polished, not fast, just working, generation after generation.
For the global Cantonese diaspora, the Star Ferry is a shortcut to memory. Many of us remember being carried across the harbour by a parent or grandparent, pointing at the lit-up buildings of Central, dropping a coin into the turnstile. Those memories don't come back when you take the tunnel. They come back only when you smell diesel, hear the horn, and feel the water move under your feet. That's why we built pieces like the 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized tee — Hong Kong identity isn't a slogan, it's a crossing you take every weekend.
How to ride it right
Catch the ferry at Central Pier 7 or Wan Chai Pier on the Hong Kong Island side. Go to the Tsim Sha Tsui pier on the Kowloon side. Pay with Octopus or cash. Pick the upper deck — more windows, better light, better views of both skylines. Ride it at sunset if you can; the Hong Kong skyline turning pink and the glass towers of Central reflecting against the water is one of the great free scenes in Asia. Walk the pier afterwards. Grab milk tea. Walk home.
That is the entire ritual. It's been the same since 1898. Long may it stay that way.
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