Around 1980, the city’s economic transformation from a manufacturing center to a hub of global commerce and investment would also have dramatic repercussions. The immediate postwar phase is also accompanied by industrial growth. In reaction to the latter, the development of public housing estates and the eventual founding of new towns is particularly significant in the history of Hong Kong. The 1940s through the 1970s were characterized by rebuilding after war and the Japanese occupation, and dramatic expansion, particularly needed to accommodate a massive influx of population in the form of refugees from mainland China. Hong Kong’s architecture can also be neatly subdivided into two eras since the Second World War. This era can be subdivided into an initial commercially driven and fairly organic phase, a reshaping of key aspects of the city from around the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and a third phase of subsequent transformation in the early 20th century defined by increasing influence of technologies such as concrete and electricity. This phase is characterized by the importation of Western building types and technologies and the implementation of colonial planning in the shaping of the city. The second phase of Hong Kong architecture is the early colonial phase, from the British cession of the island, through the expansion of the territory to include Kowloon in 1860 and the New Territories in 1898, up to the Second World War. This architecture is largely a regional vernacular reflection of broader Chinese traditions.

Pre–urban architecture of the territory consists of buildings built before the British occupation of Hong Kong Island in 1841, as well as later architecture produced in a traditional manner afterwards. The region’s architecture, and the literature about it, can be divided into several phases. The architecture of Hong Kong is the built environment contained within the present-day Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, which also matches the former British Colony of Hong Kong at its largest extent.

Modern history of hong kong