Yau Ma Tei: The Heart of Kowloon

Yau Ma Tei is the kind of neighbourhood that makes Hong Kong feel like two cities at once. On this walking tour, you'll trace the everyday rituals of one of Kowloon's oldest districts, where traditional trades, temple life, and street markets have outlasted decades of rapid urban change.

The tour starts outside Exit B2 of Yau Ma Tei MTR station. From there, you'll head down Shanghai Street, one of the oldest stretches of Kowloon, lined with kitchen shops selling moon-cake moulds, dim sum steamers, and fearsome cleavers known locally as husband-killers. You'll pass the Red Brick House, built in 1895 and once the office of the Pumping Station engineer, and stop at the Hop Sing Scale Shop, where Mr Chow has spent nearly 50 years selling traditional Chinese scales.

From Shanghai Street, the route leads to the Tin Hau Temple complex, built in the 1860s and the largest Tin Hau temple in Kowloon. Fortune tellers work the pavement outside, old men play cards beneath the banyan trees, and Cantonese opera troupes sometimes rehearse in the courtyard. You'll also pass through the Jade Hawker Market, a sprawling two-shed bazaar with 400 stalls where bargaining is expected and half the asking price is a reasonable opening offer. The tour ends back at Yau Ma Tei MTR station, next to Yau Ma Tei Theatre – Hong Kong's only surviving pre-war cinema, which went from screening Cantonese opera to pornographic films and back to opera again.

On this 60-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Examine the Nine-Dragon Wall and hear how Kowloon got its name from a Song Dynasty emperor
• Browse the art deco Mido Café, open since 1950 and still serving its signature tea-coffee hybrid
• Visit the Yau Ma Tei wholesale fruit market, founded in 1913 and rumoured site of past Triad killings
• Explore Capital Embroidery, specialising in silk wedding gowns with traditional Chinese needlework
• Spot stalls selling paper replicas of luxury goods destined to be burned as offerings to ancestors
• Watch vendors peel whole orange skins for use in Chinese medicine at the fruit market

This tour gives you a real feel for a neighbourhood that Hong Kong's rapid development hasn't quite managed to erase.