There is something about viewing Victoria Harbour from the deck of the Yacht Club in Wan Chai that makes the city feel different. From here, the skyline does not overwhelm. It does not shout for attention with its neon excess, nor does it press against you the way it does from the narrow streets of Central or the promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui. Instead, it simply exists—calm, confident, shimmering across the water like a secret only the sea can keep.
It was on one of those humid summer nights, the kind that clings to your skin and refuses to let go, that I first saw the harbour from this vantage point. I was a child then, visiting Hong Kong as I did every summer, and sometimes Christmas, a visitor to a city I had never lived in but always felt connected to. The evenings in London were quiet, measured, the sun setting over Georgian townhouses and Victorian brickwork. But here, on the deck of the Yacht Club, the world felt boundless.
From this side of the harbour, the city was a panorama of light, but not in the way it appears from Tsim Sha Tsui, where the skyline is framed like a postcard. Here, the buildings felt closer yet more distant, as though their reflections belonged to another world entirely. The breeze carried sounds from the shore—faint music from rooftop bars, the occasional horn from a passing ferry—but out on the water, they felt softened, like echoes from a past life.
What struck me most was not the skyline itself, but the way the city seemed to dissolve into the sea. The neon reds and electric blues of Causeway Bay stretched across the waves, bending and breaking with each ripple. The skyscrapers of Central were perfect and untouchable above the waterline, but beneath it, their reflections shivered with uncertainty. Even as a child, I felt that Hong Kong was a city that refused to be still.
The Yacht Club had a different rhythm from the streets I had wandered that afternoon—less hurried, more reflective. Here, time seemed to move at a different pace. I remember sitting at a table with my family, watching the harbour with the casual familiarity of those who had seen it many times before. My younger brother leaned over the railing, fascinated by the shifting lights on the water, while my parents spoke in a mixture of Cantonese and English, their voices blending with the soft clink of ice against glass.
Years later, when I found myself back at the Yacht Club, the skyline was no longer the one I had memorised as a child. Towers I once recognised had disappeared, swallowed by taller, sleeker successors. The harbour, too, seemed busier, the lights more aggressive, the city more determined to outshine its own past. There was a new order to it all—one that felt more orchestrated, more polished, as if the city had been reshaped to fit a narrative not entirely its own. Yet as I leaned against the railing, watching the neon reflections waver on the restless tide, I realised that Victoria Harbour had never been about permanence. It was a cityscape painted anew each night, a fleeting masterpiece where memory and modernity bled into each other, neither willing to surrender.14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡufge9wnT4H
