Hong Kong Observation Wheel - Replace The Wheel. Double It. Better Still, Triple It
Size Is Everything - Why 60 metres was to small - Hong Kong needs a harbour icon
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Hong Kong Observation Wheel - Replace The Wheel. Double It. Better Still, Triple It
Hong Kong Observation Wheel
Foreword by Jamie
Size Is Everything. We Need A Replacement Twice The Size, Or More.
10th September 2026
Sometimes I am afflicted by the ground hog day syndrome when I keep coming back to the same subject and the Hong Kong Observation Wheel is my current thing and new research has turned up new information
I have written about the Hong Kong Observation Wheel before, and I make no apology for coming back to it. Some subjects in this city refuse to settle. They sit on the harbourfront, they turn slowly, they collect a few photographs, and then everyone pretends the job is done. The wheel at Central is still there. It still costs HK$20 (about US$2.60) for an adult. It still stands 60 metres high, which is 197 feet in old money, and it still looks like a fairground ride that wandered onto the wrong waterfront and decided to stay. I have ridden it more than once. I have stood underneath it. I have watched visitors queue, smile for the camera, and then look a little puzzled when the gondola does not lift them above the towers. That puzzled look is the whole story.
This post is the long version. I am merging into my earlier posts, adding what I missed, and saying out loud what I think should happen next. Hong Kong does not need another polite conversation about harbourfront vibrancy. It needs a wheel that belongs in the same sentence as Victoria Harbour, Victoria Peak and the Star Ferry. Size is not vanity here. Size is the difference between an amenity and an icon. The current machine is an amenity. A world record wheel on the correct side of the harbour would be an icon, and it would cost less than a great many projects that have already soaked up years of talk and rather a lot of public money.
I have lived in Hong Kong since 2nd January 1972. I have watched this city invent itself, demolish itself, and invent itself again. I have also watched it play safe at the exact moment it needed to be bold. The Observation Wheel is one of those safe decisions dressed up as a landmark. Time to say so properly..
Technical Terms for the Hong Kong Observation Wheel
Ferris wheel is the proper generic term. It comes from George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. and the 80 metre wheel he put up in Chicago in 1893. In engineering English it means a large vertical wheel that turns on a horizontal axle, with passenger cars fixed around the rim. The cars usually hang on pivots so the floor stays level as you go over the top. A motor turns the rim or the hub. That is the whole family, from a village fair to Ain Dubai.
Observation wheel is the name the tourism trade borrowed after the London Eye. They wanted to sound like a viewing gallery, not a coconut shy. The usual marks of that label are larger enclosed cabins, air conditioning, a slow continuous turn, and a site sold for the view rather than the thrill. The Hong Kong machine is officially the Hong Kong Observation Wheel for that reason. It is still a Ferris wheel. It is just wearing a better jacket.
Am I Being Too Harsh?
The 60 metre wheel is not a crime. Treating it as the finished idea is
I can hear the pushback before it arrives. The thing turns. People ride it. Ten million people have gone round since 2017. Children like it. The ticket is HK$20 (about US$2.60). The lawn around it now has music and markets. So why keep kicking it?
Because popularity at the price of a sandwich does not make 60 metres the right height for Victoria Harbour. I am not angry with the families who use it. I am not angry with the operator who cut the fare and kept the site alive. I am impatient with the official habit of talking as if Hong Kong has solved the landmark problem when it has not. The Hong Kong Tourism Board talks big. Tourism bureaux everywhere talk big. Talking big is the job. Delivery is the part that keeps going missing.
Hong Kong is not short of attractions. That needs saying in the same breath as the complaint, or the complaint turns into a sulk.
Victoria Peak is still the high ground that defines the island. The paid deck at Sky Terrace 428 is one thing. The completely free epic views along Lugard Road and Barker Road are another.
Disneyland does the family day out, and it does it at a scale no harbour wheel will ever match.
Ocean Park still has the animals, the rides and the south side of the island.
Ngong Ping 360 and the Big Buddha give you the high wire over Lantau Island and the statue at the end of it. That pairing is already a reason people come.
Those four pillars plus the Peak are not theoretical. They are why visitors still have a week they can fill. A giant Ferris wheel is not a replacement for any of them. It is the missing simple object in the middle of the harbour story. London already had its monuments when the Eye went up. Singapore already had a skyline when the Flyer went up. They still built the wheel, because a wheel does a job those other places cannot do. It sits on the water, it turns at night, and it photographs from every hotel window.
I cannot think of a simpler major project. You do not need a new island. You do not need a theme park company to invent a story. You do not need 15 years of cultural programming. You need a site on the Kowloon shore, a height that beats 250 metres, a builder who has already done this in another city, and someone in charge who will walk the file to the right desks and not let it die in the inertia created by a working group. That is a game changer sitting in the open. The harshness, if there is any, is reserved for the shrug that keeps leaving it there.
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Hong Kong Observation Wheel - Replace The Wheel. Double It. Better Still, Triple It
What The Current Hong Kong Observation Wheel Actually Is
The numbers that never quite make the brochure
The official line is familiar. Enjoy breathtaking panoramic views of the city skyline and the picturesque harbour from 60 metres high in the sky. The leisurely ride promises unforgettable moments from a fresh perspective. That is the sort of sentence written by someone who has never stood at the top of Victoria Peak on a clear winter morning, and who has never looked at Two International Finance Centre from the promenade and then looked at the wheel sitting at its feet.
