Victoria Harbour Reclamation

Anyone walking the footbridges from Central Ferry Pier in Hong Kong will inevitably see all kinds of people looking out across towards Wan Chai:


It's a diverse crowd, from older Western married couple tourists, to hunched-back Chinese men walking with hands folded behind their lower backs, to the occasional si laai (Cantonese for your typical middle-aged mahjong playing dim-sum eating dyed-hair overly made-up face Hong Kong woman), and me.

We're watching reclamation - the impressive engineering and constructive feat of creating land where there once was ocean.



The plan is to make a harbourfront promenade along with a park. This is one of the rare times that reclamation has been for the purpose of public spaces, although this isn't too much a stretch of the imagination since public spaces are amazingly plentiful and pristinely well maintained in Hong Kong. This is the area of the harbour to be filled (from cranes on the left to cranes on the right):

photo courtesy Wikipedia

The square-shaped section on the left is what you see in my above photo showing the dirt and the major operation going on. From my occasional trips to Central I've seen that it's taken months just to fill in land the small size of a basketball court.

As impressive as it is, reclamation projects in Hong Kong are obvious examples of the governments collusion with big business, especially real estate. The harbour is shrinking in Hong Kong, leading to a more congested harbour, a disruption of the natural ecology certain sea critters rely on, more air pollution, more congestion for the plethora of boats coming and going through, and stronger waves that make it treacherous for the little boats that can amaze anyone to see how these guys can manage to stay on something that rocks 45 degrees forward and 45 degrees backward.

My parents have often noted how it used to be impossible to see the cars' headlights across the harbour back in their day. And when you go up Victoria Peak for its world renowned view, Victoria Harbour actually looks more like a river cutting through an intensely dense urban city than it does a harbour.

photo courtesy Dean Adachi