Sheung Wan, Hong Kong: where dried seafood, temples and design lanes collide

Walk west out of Central and the polish drops away fast. Within a block of Sheung Wan MTR the pavements smell of dried scallop and abalone, herbalists weigh ginseng on brass scales, and a flight of stone steps carries you uphill into PoHo, where a two-Michelin-star dining room shares a lane with a HK$17 milk tea. It is the most walkable, most texturally rich square kilometre on Hong Kong Island.

What Sheung Wan is known for

Sheung Wan has always been a district of edges: between harbour and hill, trade and taste, old money and new ideas. The old story starts early. This was one of the first parts of Hong Kong the British settled after 1841, and the area around Possession Point marked the city’s first colonial foothold. But the more useful way to understand Sheung Wan is to stand on the pavement and look around. On Des Voeux Road West, the shopfronts open onto sacks of shark’s fin and shrivelled sea cucumber. On Bonham Strand and Wing Lok Street, the old Nam Pak Hong trading houses still deal in ginseng, dried mushrooms and birds’ nest, the kind of business that makes the district feel less like a neighbourhood than a working archive.

That sensory bluntness is the point. Sheung Wan is not trying to be pretty. It is trying to keep going. The trams grind along Des Voeux Road, mahjong clicks from a shophouse, and somewhere uphill an espresso machine hisses through the noise. The district’s second life begins where the slope starts. Hollywood Road runs like a spine through the middle of it, linking Man Mo Temple to antiques dealers and then to Upper Lascar Row, better known as Cat Street, where the street trade has always been a little scruffier, a little more fun. Above that, the lanes around Po Hing Fong and Tai Ping Shan Street — PoHo, if you want to sound like you’ve been coming for years — are lined with cafes, ceramic studios, tattoo parlours and craft-beer nooks. The same neighbourhood can hand you dried scallop, a gallery opening and a natural-wine bar in one short, sweaty climb.

Where to eat & drink

The high end here is not decorative. It is serious, and often very good. Tate Dining Room on Hollywood Road is the kind of place that reminds you Hong Kong can still surprise people who think they know its dining scene. Vicky Lau’s two-Michelin-star room turns Chinese ingredients through a French lens with a kind of quiet precision that feels earned rather than showy. It is one of the city’s most important tasting rooms because it refuses to shout about its own ambition.

A few streets away, The Chairman in The Wellington keeps its Michelin star by doing what a great Cantonese restaurant should do: making one dish worth a reservation calendar. People book months ahead for the steamed fresh flowery crab with aged Shaoxing wine, chicken oil and flat rice noodles. It is the sort of plate that makes a city’s food memory stick. In the same building, Wing gives Vicky Cheng’s contemporary Chinese tasting menu a more experimental register, still rooted in produce, still precise, but with a different kind of energy.

Embla on Upper Station Street shifts the mood again. Jim Löfdahl’s contemporary Scandinavian room, the successor to Frantzén’s Kitchen at the same address, leans into fermentation, seafood and bread, with dinner running around HK$1,288. That is the Sheung Wan trick in miniature: a neighbourhood built on old mercantile habits now hosting some of the city’s most modern kitchens.

The everyday places matter just as much. On steep, quiet Tai Ping Shan Street, Yuk Kin is the sort of old-school cha chaan teng that keeps a district honest. The chicken fillet in curry-sauce rice costs about HK$50 and goes to a long queue. Get there early. It sells through by mid-afternoon, and it would be a shame to miss a place this plain and this loved.

For tea and cake, Teakha on the same street is a tiny zakka tearoom whose reputation rests on a years-perfected masala chai and home-baked scones. It feels hand-assembled, because it is. And if your day needs coffee rather than tea, Halfway Coffee on Upper Lascar Row serves its brews in vintage Hong Kong porcelain cups, with a little cup museum next door. That detail sounds cute until you sit down with it; then it feels like a small act of local memory.

Drinkers do well here too, though Sheung Wan’s bars are rarely loud about themselves. Craftissimo on Tai Ping Shan Street is the neighbourhood’s craft-beer clubhouse, part bottle shop, part bar, with a rotating wall of European, US, Australian and Hong Kong brews and a make-shift urban garden of stools out in the alley. It opens from early afternoon to 10pm daily, and the staff actually know their sours from their Trappists, which is rarer than it should be.

For something quieter, Ginger on On Wo Lane hides behind a plain sliding wall and keeps a deep list of blends and single malts for slow, unhurried nights. That is the Sheung Wan way: no need to make a scene. The best places prefer a low voice.

Going out

If you want the famous cocktail-room energy, you need to understand the geography. The trophy bars are not really in Sheung Wan proper; they are a five-minute uphill walk into SoHo and Central. That matters because it changes how you plan your evening. Drink in Sheung Wan first, where the mood is looser, then climb when you want the headline names.

Bar Leone on Bridges Street was named the World’s Best Bar in 2025, and it does what the best bars do: makes a Roman-style negroni and a filthy martini feel like the obvious order. Coa on Shin Hing Street, just on the SoHo edge, carries a 40-plus-page mezcal and tequila list and still feels like a room built for people who care what they are drinking. Both are close enough to Sheung Wan to fold into the night, but far enough uphill that you feel the district changing under your feet.

