Bowrington Road Market

Bowrington Road Market sits on the Wan Chai/Causeway Bay border at 21 Bowrington Road, on ground that takes its English nickname from the Bowrington Canal that once ran here -- a channel narrow and winding enough that 19th-century Hong Kong called it Ngo Keng Kan, "goose neck stream," crossed by a "goose neck bridge" that carried the early Hong Kong Tramways line. The canal was built in the mid-to-late 1850s, covered over during the Praya East land reclamation of 1922-29 that created the modern Wan Chai shoreline, and its name survives only in what locals still call this stretch of market. Today the site is run by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department as a public wet market: ground-floor stalls sell fresh produce, spices and medicinal herbs, meat butchered to order and live fish, alongside fermented vegetables, dried seafood, household goods, clothing and tailoring; a cooked food centre upstairs serves Cantonese meals through the day, open roughly 6am to 8pm. The market's covered, all-weather footprint under Wan Chai's elevated roadway sets it apart from some of the district's older open-air markets. It briefly reached an international audience when a scene from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was shot on location here, though the market's daily business is unrelated to that cameo.