About Hong Kong Maritime Museum

Hong Kong Maritime Museum

The Hong Kong Maritime Museum is a non-profit museum of trade and maritime history at Central Pier 8, on the Central harbourfront of Hong Kong Island, overlooking Victoria Harbour. A registered charity, it is run by the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Limited Board of Directors on behalf of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Trust, and it tells the story of Hong Kong, the South China coast and the Pearl River Delta through their relationship with the sea. Its galleries show how China, Asia and the West contributed through the ages to the development of boats and ships, maritime exploration, trade and naval warfare, concentrating on the South China coast and its adjacent seas while also covering global trends. For a city whose growth was built on its port, the museum serves as a living chronicle of a community defined by the tides and by centuries of global trade.

Founding by the Shipping Community

The museum was founded in October 2003 after Anthony J. Hardy, a past chairman of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association who had spent nearly half a century with the Wallem Group, proposed setting one up to members of the association and then to the wider Hong Kong shipping community. Hardy argued that it was a glaring omission for Hong Kong, whose success was built on its maritime trade links, not to have a maritime museum. The response was substantial: 82 shipping firms backed the museum's opening and its first five years, and the shipping community provided an endowment reported at HK$80 million, alongside invaluable support from the Hong Kong government, which made the first home available. Individual galleries at the museum are sponsored by shipping families such as the Tungs and the Paos, though the museum is careful to keep exhibition content independent of its funders. The museum is governed by a board of trustees and a board of directors, and its first director was Stephen Davies, a maritime historian and former University of Hong Kong academic, who led it through both of its homes.

First Home at Murray House, Stanley

The museum first opened to the public on 8 September 2005 at Murray House in Stanley, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Murray House is a reconstructed Victorian building: one of the first nineteenth-century buildings of the British colonial period, it had been dismantled stone by stone, stored at a rural site for over a decade, and then reassembled around a modern reinforced-concrete structure overlooking Stanley Bay. In this modest setting — about 500 square metres on the ground floor — the museum was divided into two galleries, an ancient gallery and a modern gallery, displaying more than 500 items including models of ancient and modern ships, paintings, ceramics, trade goods and shipping documents. The ancient gallery portrayed the fortunes of Chinese shipping in dynastic times, and early highlights included a pottery model boat some 2,000 years old from the Han dynasty. Between 2005 and 2011 the Stanley museum attracted around 35,000 visitors a year, but its size and out-of-the-way location limited what it could become.

The Move to Central Pier 8

The solution was a move to the heart of the harbourfront. Central Pier 8 had been used as a terminal for the Star Ferry's service to Hung Hom, with its east side also used for non-scheduled ferry services, and from August 2007 its unused spaces were tendered for restaurants and kiosks. The museum submitted a proposal in early October 2007 to convert the pier into a museum, and the government accepted it. Three years of consultation followed, during which the initial design proposals of director Stephen Davies and the museum's original Murray House architects, Richards Basmajian, were refined; the main consultants appointed for the project were P&T Architects and Engineers, with gallery design and fit-out by Haley Sharpe Designs of the United Kingdom and Kingsmen. With a government redevelopment grant, the museum renovated the pier in 2012 and relocated, reopening to the public in February 2013. The display space at Pier 8 is more than five times the area of the Stanley location.

Galleries and Layout at Pier 8

At Central Pier 8 the museum occupies four storeys — four levels arranged as two full and two half floors — with about 4,600 square metres of space. On opening, the new premises offered fifteen galleries plus two special exhibition rooms; the museum's current presentation describes more than 1,100 objects displayed in 13 galleries on three levels, attracting about 100,000 visitors a year. On three of the floors, galleries tell the stories of Chinese maritime history, Hong Kong's maritime world, and marine science through the Swire Marine Discovery Centre. Large harbour-facing windows are a feature of the main floor, so that the working port outside becomes part of the interpretation inside. The museum also has a special exhibition and events space, a resource centre, a rooftop café and a museum shop, and its galleries are supported by more than fifty interactive touch screens in English and Chinese in the Pier 8 displays.