Back down in Sheung Wan, the pleasure is in the understatement. A whisky at Ginger. A beer at Craftissimo. Then a walk home through streets that are still awake but not performing for you. That mix — serious bars, no theatre — suits the district exactly.

Things to do and what to see

Start at Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road. It is one of the city’s oldest temples, built between 1847 and 1862 and dedicated to Man, the god of literature, and Mo, the god of war. The hanging incense coils are the thing everyone photographs, and for once the cliché is fair: they can burn for up to two weeks, hazing the whole hall in smoke. It opens daily roughly 8am to 6pm, and entry is free. Step inside and the temperature changes, the light goes soft, and the whole city seems to pause for a breath.

From there, drop down to Upper Lascar Row, or Cat Street, the 200-metre antiques lane running parallel to Hollywood Road. This is where you come for Mao memorabilia, old coins, jade, Bruce Lee posters and a lot of cheerful fakes. Haggling is expected. So is a little scepticism. The fun is in the rummage, not the certainty.

Climb the ladder streets when you have the legs for it. Ladder Street and Pound Lane are near-vertical stepped lanes that pull you up into PoHo around Po Hing Fong and Tai Ping Shan Street. This part of the district once had ties to Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary circle; now it is the island’s arty core, thick with murals, ceramic ateliers and pocket galleries. The walls carry HKwalls murals, and the lane itself feels like a conversation between old stone, new paint and people who chose to open small businesses where the gradient would make most landlords nervous.

For serious collections, the Liang Yi Museum on Hollywood Road holds a private trove of Ming and Qing furniture and antique European vanities. Check ahead; it is appointment-led. And a short walk east, PMQ — the former Police Married Quarters — now houses independent designer and craft studios worth an hour’s browse. It is a useful reminder that Sheung Wan’s creative side is not just cafe decor. There is real making here.

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Shopping

Shopping in Sheung Wan means treasure-hunting, not mall-crawling. Hollywood Road is lined end to end with antiques and Asian-art dealers. Some of it is serious, some of it is theatrical, and some of it is both. The street has enough weight that even a casual walk feels like a lesson in what Hong Kong has collected, sold and exported over the decades.

Its scruffier cousin is Upper Lascar Row (Cat Street), where stalls sell porcelain, coins, vintage watches, retro tins and knowing reproductions. The point is not purity. The point is the pleasure of looking and the freedom to walk away. A good-natured bargain is part of the deal, and the lane rewards people who are willing to linger.

Up in PoHo, the small shops around Tai Ping Shan Street and Po Hing Fong lean independent and design-led: ceramic studios, homeware, crystals, incense and one-off boutiques, most of them one-person operations open from late morning. This is where Sheung Wan’s new identity is most visible, though not in a polished, mall-like way. It is stitched together from narrow front rooms and handwritten signs.

The most Hong Kong shopping of all, though, is down by the water. Along Des Voeux Road West and around Bonham Strand and Wing Lok Street, the dried-seafood and Nam Pak Hong shops sell dried scallop, abalone, fish maw, ginseng, dried mushrooms and birds’ nest to a serious local clientele stocking up for banquets and tonics. Prices climb fast for the premium stuff, but a small bag of dried scallop or a box of good tea makes an easy, genuinely local souvenir. If you want to understand how the city feeds itself, this is a better lesson than any souvenir mall.

For a covered browse, the Edwardian red-brick Western Market anchors the district’s harbour edge, though you should check its current status because parts have been under refurbishment. Even when it is partly masked, it still belongs in the mental map of the neighbourhood: a reminder that Sheung Wan has always been more than one thing at once.

Where to stay in Sheung Wan

Sheung Wan is a design-and-boutique area rather than a five-star-tower one, and that is the point. You trade the harbour-view lobby for character, walkability and a real neighbourhood on your doorstep. The sweet spot for most visitors is the flatter ground near the MTR and the trading streets, around Des Voeux Road, Bonham Strand and Hillier Street, where you are steps from the station, the trams and dozens of restaurants. Stay uphill toward Hollywood Road, Tai Ping Shan and PoHo and you swap easy transit for atmosphere, waking up among the cafes and galleries but climbing steps to get home. Prices skew mid-range to upscale-boutique, generally friendlier than Central or a Tsim Sha Tsui harbour hotel for what you get, and the location is superb: Central’s offices, ferries and Peak Tram are a 10-minute walk or one MTR stop east.

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Getting around

Sheung Wan MTR on the Island line is the anchor, one stop west of Central and, until the 2014 Kennedy Town extension, the line’s western terminus. Exit A2 puts you by the trading streets and a short walk from Cat Street and Hollywood Road. The neighbourhood is emphatically walkable, but it is built on a hillside, so the north-south lanes are steep and often stepped. Comfortable shoes matter. The Central-Mid-Levels escalator on the eastern edge helps for the uphill legs, and it is worth using without any guilt at all.

The historic trams — the ding ding — run east-west along Des Voeux Road, a cheap, scenic way to reach Central, Wan Chai and Causeway Bay, or west to Kennedy Town. The Star Ferry and Central’s piers are a 10-15 minute walk east for the harbour crossing to Kowloon. For the airport, take the MTR one stop to Hong Kong Station and change to the Airport Express, roughly 24 minutes to HKIA, or take a taxi, which runs about 40-45 minutes depending on traffic.