Hong Kong Museum of History

Being a huge nerd, I always love checking out museums no matter where I travel. Every Wednesday is free museum day in HK, but last February, all the museums were admission-​free for the entire month! This was actually my first time at the HK Museum of History. I highly recommend it for people who are history buffs are anyone of any age who is interested in learning about HK in general.
The museum begins with the Natural Environment exhibit, where they show how civilization began back in the day aka when our ancestors were cavemen and cavewomen. They even had artifacts and skeletons from the indigenous people. The following permanent exhibits include Prehistoric HK and The Dynasties from the Han to the Qing. Here, displayed are many exhibits of the Chinese/​HK culture, traditions and lifestyle from those time periods. The museum recreates some festival scenes and displays folk culture so that you can experience and understand what it was like to live during those times. The Opium Wars, birth of HK and the Japanese Occupation are also exhibited in great detail. They had lots of images from WWII which were depressing, but it was part of history that cannot be denied. The last permanent displays were of HK the modern city and return to China. In addition, there are lots of temporary exhibits. Some of the newer ones include HK pop culture as well as Chinese artifacts from different dynasties.
The HK Museum of History is a place you can spend an entire day. There is a lot to see and learn about. Location is easy to get to in Tsim Sha Tsui. However, note that most of the museums (HK Art, Space and Science museums) are located by Victoria Harbour, but the HKMH is actually not in the same vicinity as those.

Must see museum. There is so much history of Hong Kong. Very interesting. Alright l was born in HK, there’s so much I didn’t know. It’s like a walk on the memory lane. The admission is unbelievably cheap. Right now they have a special exhibition of Ming dynasty ‘s furniture & arts. You can easily spend half a day there. If you only have a few days in HK, make it the first thing on your to do list !!

One of my favorite museums in Hong Kong. Their permanent exhibit covers Hong Kong’s history since the beginning of time. Definitely worth checking out. And free admission every Wednesday. Otherwise it’s only HKD 10.

Great museum, you can get in for cheap (10 HKD) or sometimes free during particular days or off seasons. This museum offers a comprehensive overview of Hong Kong history, and while it’s not the most interactive, there are a lot of visually interesting exhibits. I did the museum in 2 hours, but felt really rushed. I would say allot 3 hours if you’re the type of person who likes to read a lot of the informational text.

A very well-​put-​together museum at a cheap price. Visiting was a very pleasant experience; it wasn’t crowded, there was an interesting variety of visual and written components to the displays, and the content was really interesting. If you are limited on time, I would recommend skipping quickly through some of the ancient history stuff to get to the more interesting history of the last couple centuries (which is on the upper floor). There’s free wifi in some parts of the museum, which is a plus. Definitely recommend!

Admission is cheap, 10HKD for general admission, which is a little more than $ 1CDN (depending on the currency). For toddlers, 4 and under, admission is free. I also believe that Wednesdays are free admission!
Their collection of Chinese history is amazing. Coming here with my parents was a huge reminisce for them because it showcased the trams that were present back in the day, the bun mountains, the houses they lived in, the «restaurants», convenient stores that sells everything, barbers, the cannons that were used, very old houses, how Chinese people got married back in the day, etc.
Definitely a great place to visit if you go back to Hong Kong and would like to learn about the history of how people lived back in the day!

This is an amazing museum. It covers every facet of history of Hong Kong in great detail. I was especially fascinated with the exhibits on the Opium Wars, the Japanese Occupation during World War II, and the rise of manufacturing after the war. They have spent some decent cash at creating exhibits that are thought-​provoking and insightful. It was free on the day we went, but I would have gladly paid to see this museum.
If you are in Hong Kong, make plans to go. It will take you through Hong Kong’s history better than any documentary.

I really fell in love with this museum. More-​so than the National Museum of Singapore, I really liked the energy of this place and the tremendous depth of historical information within the maze of exhibits. It focuses on the history of HK of course going back to Chinese Dynasties and British Colonization. Interactive installation pieces are commonplace. Rotating exhibits keep it fresh for locals. Highly recommended.

I have never been to this museum because it was built after I moved away from Hong Kong. It is a public museum. Therefore it the entrance fee is not very high, it is only HK$ 10 for one adult, which is just slightly over US$ 1. This will only allows you entry to the «Hong Kong Story», there is admission fee for other special exhibition. If you go on a Wedenesday, it is free for everyone.
This place will give you an overview of Hong Kong’s archaeology, ethnography, natural and local history. I personally am not interested in every subjects. It gives a glimpse of how Hong Kong become Hong Kong today. For me the most interesting aspect are the local custom and history, and there are plenty of replica of many objects and villages, boats etc in Hong Kong. Also, the story of what happen in the second world war, and the transition from British colony to be part of China. Well worth a visit. You can also rent an audio recording for HK$ 10.

