Appetite for Survival

Tracing hunger and sustenance through street names

Hong Kong dazzles today as a hyper-dense culinary playground defined by pluralism: mid-century dai pai dongs slick with wok hei, steam-filled dim sum halls, and sky-high dining rooms. Yet beneath this effortless veneer lies a landscape born of sheer panic. Long before acquiring its glossy reputation for gastronomic indulgence, it was a frontier of survival shaped by the reality of moving calories across markets, processing hubs, and corporate empires. Beneath the modern surface, a network of street names preserves this history: a century‑long record of provisioning, regulation, and improvisation. This opens a three‑part series tracing Hong Kong’s relationship with food through its street names, revealing how the city’s edible past remains inscribed directly into its map.

The Baseline Economy

The Catch

Hong Kong’s first true food story began at sea, mapped by the boat‑dwelling Tanka and Hoklo communities. On a regional level, coastal markers like Tsing Yi 青衣 (“Black Tuskfish”), Lung Ha Wan 龍蝦灣 (“Lobster Bay”), and Yau Yue Wan 魷魚灣 (“Squid Bay”) mapped marine biodiversity straight onto the shoreline. Locally, when Aberdeen’s Shek Pai Wan was urbanised in the late 1960s, planners mirrored this heritage with a cluster of “Yue 漁” lanes such as Yue Fung Street 漁豐街 ("Abundant Fishing Street"), Yue Lei Street 漁利街 ("Profitable Fishing Street"), and Yue Wok Street 漁獲街 ("Fish Catch Street").

Shore of Yau Ma Tei in 1880 (source: wiki)

Beyond the catch itself, the map preserves the gritty logistics of extraction. Yau Ma Tei 油麻地, now a dense urban area, was once a coastal village defined by net maintenance. In the pre-nylon era, deep-sea nets were woven from heavy hemp twine (Ma 麻) and waterproofed with viscous tung oil (Yau 油) to stave off rot. The ritual of drying, mending, and sap-sealing these nets fostered a highly specialised trade that permanently stamped the district’s identity long after the water retreated.

Sok Kwu Wan 索罟灣 on Lamma Island offers an equally literal archive: Sok 索 denoting heavy mooring ropes, and Kwu 罟 referring to the nets themselves. Further along the coast, Mong Yue Kok (望魚角, “Watch Fish Corner”) and Cha Yue Pai (炸魚排, “Bomb Fish Raft”) memorialise cliffside lookouts and blast fishing, a highly efficient, if ecologically ruinous, extraction method now outlawed.

While the coastlines were mapped by the tides of the Tanka and Hoklo, inland Hong Kong developed its own commercial geography. If the sea provided immediate sustenance, the fertile plains required a different kind of rhythm to distribute their yields.

Markets of Emptiness

The Chinese character hui (墟), conceptually interchangeable with emptiness (虛), carried a distinct temporal meaning. As the Qing-era text Guangdong Xinyu dryly observed:

"In Guangdong, a rural market is called hui. When people gather, it is full; when they disperse, it is empty. Fullness is rare, emptiness is common—hence the name."
「粵謂野市曰虛。市之所在，有人則滿，無人則虛。滿時少，虛時多，故曰虛也，虛即廛也。」

Yuen Long Old Market, founded in 1669, once served as the district’s primary trading centre (source: Hulu HK)

In the fertile plains of today’s Yuen Long, Sheung Shui, Fanling, Tai Po, indigenous clans established these nodes to trade surpluses. As far back as 1688, there were three of these markets recognised in the official records and by 1819, hubs like Yuen Long Hui (圓蓢墟) and Shek Wu Hui (石湖墟) had become vital engines of exchange.

The ghost of this rhythm survives in Yuen Long Old Market. Founded by the Tang clan in the Ming dynasty, it clustered around Cheong Shing Street 長盛街 (“Long Prosperity Street”), Lei Yik Street 利益街 (“Profits Street”), and Wine Street 酒街. By the 19th century, over a hundred inns, wine houses, and grain firms crowded this grid. Though Yuen Long San Hui (New Market) rose in 1915 and mid‑century urbanisation erased the old stalls, the optimism of its street names endures.

Salt and Empire

Mastering the haul from the fields and the sea was only half the battle. Preserving it in a punishing subtropical climate demanded Hong Kong’s oldest state‑controlled enterprise: salt. For over two millennia, the salt trade was heavily taxed and regulated across Imperial China, where the court managed the coastline through vast government pans, treating the condiment as a vital form of fiscal currency.

