Hong Kong
A vertical city of harbor, hills, and high finance
Hong Kong squeezes some seven and a half million people onto a few hundred square kilometers of mountainous coast, making it one of the most vertical and densely built places on Earth. A global financial center where East meets West, it is a city of dazzling harbor views, dim sum and double-decker trams, frantic markets and forested hills, all crowded between the sea and the steep slopes of the New Territories. Its skyline at night, lit across Victoria Harbour, is among the most famous on the planet.
The territory comprises Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon peninsula, and the larger, greener New Territories, plus more than two hundred outlying islands, fronting the Pearl River estuary and the South China Sea. Steep terrain forces development upward and onto reclaimed land along the harbor, leaving roughly three-quarters of the land as country parks and hills, with Victoria Peak rising sharply above the financial district. The deep, sheltered harbor was always the territory's great asset.
A scattering of fishing and farming villages until Britain took the island in 1842 after the First Opium War, Hong Kong grew into a thriving entrepot and, after the Second World War, a manufacturing and then financial powerhouse. Britain returned it to China in 1997 under a one country, two systems arrangement that preserved its own legal and economic order, though that autonomy has narrowed in recent years. It remains a major banking center, deepwater port, and gateway between mainland China and the world.