If you can only give 5 stars to one museum in Hong Kong, this gonna be the one. Even for the locals. (actually, especially for the locals.)
With the lack of support from the government, museums in Hong Kong are meh at best. But this is something different. You can tell right away. Special exhibitions are held on the ground level, separated from the rest of the exhibition. It was about Han Dynasty — and they have some legit gems shown. One of the highlights was the «Jade burial suit» (金縷玉衣). I was so sure it’s a replica, but no, it was the original piece. What a pleasant surprise.
The rest of the regular exhibitions was designed very carefully, like leading you through the journey of the history of Hong Kong. I know travelers would be very interested to learn about the opium wars and the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. But for me, it was more interesting to learn about the fossils and ancient rock carving in Hong Kong, and the daily lives of Hong Kong people in the not-​too-​distance past.
The best piece I liked the most was the old street. Old banks, old post office, old pawn shop, old Chinese med store… it felt real. Leading to the real, retired tram at the end of the street, which was a nice connection to the modern day Hong Kong.
The last bit about 1997 handover is a bit forced from the point of view of a local, but I guess it’s quite an interesting story for travelers too, as having both communism (back then) and capitalism under the same country was definitely one of the firsts in modern civilization.
It’s a large museum (in Hong Kong’s standard, anyway), and everything presented there was an integral part of Hong Kong history.

If you’re ever travelling to Hong Kong on Wednesdays from 10AM — 6PM, I highly suggest you walk into this museum. It’s free. Yes. You heard me. FREE (as all other museums on this day).
Do you want to learn more about Hong Kong? What relation Hong Kong had with the British or Japanese? What kind of activities or daily life the people in Hong Kong used to/​still have?! Take a walk through their permanent exhibit called «The Hong Kong Story» to learn more about the history of Hong Kong.
They go way back. So far back, they talked about Hong Kong 400 million years ago. Yes, I mean rocks.
If you’re done with the Museum of History, you can enter the Museum of Science next door~

I throughly enjoyed this museum. It was very nicely planned out from ancient history to the present. I learned a lot about Hong Kong and the Guangdong area. The Japanese occupation in the early 40’s was very sobering, not to mentioned what happened on the Mainland. It is a must see for anyone new to HK.

Very well-​made history museum that takes you through prehistory to the 1997 release of Hong Kong to China by England. This comes highly recommended by people who aren’t aware of Hong Kong history and are looking for an inexpensive way to spend approximately four hours.
Student discounts are 50% off the full admission price of 10 Hong Kong dollars (approximately $ 1.29 USD as of May 22, 2015).

We happened to stop by on a free day for the museums and let me tell you, this is way more fun than the Science Museum.
I tried to soak in as much information as I can before I got to my dinner plans– starting from Prehistoric HK (which was really cool, by the way), to the different dynasties with all their cool little buildings and rooms I could go into. I really wish they had a larger exhibition of these, but I know they have a lot to teach! The banking and Opium war parts were of more interest to my bf, but I learned a lot about Colonialism in HK too.
I also found out that there are different subsets of people in HK with their own garments and traditions.
Things got darker in the war section/​Japanese occupation and with the sound effects, I imagined what it was like for some of my family to be caught in this period of time. We see the aftermath of the occupation, extreme poverty, and then we move onto brighter cheerier things. Hong Kong was also a victim of the fads of pop culture, as America was. You see more convenience in things and items that they might have owned if they had money.
Then it got to the return to China in ’97 and modern times. If you look down from there, you see the people viewing Prehistoric HK, which was quite funny to me.
This was a very informative visit and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I learned a lot and am hoping to go back to really take my time at each exhibit if I had more time in HK.

This is a great museum. I am very thankful for my friend who remind me to visit this place while I’m in Hong Kong. I spent about six hours there up until closing time and even had to be escorted out during the closing bell.
There are eight so-​called «galleries». Galleries One thru Four are on ground level and cover from pre-​historic times thru the «China dynasties» prior to the Opium War. Galleries Five thru Eight are on the third floor and covers from the Opium War (when the island became a British colony) up to modern times. I think the most touching is Gallery Seven, which is small but is dedicated to the «three years and eight month» of Japanese occupation during World War II.
The museum does a great job of replicating what buildings and businesses looked like during the different periods. There are many mini-​theaters showing short videos at every gallery. These videos are shown in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English in this rotating order (thee are a few that were only in Cantonese and English). The most entertaining ones in my opinion was the one in Gallery Seven that showed how things were in the 1960’s and 1970’s compared to today (done using clips of Hong Kong films during those years) and the one in Gallery Eight right before the exit showing events of Hong Kong up to the China Reunification event of 1997. Speaking of the video at Gallery Seven mentioned above, I live how they put up movie posters used to advertise old Hong Kong movies as done in those days (including two of my favorite movies by Michael Sam Hui from the 1970’s).
It’s free admission on Wednesdays (the day of week I went), but otherwise it’s only HK$ 10 (about $ 1.30 U.S.). Definite bargain compared to museums here.

Came here after reading reviews on Tripadvisor and Unilocal.It was walking distance from our hotel, Hotel Icon, and it was ‘dirt cheap’. The tickets were equivalent to about $ 1.50 US dollars.
The museum chronicles Hong Kong’s history from prehistoric times to modern times. It covers the geographic evolution of Hong Kong’s landscape and early human settling to present day culture. It also touches on politics and Hong Kong’s ties to other nations such as the British, Chinese and Japanese governments.
Definitely worth as visit if you are a history buff, but even if you aren’t its a great excuse to get out of the sweltering heat!