Salt worker in Tai O (source: Industrial History HK)

The imperial presence still lingers in the map. Kwun Tong (觀塘, originally 官塘 “Official Pond”) operated during the Northern Song as Guanfu Chang (官富場, “Official Government Wealth Field”), one of the earliest recorded toponyms on Kowloon Bay. Further traces of the industry remain scattered along the shoreline, from Yim Tin Tsai 鹽田仔 (“Small Salt Pan”) in Tai Po to Yim Liu Ha 鹽寮下 (“Below the Salt Depot”) in Sha Tau Kok, quiet markers of an economy once tightly bound to imperial regulation.

However, these were not peaceful agrarian outposts. As salt was effectively liquid tender, the high margins of the black market bred fierce resistance against dynastic authority. In 1197, under the Southern Song dynasty, that tension erupted in Tai O. When Lantau’s independent salt-makers defied the imperial monopoly, clashes between imperial enforcers and local producers ended in the massacre of more than 300 salt workers.

When the British established the Crown Colony, they quickly recognised salt’s fiscal potential. In 1844, the colonial government introduced a salt tax, extending a long tradition of state control over the commodity. Deeply unpopular, the levy was abolished in 1858, yet its brief existence highlighted how salt remained tied to governance, revenue, and regulation across different regimes.

Olfactory Cleansing

Salt gave Cantonese cuisine one of its defining flavours: ham yu (鹹魚, salted fish). Once the humble fuel of the working poor, captured in the idiom “eat salted fish, endure the thirst” (食得鹹魚抵得渴), its savory depth nonetheless crossed class lines, stretching a coolie’s rice bowl or elevating banquet dishes.

Fishermen traded their catch along the Sai Ying Pun beachfront (now Des Voeux Road West); by 1858, the district claimed nearly 60% of the colony’s 88 fish stalls. This informal shoreline trade soon institutionalised into a permanent marketplace of 39 shopfronts officially christened Ham Yu Street 咸魚街 (‘Salted Fish Street’). Late-1880s reclamation pushed the coastline north, landlocking the trade. By 1894, a colonial administration grappling with the bubonic plague declared these brine-soaked workshops an intolerable biohazard, demolishing the original alley entirely.

Yet its memory endured through a cynical exercise in linguistic gymnastics. When the site was redeveloped, the streets were renamed Mui Fong (梅芳街, “Plum Fragrance”) and Kwai Heung (桂香街, “Osmanthus Fragrance”). This linguistic pivot substituted floral homophones to mask the unappetising reality of the mui heung (霉香, "mold-fragrant") fish cure, cloaking a pungent industrial heritage in high-minded poetry. A humble Ham Yu Street 咸魚街 still survives nearby, anchoring the sensory and economic reality of the trade in Sai Ying Pun.

The Colonial Shift

Blockades and Betrayals

The Port of Canton in 1830s (source: wiki)

Hong Kong’s early food supply was shaped by the operating logic of the Canton System, under which Western merchants obtained provisions through officially appointed Chinese compradors who controlled access to supplies, labour, and credit. This created a single, highly regulated channel for essentials, and during periods of tension Guangdong officials could suspend these intermediaries, effectively halting the flow of provisions. The most consequential instance came in 1839, when Commissioner Lin Zexu imposed a blockade that cut off supplies to Macau and pushed British merchants and troops back onto their ships. With official channels closed, the British fleet remained in the Pearl River Delta dependent on informal local networks willing to trade outside the sanctioned system.

Despite the Qing government’s threat of execution as “traitors” (漢奸), fishermen and boatmen from the Xin’an and Dongguan districts continued supplying the British fleet, drawing on long‑standing maritime trading networks and the mobility of life on the water. Selling directly from bumboats and sampans, they turned anchorages at Victoria Harbour, Tung Kwu (Lung Kwu Chau 龍鼓洲), and Kap Shui Mun (汲水門) into a vast “floating marketplace,” described by contemporary Western newspapers as a chaotic “floating Wapping.” As many as 2,000 boats were said to be involved. Some traders pushed closer to shore, erecting temporary matsheds on nearby beaches — early forerunners of Hong Kong’s landward bazaars. Tsim Sha Tsui emerged as a key node funnelling vegetables from the mainland, while the range of supplies broadened from flour, biscuits, and cakes to fresh fish, poultry, and greens. Wealthier operators dealt in cattle, often bartering livestock for Bengal opium rather than cash.

