Hong Kong Hidden Gems: Secret Spots Locals Love

Hong Kong's tourist circuit concentrates visitors in Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Victoria Peak — leaving most of the city's 18 districts almost entirely to the 7.5 million residents who constitute Hong Kong's extraordinary urban society. Sham Shui Po, now attracting Hong Kong's young creative community to its wholesale fabric and electronics district, contains the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in a former prison — a complex of artist studios, galleries and performance spaces operating in repurposed correctional facility buildings that provide some of Hong Kong's most affordable studio space and most interesting contemporary art programming. The centre's open days attract Hong Kong's art community rather than tourists, and the contrast of the prison architecture with its new creative occupants creates a specifically Hong Kong combination of historical weight and contemporary energy.

Cheung Chau island — a 35-minute ferry from Central — is Hong Kong's most distinctive inhabited island, car-free by law, with a population of 25,000 living in a network of alleyways between the double harbours at the island's narrow waist. The weekend crowds can be managed by arriving on the first morning ferry at 6:30am, walking the island's circumference before the day-trippers arrive and eating seafood at the harbourfront restaurants that open for breakfast fishermen. The annual Cheung Chau Bun Festival — held in late April or May — is Hong Kong's most extraordinary community festival: a four-day event combining Taoist religious ceremony with competitive bun-tower climbing and traditional painted face processions attended primarily by Hong Kong families making the island pilgrimage. The Kat Hing Wai walled village in the New Territories, accessible by bus from Kam Tin, is a 15th century Hakka walled village still inhabited by descendants of the Tang clan — a genuinely inhabited piece of Ming Dynasty Hong Kong within the modern city's administrative boundaries.

The Lei Yue Mun fishing village at the eastern entrance to Victoria Harbour was Hong Kong's primary seafood supply community until the 1980s and retains its working character as a seafood restaurant village where the day's catch from Hong Kong waters is sold from wet market stalls and immediately cooked at adjacent restaurants — a combination of market and restaurant that has no equivalent in tourist Hong Kong. The Dragon's Back trail on Hong Kong Island's southeastern coast, consistently rated among the world's finest urban hiking trails, ends at Shek O beach — a laid-back Hong Kong seaside village of whitewashed bungalows, seafood restaurants and the city's most relaxed beach community, located at the end of a 20-minute bus ride from the MTR that most Hong Kong visitors never take.