We had no idea what to expect. We needed to kill time in Kowloon, and my friend saw this. We weren’t sure if it was History of HK, or just a generic old history museum. It’s the latter, but has a huge exhibit of the former.
We spent about 5 hours or so in there. The exhibit takes you from pre-​history all the way through the departure of the British. The story of Hong Kong is amazing, and seeing the transitions it’s gone through was so cool.
I can’t speak to the rest of the place, it had a Russian exhibit, that we didn’t do.

We really enjoyed this museum and spent over 4 hours here learning about the history of Hong Kong.
Kudos to the curators for putting the exhibits together. We really enjoy the store fronts from the Tea Shops and the Chinese Medicine Shops, plus the Chinese Opera Stage.
The different small theatres with film of yester years were great reminders of how far the city has come.
Love the Wars this small city has endured and how the people overcome all the different crisis man made or by nature.
Worth a visit if you want to know what Hong Kong is about!

For an interesting and immersive experience of HK’s history, this museum is without question one of the best I’ve ever been to and a must see for visitors.
Spanning from the prehistoric period right through to the modern era, it was enlightening to see just how the city we see today had changed, both geologically and socially. There are multimedia attractions along with a huge range of exhibits.
Set over a few floors, you start your wander through The Natural Environment which is split into two areas covering ‘Landform and Climate’ and ‘Flora and Fauna’. The next zone, Prehistoric Hong Kong, shows exhibits from 6,000 years ago when the first humans settled in the area. The Dynasties: From The Han to the Qing covers the period after the prehistoric era and the myriad of peoples who lived here and dynasties that ruled over them.
Folk Culture was a colourful and fascinating area of the museum, with full sized replicas of ‘Bun Towers’ and other traditional ceremony pieces. The Opium Wars and the Cession of Hong Kong shows you what life was like when HK was ceded to Britain from China. Birth and Early Growth of the City includes lots of exhibits from the early 20^th century. The Japanese Occupation has galleries of photos and items from the three years that Japan occupied the city in the 1940s.
The last gallery, Modern Metropolis and the Return to China traces the story of HK’s post-​war development and the eventual handover in 1997.
All of this in about two hours, it’s a terrific way to learn all there is to know about the rich and sometimes traumatic history of HK. I wholeheartedly recommend paying the museum a visit.

I have been in Hong Kong for 7 years, I get my permanent residency this year (yay!) and I’ve only found out about this place a couple months ago. Get this, I only found out as my friend came to visit Hong Kong for the first time and went (while I was at work). He told us about how much fun and how much he learned about it, clearly shaming me and another friend (who was raised here). Subsequently, we went the very next day.
It was $ 10 to get in, that in itself is a steal. I can’t think of any other museums I’ve been to in the last 10 years that costed that — 10 euros maybe.
We went in, in the beginning, we were goofing off a little bit, saying the neanderthal, cave men, dinosaurs and forests looks the same anywhere in the world.
We quickly realised there was so much about HK that we had absolutely no idea about. Of course the most obvious opium wars, fisheries, and stuff we knew. It turned out that we actually didn’t know a lot about Hong Kong history despite living here for such an extended period of time.
It was interesting to see the transition of Hong Kong, how it became what it is today. My favourite part however was seeing what Hong Kong looked like just 30 – 40 years ago compared to our modern Hong Kong we have now.
It was an excellent learning experience to see how HK evolved over the years and even seeing the more recent changes since 97.
The movie at the end of the history museum is worth watching. Another place to show my tourist friends.

For anyone in search of a compendium of Hong Kong’s rich natural and cultural history, the Hong Kong Museum of History should be your first point of reference. The permanent exhibition ‘The Hong Kong Story’ takes two floors and around 2 – 3 hours to get through, starting with the Devonian period (400 million years ago!) and Hong Kong’s natural environment, to the Handover period in 1997. They also do a couple of other prop-​up exhibitions usually relating to Chinese history and culture, archaeological finds etc.
Being a bit of a modern History buff, I love going here to check out footage from the Handover period. In the whole museum, there are over 50 multimedia programmes, which is a testament to the hard work and research undergone by these Hong Kong historians. The three shows in the ‘Modern Metropolis and Return to China’ section are definitely worth watching, particularly the ‘Sino-​Hong Kong Relations from 1841 – 1997′ show, which is about 10 minutes long. You can watch real coverage from the 1997 ceremony, including the Prince of Wales and then-​Governor Chris Patten boarding Her Majesty’s Yacht Britannia.
An extremely sobering aspect of the ‘Hong Kong Story’ is without a doubt the Japanese Occupation, and the museum covers this period in detail. I was swept with emotion from all the historical photography and videos, emphasizing the extremely dire conditions that plagued the Hong Kong people for three long years and eight months. There is an interesting aspect that the Hong Kong History Museum looks at: the East River Column, which is the guerilla force of thousands of resistance fighters in Hong Kong at the time. Truly makes you appreciate the Hong Kong spirit and all this little harbor has achieved in its relatively short history.