About Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence

Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence

The Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence, formerly the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence (香港海防博物館), is a public museum in a former coastal defence fort overlooking the Lei Yue Mun channel at 175 Tung Hei Road, Shau Kei Wan, on Hong Kong Island, managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). The Lei Yue Mun Fort was built by the British in 1887 to defend the eastern approaches to Victoria Harbour. Converted into a museum that opened on 25 July 2000, renamed and relaunched on 3 September 2024, it is Hong Kong's only museum dedicated to the War of Resistance and coastal defence, covering 34,200 square metres with a permanent exhibition of 11 galleries tracing more than 600 years of coastal defence and Hong Kong's role in resisting the Japanese invasion.

Lei Yue Mun: the eastern gateway to Victoria Harbour

The museum's site explains its subject. Lei Yue Mun Pass, the narrow channel between Hong Kong Island and Devil's Peak on the mainland side, is the eastern entrance to Victoria Harbour, and for centuries it has served as a critical defensive chokepoint guarding Hong Kong's maritime gateway. The fort stands on a headland on the south coast of the pass, rising from sea level at the shore to 64 metres at the hilltop redoubt, a commanding position from which guns could command the channel. Chinese coastal defence of the area long predates the British fort: the museum's narrative begins in the Tang dynasty and continues through the Ming and Qing eras, when Chinese forces fortified the Hong Kong coast against pirates and foreign incursions. The British, who took Hong Kong Island in 1841 and built up Victoria Harbour as a naval and commercial port, recognised the same geography: whoever held Lei Yue Mun controlled the harbour's eastern door.

The building of Lei Yue Mun Fort in 1887

The Lei Yue Mun Fort was built by the British in 1887 as one of the most important British Army fortifications in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century, together with the adjoining Lyemun Barracks. Its core structure, the Lyemun Redoubt, was built in 1887 on the hilltop, with casemates — vaulted chambers — arranged around a courtyard, protected by a deep ditch and designed to be inconspicuous from the sea. The Central Battery was completed in March 1887; the gun barrel displayed there today is a 7-inch rifled muzzle-loading Mark I gun of 4.5 tons dating from the 1870s. The Lei Yue Mun Pass Battery, completed in March 1892, was built to defend the harbour from fast torpedo boats and destroyers. Between 1892 and 1894 the Brennan Torpedo Station was built in a cave on the shore, about two metres above sea level, to launch the Brennan torpedo — a wire-guided weapon invented by Louis Brennan and operated from the shore station — against ships entering the channel. Batteries, caponiers (covered firing positions in the ditch), redoubts and the torpedo station together made the fort a layered defensive system, and it is this system, remarkably well preserved, that the museum now presents.

The Battle of Hong Kong and the fall of the fort in 1941

The fort's defences were tested in the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941. On 8 December 1941, the Japanese launched their attack on Hong Kong. After the fall of the New Territories and Kowloon, British forces immediately strengthened the defences at Lei Yue Mun to prevent the Japanese from crossing the Lei Yue Mun Channel from Devil's Peak. The defence forces managed to repulse several Japanese raids, but were eventually overwhelmed, and the fort fell into enemy hands on 19 December 1941 — six days before Hong Kong's surrender on Christmas Day. Hong Kong then endured three years and eight months of Japanese occupation. The museum's War of Resistance galleries give particular attention to the resistance that continued under occupation, including the underground efforts of the Hong Kong Independent Battalion of the Dongjiang (East River) Column and local guerrilla fighters, who rescued Allied personnel and gathered intelligence along the coast the museum overlooks. In the post-war period the fort no longer bore defensive significance; it became a training ground for the British Forces, as did the Lyemun Barracks, until the land was returned to the Hong Kong Government in 1987.

From fort to museum: conversion and opening in 2000

In 1993 the Urban Council decided to convert the hundred-year-old fort into a museum. The conversion respected the fort's historic structures: the casemates of the redoubt became exhibition galleries, a reception building with a distinctive tensile roof structure was added, and the outdoor defences became a historical trail. The Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence opened on 25 July 2000, initially as a branch museum of the Hong Kong Museum of History. The museum comprises three main areas: the reception lobby, the redoubt on the upper level (described as the 8th floor in the museum's layout), and the historical trail. Its total area is 34,200 square metres. The conversion is regarded as a model of adaptive reuse, in which a military site of genuine historical importance — including the very ground on which part of the Battle of Hong Kong was fought — became the setting for telling the story of that defence.