The missionary Karl Gützlaff recorded hawkers doing brisk business in “a large quantity of pigs, ducks and fowls.” His name now survives in Gützlaff Street (吉士笠街) in Central: a narrow, steep lane beside Graham Street Market, one of Hong Kong’s last remaining open‑air wet markets, where the rhythms of provisioning still echo the city’s earliest food economy.

Graham Street market, one of the last standing open air markets in Hong Kong (source: HK Tourism Board)

Zoning the Chaos

With Britain’s official 1841 occupation of Hong Kong and the rapid construction of Queen’s Road, the food supply finally came ashore. Traders poured in from the Pearl River Delta: rural migrants, boat people moving inland, and impoverished villagers drawn to the energy of the new entrepôt. Within months, some 600 hawkers were recorded crowding Queen’s Road, pressing against the verandas of European merchant houses and alarming officials who saw only disorder, filth, and disease.

Determined to impose structure, the colonial administration carved the Chinese population into designated Bazaars. The Upper and Middle Bazaars clustered just off Queen’s Road, deliberately buffered from the European quarter, while the Lower Bazaar to the west grew into what is now Sheung Wan. Yet even with these spatial partitions, the density of hawkers, livestock, and open-air butchering along the main thoroughfares continued to overwhelm the fledgling town. The government responded with a familiar carrot‑and‑stick strategy: street hawking bans on one hand, and the construction of regulated public markets on the other, intended to absorb the displaced peddlers.

Check out the 1842 Plan of Hong Kong on HK Maps to see where this is in present day (source: UK National Archive)

At the centre of this new system stood Central Market, opened in 1842. Its location was no accident. Built on Marine Lot No. 16, reserved at the very first land sale in 1841 specifically for a government market, it sat between Queen’s Road and the shoreline, precisely at the hinge between the Upper and Lower Bazaars. The market was shown as a compact, walled rectangle with its long side facing the Praya, positioned to intercept both land traffic from Queen’s Road and boat traffic from the harbour. This was the colony’s first purpose‑built attempt to pull the provisioning trade off the water and into a regulated, taxable space.

Once Central Market proved the model, others followed quickly. Eastern Market opened in 1844 near present‑day Arsenal Street, and Western Market in 1858. Each extended the same logic: confining the messy, essential business of fish, vegetables, and butchered meats within clean colonial walls, and in doing so, reshaping the everyday geography of Chinese life in the new colony.

Oligarchs of Flesh

In 1844, the administration escalated its segregation policies, clearing the ad‑hoc Middle Bazaar entirely and forcing the Chinese population uphill into a newly designated district: Taipingshan. To operationalise municipal markets in this expanding settlement without drawing on public funds, Governor John Davis introduced the “market farming” system, auctioning exclusive operating and taxing rights to the highest bidder. This privatisation policy inadvertently created a new class of ultra‑wealthy Chinese food oligarchs.

1869 photo showing Man Mo Temple (source: Gwulo)

Among the first to capitalise was Loo Aqui 盧亞貴, a Tanka man who had risen through the ranks of piracy and smuggling. Having provisioned British forces during the war in open defiance of Qing prohibitions, he was rewarded with prime land at the Lower Bazaar. Kwai Wah Lane 貴華里 in Sheung Wan still bears his alias. From this foothold, he built a property empire funded by gambling dens, brothels, and Aqui’s Theatre, which staged Hong Kong’s first amateur dramatic production in 1845. By the late 1840s, he co‑founded Man Mo Temple. Yet his fortune proved fragile: fires, speculative losses, and collapsing rents left him bankrupt by 1855.

Securing live cattle from the mainland was a volatile, high‑stakes trade that naturally attracted men of flexible morals. The figure who dominated this pipeline until the 1870s was Kwok Acheong 郭甘章/郭亞祥/郭松, nicknamed Ngau Lan Atsung 牛欄阿松 (“Cattle Market Atsung”). Like Loo Aqui, Kwok was a Tanka man who parlayed wartime British provisioning into immense legitimacy. By 1845, he had joined the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company as comprador, bridging Chinese networks and British capital. By the 1860s, he ran a shipping empire that made him the single largest individual ratepayer in the colony, paying more in taxes than any British merchant house. His empire left marks on the city’s map: Fat Hing Street 發興街 bore the name of his company, while A Chung Lane 郭松街 has since vanished.

