Hong Kong Department Store Chronicle
Stories of the department stores that shaped Hong Kong’s changing tastes, lifestyles and retail landscape.
From a waterfront shop in 1850 to one of Hong Kong’s best-known luxury department stores.
How two brothers from Guangdong built a retail empire that modernised department store culture in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
From reading water meters to lighting up Nathan Road — how a stranded civil servant built Kowloon’s leading department store, and gave Hong Kong its first public Christmas lights.
Not a department store at all, but the trading house that brought Marks & Spencer to Hong Kong — a silk trader turned shipping empire turned high-street gatekeeper.
From a Leeds market stall to a name Dodwell franchised on its behalf, to running its own stores across Hong Kong — and then, decades later, handing the keys to a franchise partner all over again.
Two unrelated companies racing to open branches across Hong Kong’s brand-new housing estates in the early 1980s — and collapsing within a year of each other.
How Hong Kong’s first Japanese department store rewrote the rules of local retail — and changed the fortunes of the stores that came before it.
Three Japanese department stores followed Daimaru into Causeway Bay — and each one left the neighbourhood in a completely different way.
Hong Kong’s last Japanese department store eventually closed — but not before its own staff built something that would outlive it.
THE COMPLETE STORY
A Brief History of Hong Kong’s Department Stores
One city, six generations of shopkeepers, and 170 years of stores that opened, competed and — almost all of them — eventually closed. See how it all connects.