The Collection

The collection has grown from the 500 items shown at Stanley to more than 3,000 objects. Its ship-model collection includes shipbuilders' models, private creations and commercially produced replicas of historic vessels, among them models of nineteenth-century sailing ships such as tea and opium clippers and a large-scale model of the Keying, the Chinese junk that sailed from Hong Kong to Britain via New York in 1846–47. The museum's most famous treasure is "Pacifying the South China Sea", an early nineteenth-century ink-painting scroll some 18 metres long telling how Bailing, Viceroy of the Two Guangs, suppressed piracy on the Guangdong coast in 1809–1810; its centrepiece episode, the Battle of Lantau, in which imperial naval forces fought Hong Kong's most famous pirate, Cheung Po Tsai, is presented as a digital animation projected around visitors, and a walk-in recreation evokes the Qing naval campaign against Cheung Po Tsai. Archival holdings include original Admiralty charts, other hydrographic charts, and photographic negatives, prints, albums and microfilms from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, alongside paintings, nautical instruments and Chinese ceramics.

Stories the Museum Tells

The permanent displays follow Hong Kong's maritime development from early Chinese seafaring on the South China coast — represented by Han-dynasty ceramic ship models — through the Maritime Silk Road trade of the Song to Qing dynasties, the clipper era and the age of steam, to the container port and shipping industry of the modern city. Piracy, naval warfare and the suppression campaigns of the Qing period sit alongside the peaceful history of trade goods, shipping documents and port development. An interactive ship-bridge simulator lets visitors try their hand at taking a vessel to sea. The effect the museum aims for is a comprehensive account of Hong Kong's growth as a major world port and maritime centre, set within the wider history of Chinese and global seafaring, and told in a building that itself served the harbour as a ferry pier.

Marine Science and the Swire Marine Discovery Centre

In recent years the shipping industry that founded the museum has also funded its turn towards marine science. The Swire Marine Discovery Centre, located on decks A and D of the museum, comprises the COSCO Shipping Blue Ocean Hall, the Blue Ocean Gallery and the Blue Ocean Learning Centre, integrating with the existing facilities to offer a new experience of Hong Kong's maritime heritage and marine ecology through a fusion of history, art and science. The centre includes a multi-purpose hall that can be used for lectures, a small gallery and a learning centre geared towards school visits, with a balcony giving access to the harbour so that schoolchildren can have the direct experience of collecting marine samples. A permanent exhibition on marine sciences is being built up, and displays on marine conservation use technologies such as virtual reality to explore underwater ecology. Under chief executive Richard Kendall, himself a former board trustee who began his career at the United Kingdom's naval academy and later worked for Swire, the museum has balanced its historical galleries with this environmental and scientific programming.

Special Exhibitions and the Seawise Giant Anchor

Alongside the permanent galleries, the museum presents semi-permanent and special exhibitions on topics that have ranged from sharks to Chinese junks to Hong Kong pirates, and shows such as one displaying nautical maps and ancient books, with rare maps and late Qing dynasty volumes illustrating the fusion of Eastern and Western maritime cultures. A major recent project extends the museum beyond its walls: the anchor of the Seawise Giant, the largest ship ever built, was destined to form the centrepiece of a new plaza containing a maritime interpretive centre with an immersive projection, planned outside the neighbouring Central Pier 9. Kendall explained that the anchor installation, planned for completion in early 2025, was intended to turn heads and draw more visitors into the museum's space in Pier 8. The project underlines the museum's close ties to the modern shipping industry as well as to the age of sail.

Education, Community and Governance

As a non-profit educational institution, the museum runs educational events and public programming for schools, community groups and families, supported by its resource centre and learning spaces. Its funding model is distinctive in Hong Kong's museum landscape: it is not a government department museum like those of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, but a charity created by the shipping community with government support, governed through the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Trust and its board of directors, with a collections development policy approved by its Curatorial and Collections Committee, board of directors and board of trustees — the current policy, covering 2025 to 2029, was approved through those bodies in the spring of 2025. That structure shapes its collecting, which follows the stories the museum tells: Chinese maritime history, Hong Kong's maritime world and marine science.

Visiting the Museum

The Hong Kong Maritime Museum stands at Central Pier 8 in the heart of the Central harbourfront, a short walk from Central station and the other Central ferry piers, with its galleries uniquely overlooking the busy Victoria Harbour. The museum's official website is hkmaritimemuseum.org, where current opening arrangements, admission details and the special-exhibition programme are published. With about 100,000 visitors a year, it is smaller and quieter than Hong Kong's big public museums, but its combination of a working-harbour setting, treasures such as the "Pacifying the South China Sea" scroll, and the breadth of its ship models and trade artefacts makes it the essential museum for understanding how the sea made Hong Kong.