1901 plan of Victoria showing the three streets named after Loo Aqui and Kwok Acheong (source: HK Maps)

Sanitising the Grid

Tenement Stables

While tycoons like Kwok Acheong amassed fortunes commanding the cattle pipeline from the safety of shipping offices, the physical reality of that livestock on land triggered an immediate urban crisis. As meat and dairy could not be stored, livestock had to remain alive until the very moment of slaughter. Hauling cattle up Hong Kong’s steep hillsides daily was a logistical nightmare, so traders simply dragged the animals into the tenements.

Early tenement architecture made this urban cohabitation deeply perilous. Built back‑to‑back without lightwells to maximise every square inch of rent, the ground floors doubled as urban barns where cows and pigs stood tethered in pitch darkness. Thin wooden boards separated these steaming stables from the cramped cubicles above, which were rented out to exhausted labourers. Long before modern architects touted "vertical mixed-use design," Taipingshan had perfected it, albeit with catastrophic sanitary results.

A view of the Chinese tenements in the city of Victoria, 1870s and drawings showing typical configurations of Chinese tenements in Taipinghshan, 1882 (source: academia.edu)

This chaotic overlap was etched into Pound Lane 磅巷, named for the Government Pound that impounded stray livestock. Human-animal proximity created the perfect vector for the 1894 bubonic plague, which ravaged Taipingshan, killing thousands. In panic, authorities demolished slums and rewrote zoning laws to sever habitation from husbandry. Livestock trading was exiled to Kennedy Town, with centralised slaughterhouses at Smithfield 士美菲路, named after London’s famous meat market.

Linguistic Purges

This desire to scrub the city of its messy history extended from physical architecture to the map itself. As public markets multiplied across the territory, adjoining lanes were pragmatically christened "Market Street" (街市街). This literalism suited a small settlement, but by the early 20th century, a dozen identical “Market Streets” across Hong Kong created administrative headaches for postal deliveries, police patrols, and tax registries. For a bureaucracy built on British precision, duplication was a form of disorder, prompting a systematic cartographic purge.

In Sheung Wan, the original Market Street wound through Tai Ping Shan. Its problem was duplication compounded by infamy: it had become the epicentre of the 1894 bubonic plague. After the government resumed, demolished, and sanitised the tenements, the street was reborn in 1909 as Po Hing Fong 普慶坊 (“Terrace of Universal Celebration”), cloaking mass mortality in forced optimism. Across the harbour, Hung Hom’s Market Street served working‑class families tied to Whampoa Dockyards; in 1909, it was renamed Wuhu Street 蕪湖街, replacing market identities with mainland Chinese cities.

Western Market in 1930s (source: HT@Flickr)

Today, only the Market Streets of Yau Ma Tei and Tsuen Wan escaped this purge. They endure as linguistic fossils, reminders of an era when the wet market was the nucleus around which urban geography crystallised.

Western Market tells a different story. One of Hong Kong’s oldest surviving civic buildings — first erected in 1844 and rebuilt in Edwardian red‑brick in 1906 — it now fronts New Market Street 新街市街, a name introduced when the government extended the market northward onto newly reclaimed land. The irony is hard to miss: a heritage landmark tied to a street christened “new” over a century ago, its name preserving the moment when colonial administrators shifted the market’s footprint even as the older structure endured.

The Agrarian Footprint

Monetise the Marshland

Before it became one of the densest urban districts on Earth, modern Mong Kok was a coastal marshland. Its original name, Mang Kok (芒角), literally meant "Corner of Fern-Gorse". When British colonial administration expanded onto the Kowloon Peninsula, this brushland was transformed into a sprawling network of market gardens.

To feed a growing population, Chinese farmers cleared the wild terrain and meticulously reshaped the swamps into highly productive agricultural plots. They engineered the land to suit the precise hydrological needs of traditional greens. Decades later, when the government paved over the area, this agricultural layout dictated the urban grid. The rectangular geometry of the old water plots provided a ready-made template for developers, permanently locking the footprint of Hong Kong’s densest modern streets to the dimensions of mid-century vegetable fields.

