The Star Ferry, still doing its job since 1888

BackgroundA hunger strike, a riot, and a pier that no longer exists

The service began in 1888 as the Kowloon Ferry Company, founded by Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala, a Parsee merchant who had arrived in Hong Kong decades earlier as a stowaway and worked his way up through baking and hotel-keeping before going into shipping. His first boat, the Morning Star, mainly ferried his own workers and bread deliveries across the harbour, with other passengers paying a token fare to ride along. The company was renamed Star Ferry in 1898, and every vessel since has carried some variation of the same name — Morning Star, Meridian Star, Twinkling Star — a small naming ritual that has outlasted the British administration, the handover, and several generations of the harbour it crosses.

The ferry's most consequential day came in 1966, not during any war but over a fare increase. When Star Ferry raised its first-class fare by five cents in 1965, a 25-year-old protester began a public hunger strike outside the Central pier the following April. His arrest triggered four nights of rioting across Kowloon — buses burned, shops looted, curfews imposed, and by the time it ended more than 1,800 people had been arrested. Historians now treat the 1966 riots as an early, unmistakable sign of public frustration with colonial governance, a precursor to the larger unrest of the following year. It is a strange legacy for a ferry ride, but it means this particular eight-minute crossing sits closer to the centre of modern Hong Kong political history than almost any monument in the territory.

The more recent controversy is about the pier itself rather than the fare. The original Central terminal, a Streamline Moderne building at Edinburgh Place completed in 1957, was demolished in December 2006 to make way for a land reclamation project that pushed the harbour's edge further out and built a new pier roughly 300 metres north of the old one. Heritage campaigners occupied the site and staged their own hunger strikes trying to stop the demolition, arguing that a city already losing its harbour to reclamation, metre by metre, was now losing a genuine piece of civic architecture along with it. They lost that fight, and the ferry has run from the newer Pier 7 ever since — a small, everyday reminder of how much of Hong Kong's waterfront has been rebuilt on land that used to be water.

On boardThe boat, the routes, and the two decks

Two routes still run today: the busy, well-known Central–Tsim Sha Tsui crossing, and a quieter Wan Chai–Tsim Sha Tsui line that most visitors never bother with, which is precisely why it is worth knowing about if you want the same harbour without the queue. Both use the same green-and-white double-ended ferries, boats that can load and unload from either end without turning around, finished with the wooden bench seating that has barely changed in style for decades. Watch the crew as you dock: mooring lines are still caught by hand with a long wooden hook, a genuinely nineteenth-century piece of technique surviving inside a thoroughly modern harbour.

Each boat has two decks, and the choice between them matters more than it looks. The upper deck is air-conditioned, costs slightly more, and sits high enough to give an unobstructed view over the railings — the better choice for photographs and for anyone crossing in Hong Kong's heavy summer humidity. The lower deck is open to the air, cheaper, and rides closer to the waterline, which trades a slightly lower vantage point for a more physical sense of actually being on the harbour, spray and all. Either way the crossing takes about eight to ten minutes, is paid for with an Octopus card tap or cash at the turnstile, and costs only a few Hong Kong dollars — comfortably the least expensive great view the city has to offer.

Timing it rightWhen to ride, and which direction

Dusk is the correct answer, and both directions have a case. Heading from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui puts Hong Kong Island's tower wall behind you as it lights up; heading back the other way afterward gives you the Kowloon side of the same trick, with the island's skyline now ahead and fully lit. Doing both, as the harbour goes from daylight to night, is the single best use of a spare half hour anywhere in the city.

Time it, if you can, around 8 p.m., when Hong Kong's long-running nightly light display on the buildings along both shores is timed to run for about thirteen minutes — the harbour itself, including the ferry, is one of the best places to watch it from, with no ticket and no fixed viewing spot required. Displays are occasionally cancelled in severe weather, and the show's future format has reportedly been under review, so treat the exact schedule as worth a quick check on the day rather than a certainty. Avoid the two weekday commuter crunches, roughly 7:30 to 10 a.m. and the early evening rush, if you would rather ride with tourists and off-peak locals than a packed harbour-crossing commute — the boats run every six to eight minutes through most of the day regardless, so there is rarely a long wait either way.

Either end of the crossingWhat to pair it with

On the Kowloon side, the pier drops you directly onto the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade and the Avenue of Stars, the harbourfront walk devoted to Hong Kong's film industry, and one of the better fixed vantage points for the evening light show if you would rather stand still and watch than time a ferry crossing to it. On the island side, the current Central pier sits beside the IFC mall and tower, a ten-minute walk on elevated walkways from Central and Hong Kong MTR stations — easy to combine with a morning in Sheung Wan or an evening heading up into SoHo. Either direction, the ferry works best treated as a connector between two neighbourhoods you were already planning to see, not a there-and-back excursion on its own.