Holidays in Hong Kong

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Hong Kong

Eighteen Minutes That Ended a Colony

The handover ceremony that ended one hundred and fifty-six years of British rule over Hong Kong was choreographed down to the second. Proceedings at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre formally began at 23:42 on 30 June 1997, when Prince Charles read a farewell message on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II. At precisely 23:59, as the last minute of British sovereignty ticked away, the Union Flag and the Hong Kong colonial flag were slowly lowered together to the strains of "God Save the Queen." Eighteen minutes had passed since the ceremony's formal opening.

At the stroke of midnight, 00:00 on 1 July 1997, the flags of the People's Republic of China and the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region rose in their place, and President Jiang Zemin formally declared Chinese sovereignty restored over territory Britain had first seized in 1841 during the First Opium War and later secured, in the case of the New Territories, through a ninety-nine-year lease signed in 1898 that had simply run its course. More than eight hundred journalists from fifty-seven countries covered the ceremony live, and the event carried with it a specific, self-imposed deadline of its own: under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong's distinct social and economic systems were guaranteed to remain unchanged for fifty years from that midnight, a promise now known simply by the year it is due to expire, 2047.

A Punishment That Became a Landmark

Every day at noon, without exception, an employee of the trading firm Jardine Matheson fires a small cannon overlooking Causeway Bay, a ritual local tradition traces back to an incident in the 1860s. At the time, Jardine's private militia customarily fired a gun salute whenever the company's most senior executive, known locally as the taipan, arrived in Hong Kong by sea, an honour normally reserved for admirals and governors. According to the story passed down since, a senior British naval officer, newly posted to the colony and unaware of the informal custom, took serious offence at a merchant company appropriating a military honour, and as a penalty ordered Jardine Matheson to fire the same gun every single day at noon, in perpetuity, for the rest of time.

Whatever the truth behind the legend, the daily ritual stuck. Japanese occupying forces dismantled the original gun during the Second World War, and it was not until 1 July 1947, with a replacement gun supplied by the Royal Navy, that the tradition resumed. In 1961, complaints about noise led to a further swap, this time for a quieter three-pound Hotchkiss gun that had itself previously seen action during the First World War's Battle of Jutland. The gun still fires once each day at noon, and once more, a minute before midnight, every New Year's Eve, marking the passage of a single minute that has, by tradition if not by law, been treated as legally significant in Hong Kong for well over a century and a half.

A Century and a Half on the Same Crossing

Before any ferry service existed, people crossing Victoria Harbour between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon relied on individually owned sampans rowed across the water by hand. That changed in 1888, when a Parsee merchant named Dorabjee Naorojee Mithaiwala founded the Kowloon Ferry Company, buying up the harbour's small fleet of steam launches; a decade later, in 1898, new owner Sir Catchick Paul Chater renamed the growing operation Star Ferry, giving each vessel a name ending in the word "Star," a naming convention the company has kept for every ship it has ever run since.

The ferry has now carried passengers across the same short stretch of water for well over a century, surviving the Japanese occupation, during which several of its vessels were damaged or requisitioned, and continuing to operate even after road tunnels and a subway line opened faster, drier alternatives across the harbour from the 1970s onward. Its role in Hong Kong's civic life has occasionally gone beyond simple transport: a 1966 fare increase of just five cents sparked what became known as the Star Ferry Riots, one of the territory's earliest large-scale outbreaks of public unrest, born from a dispute over a single coin's worth of change on a crossing that, more than a century later, still runs on essentially the same short timetable it always has.

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