Kowloon looking towards Kowloon City in 1870 (source: wiki)

This green history is hidden in plain sight within Mong Kok's street names. Sai Yeung Choi Street (西洋菜街) marks where flooded fields once grew watercress, a European herb introduced through Macau that became a staple of Cantonese soups. Running parallel is Tung Choi Street (通菜街), named after the adjacent summer fields of water spinach (morning glory), a hollow-stemmed crop.

As both vegetables required intensive irrigation, the farmers' stagnant, heavily watered plots became breeding grounds for mosquitoes. As residential neighborhoods crept closer, the pooling water triggered severe public health complaints and local resentment. Ultimately, the colonial government evicted the growers to more rural districts, replacing the buzzing, muddy marshlands with the concrete high-rises that define Mong Kok today.

Botanical Anachronisms

Hoi Shum Island in the 1840s, now reclaimed (source: wiki)

Further east, To Kwa Wan (土瓜灣) connects an imperial escape with the region's ancient geography. Local legend dates the name to 1277, when villagers offered crops to the fleeing Southern Song Emperor Duanzong. While folklore claims they fed him sweet potatoes, this is a botanical impossibility—the South American tuber wouldn't arrive in China for centuries. Instead, the moniker honors the to kwa (土瓜), a native greater yam that farmers cultivated across the local plains.

This agricultural landmark was mirrored just offshore. Early records suggest the bay actually took its name from To Kwa Wan Island, a small, melon-shaped outcrop crowned by the historic Hoi Sham Temple and its famous Fish Tail Rock. To early residents, the rocky formation looked exactly like the yams pulled from the nearby soil, binding the land and the sea under a single name.

Whether the name originally praised the crop or the crag, it anchors a vanished world. Today, the ancient coastline and the island itself have been completely erased, swallowed up by decades of industrial land reclamation.

Organised Self-Reliance

After 1949, a massive influx of refugees forced Hong Kong to confront a looming hunger crisis. As hundreds of thousands of people crossed the border and swelled into Kowloon’s squatter settlements, food supplies wore dangerously thin. The colony’s survival depended on rapidly turning the rugged New Territories into productive farmland.

Stepping into the gap was the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association (KAAA), founded in 1951 by Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie—tycoons better known today for luxury hotels and the city's electricity grid. Rejecting simple handouts, the brothers designed a model for self-reliance. Across the slopes of Tai Mo Shan and Paak Ngau Shek, they terraced steep hillsides, carved out irrigation channels, and equipped refugees with the livestock, tools, and training needed to farm.

KAAA’s scale was infrastructural. It distributed tens of thousands of pigs, cattle, and poultry; supplied seeds, fertilisers, insecticides, sprayers, and water pumps; and donated enough cement to build over 300 kilometres of rural roads, paths, wells, dams, and irrigation works. By the 1970s, the sweat and labor of these farmers supplied over half of Hong Kong’s fresh greens and a massive share of its meat. While local agriculture eventually collapsed in the late 1980s under real-estate pressure and mainland competition, the physical evidence of this self-reliance never truly vanished.

Widows being gifted cattle by Horace Kadoorie (source: HK Heritage)

Today, the Kadoorie name is most widely recognised for Kadoorie Avenue and Kadoorie Close: exclusive addresses synonymous with prestige and wealth. Yet the true monument to this history isn't found in luxury real estate. It lives in the forgotten corners of the New Territories: the abandoned pigsties, concrete footbridges, and water embankments still stamped with the KAAA insignia. They remain enduring monuments to the displaced people who engineered their own survival and fed the city during its darkest decades.

Conclusion

From the seasonal emptiness of rural markets to the hemp-and-oil trades of Yau Ma Tei, the city’s map was forged by a visceral battle for sustenance. Every major cartographic shift records this spatial friction. When the pungent reality of the salted fish trade threatened colonial sanitation, the state cloaked the odor behind the floral poetry of Mui Fong Street. When duplicated "Market Streets" jammed the bureaucratic gears of empire, officials wiped them away in favor of mainland cities. This history reveals an urban landscape built on sheer improvisation, engineered by wartime tycoons, market gardeners, and hill-terracing refugees. Whether buried under reclamation or preserved in asphalt, the baseline remains unchanged: Hong Kong's geography is dictated by its appetite.

In the Next Installment...

Securing raw food was only half the battle. As Hong Kong shifted from outpost to colony, it confronted an even more volatile challenge: water, ice, and every liquid the city depended on.