Pottinger Street

This short, steep passage is made of heavy, rough granite stones: they were laid with offset joints, turning the road into long steps. The middle is raised above the edges, with drains running along the sides, so water flows downward and footwear grips the stone on the slope. Shops and stalls later appeared along this staircase; behind the green booths, people still trade where things were once repaired and clothes sewn.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese day-laborer porters carried brick, timber, and stone up this slope. Below, by the shoreline at the time, ran Queen's Road Central; above, near Hollywood Road, a prison and a courthouse were being built. The porters made their living by carrying such loads. On the steep climb, they were responsible for the cargo with their own bodies: an injury meant losing their income, and a dropped load meant losing payment for its delivery.

Around eighteen forty-five, a short road uphill was laid out for them. Road workers covered the slope with heavy, rough granite slabs. The stones were laid in offset rows, turning the road into a long staircase; the middle of the roadway was raised, with drains left along the sides. The unevenness was deliberate: footwear gripped the granite, water ran to the edges, and a porter could keep climbing with a load. The stone is thought to have come from a nearby quarry on Pedder Hill.

The materials reached the construction sites, while the road remained the main pedestrian route between waterfront trade and the institutions on the hill. Sellers came here after the porters. By the beginning of the twentieth century, shops and street stalls already stood along both sides: shoes and dishes were repaired here, clothing was altered, and everyday household items were sold. Today's traders offer festive costumes, masks, and handmade goods, but they occupy the same advantageous passage, where a customer inevitably slows down before the next climb.

The street received its official name only in eighteen fifty-eight. Sir Henry Pottinger was the British plenipotentiary seeking a trading harbor on China's coast. After the First Opium War, new instructions allowed him to conclude a commercial treaty without acquiring the island. Pottinger demanded both a treaty and Hong Kong. Under the Treaty of Nanking, the Qing Empire ceded the island to Britain, and Pottinger became its first governor the following year. It was this decision that the administration commemorated in the name Pottinger Street; it did not preserve the name of the builder of the steps.

Local residents continued to call it the stone-slab road, after what they knew underfoot. In nineteen sixty-one, workers went over the entire roadway, cleaning and restoring damaged stones. Later, the slabs were repeatedly lifted for underground utilities and laid again. Pottinger's name remained on the sign, while beneath the green market stalls the uneven road has survived, the road by which porters delivered materials from the former shoreline to the prison and courthouse on Hollywood Road.