Hongkong Hotel

Hongkong Hotel 香港大酒店
The Hongkong Hotel on the Central Praya (c.1900); Jardine Matheson opposite (right)
General information
Opening	1868
Closed	1952
Owner	The Hongkong Hotel Company
Technical details
Floor count	6

...the Hong Kong Hotel, constructed after the model of large hotels in London. It has not proved to the shareholders a very profitable undertaking, being on a scale too vast for the requirements of the place. It is rented and conducted by a Chinaman, and none but Chinese cooks and waiters are employed. The management is good and the hotel comfortable. To the visitor, the large dining hall presents an animated and interesting scene, and he finds on further experience that the arrangements are perfect and the fare unexceptionable. The native waiters are remarkable no less for promptitude and politesse than for the spotless purity of their light silk or linen robes, and the fluency of their "pidgin" English in which they converse; this is however a jargon intelligible only to the residents.

The Hongkong Hotel was Hong Kong's first luxury hotel modelled after sumptuous London hotels. It opened on Queen's Road and Pedder Street in 1868, later expanding into the Victoria Harbour waterfront of Victoria City in 1893.

The original hotel stood roughly on the site of the present Central Building at Queen's Road Central and Pedder Street. It was owned by The Hongkong Hotel Company, which later became The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited, current owner of The Peninsula Hotels chain.

In the late 1880s the six-storey north wing extension was built on the waterfront, with entrances on Pedder Street, Queen's Road and Praya Central (now Des Voeux Road Central). Competing in all respects with the Peak Hotel, owned by The Star Ferry Company, the management provided a special launch to meet arriving passengers on incoming P&O mail steamers and ferry them direct to the hotel's pier.

A shop of Kuhn & Komor was located on the ground floor of the hotel, along Queen's Road.