The permanent exhibition: 11 galleries and over 400 artefacts

The museum's permanent exhibition, The Story of Hong Kong Coastal Defence, is housed within the historic converted casemates of the Lyemun Redoubt. In its current form it comprises 11 thematic galleries tracing the changes in Hong Kong's coastal defence and military affairs since the Tang dynasty, and the history of Hong Kong's resistance against Japanese aggression — more than 600 years of coastal defence in total. The narrative runs from the Tang dynasty through the Ming and Qing eras, the Opium Wars and the cession and lease of Hong Kong, the British period, the Japanese invasion and occupation, and the decades after the war to the handover in 1997 and beyond. Four of the galleries are dedicated as the War of Resistance Galleries, focusing on the Japanese invasion of China, the fall of Hong Kong, the underground resistance of the Dongjiang Column's Hong Kong Independent Battalion and local guerrillas, and Japan's eventual surrender. The galleries display over 400 artefacts, including cannons, uniforms, medals, weapons, vehicles and personal items, presented with textual and graphic illustrations and multimedia programmes to give visitors a deeper understanding of Hong Kong's coastal defence history. An earlier formulation of the permanent display was titled 600 Years of Coastal Defence, telling the story of the defence of the Hong Kong coastline from the Ming dynasty, through the First and Second Opium Wars and the Battle of Hong Kong, through to today.

The Lyemun Fort Historical Trail: 24 checkpoints

Outdoors, the Lyemun Fort Historical Trail links the museum's military structures across the headland. From the Brennan Torpedo Station, built in a cave on the shore two metres above sea level, to the hilltop at 64 metres where the Lyemun Redoubt stands, there are 24 checkpoints along the military-themed walking trail, providing a historical record of the events that took place in the fort. Checkpoints include the Central Battery with its 7-inch gun, the Lei Yue Mun Pass Battery, the caponiers and ditch defences, gun batteries and ruins of the fort's supporting structures, with views across the channel to Devil's Peak and the route of the Japanese crossing in 1941. The trail makes the museum a site museum in the fullest sense: visitors do not only read about coastal defence but walk through its physical system, from sea-level torpedo station to hilltop redoubt, understanding how the layers worked together.

Typhoon closure, reopening and the 2024 renaming

The museum was closed for four years after Super Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018, which caused serious damage to the exposed coastal site, and reopened on 24 November 2022 after repair and renovation. On 3 September 2024 the museum was renamed and relaunched as the Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence. The date was chosen deliberately: 3 September is commemorated in China as the anniversary of victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, marking the Japanese surrender in the Second World War — the 79th anniversary in 2024. The renaming, with its permanent exhibition reorganised to highlight the core themes of War of Resistance and Coastal Defence in defending the nation, placed new emphasis on Hong Kong's part in China's resistance to Japan, while retaining the full coastal defence narrative from the Tang dynasty to 1997. LCSD materials describe the relaunched museum as using multimedia elements, innovative presentation methods and a thematic approach in its permanent exhibition and historical trail to narrate the history of the War of Resistance and the story of Hong Kong's coastal defence, and to promote knowledge of that history across generations.

Curatorship and place in the LCSD museum system

The museum is managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department; its curator is recorded as Rebecca Cheung Nga-yan. It was previously a branch museum of the Hong Kong Museum of History and remains part of the LCSD's family of seven major museums, alongside the Museum of History, the Museum of Art, the Science Museum, the Space Museum, the Heritage Museum and the Dr Sun Yat-sen Museum. Admission to LCSD museums' permanent exhibitions follows the department's standard arrangements, and the museum runs education programmes, guided tours of the historical trail, and commemorative activities connected with the War of Resistance. Its setting beside Lei Yue Mun Park — the former Lyemun Barracks, returned by the British Army in 1987 — and below the Sai Wan Battery and Morning Trail means the whole headland now forms a landscape of military heritage open to the public.

Why this museum is unique in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence is the city's premier military museum and its only museum dedicated to the War of Resistance and sea defence. Its uniqueness lies in the union of subject and site: no other Hong Kong museum is housed in the very fortification whose history it tells, where visitors can stand in the redoubt built in 1887, descend to the torpedo station cut into the rock, and look across the channel that invaders had to cross in 1941. Its narrative — Tang and Ming coastal guards, Qing defences, Opium War-era change, a British fortress, a Japanese assault, guerrilla resistance, and the return to China in 1997 — compresses the whole military history of Hong Kong into one headland. Since 2024, under its new name, it carries that story with an explicit emphasis on remembrance of the War of Resistance, anchored in authentic ground.