.. and that paragraph nails it, did it not occur to anyone to question how a 60m tall ferris wheel could possibly compete and compare with the view from Victoria Peak at 428m?
Here is the machine in plain figures.
Height: 60 metres (197 feet) Hon
Location: 33 Man Kwong Street, Central Harbourfront, between Central Pier No. 9 and Pier No. 10.
Opened to the public: 5th December 2014.
Construction window: May 2014 to September 2014, which is unusually fast because the thing was assembled rather than born as a permanent civic monument.
Gondolas: 42 ordinary cabins plus one VIP gondola with leather seats and a glass bottom.
Capacity: up to 8 people in a standard gondola, 5 in the VIP cabin.
Ride time: about 15 to 20 minutes, typically 2 or 3 rotations.
Comforts: air conditioning and a communication system in each cabin. Useful in August. Not a substitute for height.
Original installation cost: about HK$250 million (about US$32 million) for the whole kit and transport.
Original operator: Swiss AEX, on a short lease. Monthly land rent in that first period was HK$850,000 (about US$109,000).
Current operator: The Entertainment Corporation Limited, working with AIA as title sponsor inside AIA Vitality Park.
Original adult ticket in 2014: HK$100 (about US$13). Concession HK$70 (about US$9).
Current adult ticket: HK$20 (about US$2.60). Child 3 to 11, senior 65 and above, and visitors with disabilities: HK$10 (about US$1.30). Under 3: free. Private gondola: HK$160 (about US$20.50). Fast pass extra: HK$70 (about US$9).
Usual hours: 11:00 to 23:00, last admission around 22:30, weather and typhoon signals permitting.
Those figures explain both the popularity and the problem. At HK$20 (about US$2.60) the ride is cheap enough that families will do it without thinking too hard. The operator has said more than 8 million people have ridden it since 2017, with a peak year of about 2.284 million in 2023 and a satisfaction score around 94%. By late 2024 the running total since the AIA era was being put at about 8.98 million. In June 2025 they said the 10 million mark had been passed, with more than 900,000 riders in the first 5 months of that year alone. In 2024 the operator won another 5 year run and promised the HK$20 (about US$2.60) price would hold. AIA extended the sponsorship. Arts events, markets, outdoor cinema and a carousel now sit around the wheel. On paper this is a success.
On the ground it is a pleasant harbourfront toy sitting in the shadow of buildings more than 400 metres tall. Two International Finance Centre is 416 metres. The Peak Tower viewing deck sits at 428 metres above sea level. A 60 metre wheel in that company is not an observation experience. It is a slow lift to the middle floors of the neighbours.
Who Actually Pays The HK$20 (US$2,60) to ride it
Local Hong Kong residents are not the main customer, whatever the press release implies
The cheap ticket is often sold as a gift to Hong Kong people. The operator’s own split says otherwise. When they marked 10 million riders in June 2025 they gave the only origin breakdown I have been able to find for the wheel itself. For the previous year:
Local visitors: about 20%
Asia: 76%
Europe and America: about 4%
Riders since 2017 from more than 150 countries and regions
They do not publish a Mainland-China only number. That gap matters, because “Asia” in a Hong Kong tourism sentence is a wide basket. It includes Mainland China, and it also includes Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore and the rest of the short haul list.
What we can say without guessing is this. Only about 1 rider in 5 is local. The other 4 are visitors. City-wide, Mainland Chinese arrivals are about 76% of all visitors to Hong Kong, so a large part of that 76% Asia figure on the wheel is almost certainly our friends from Mainland China. I would not put my name to an 80% Mainland China claim for the wheel itself, because that would squeeze Taiwan, Japan and Southeast Asia down to almost nothing and the operator has not given us that cut. I would put my name to this: the HK$20 (about US$2.60) price is visitor policy first and resident policy second. A local amenity that is 80% locals looks one way. A HK$20 (about US$2.60) ride that is 20% locals looks like a volume machine for people who already expect cheap tickets.
That does not make the price wrong. It makes the speech around the price sloppy. If the city ever builds a serious wheel, keep a low off peak local price and stop pretending the current HK$20 (about US$2.60) is mainly an act of kindness to local residents.
How We Ended Up With a 60 Metre Ferris Wheel
A short lease, a fast assembly, and a long argument
The idea of a giant wheel in Hong Kong is older than the machine now turning in Central. In March 2001 Wharf Holdings put forward a 75 metre wheel at Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui. That is the correct side of the harbour if you want the view that actually sells Hong Kong on postcards: the island ridge, Victoria Peak, the Bank of China angles, the night wall of glass. The first Town Planning Board decision that same month said no. The site had a 38 metre height limit. Wharf wanted a podium as well, which would have taken the top of the wheel to about 103 metres. The board said a relaxation would punch a hole in the waterfront height rules and invite every other tall idea to follow. (and guess what the Rosewood Hotel, a short walk from the Ocean Terminal did just that, it is 256m which is a darn sight more than 103m)
Wharf came back with surveys. More than 70% of people asked were in favour. In September 2001 the plan was given a path forward, with talk of a 2004 opening. The London Eye architects at Marks Barfield even drew a hubless, spoke free ring of about 70 metres, aligned at 218 degrees for feng shui, sitting on an extension of Ocean Terminal. They talked about 500,000 visitors a year. For a moment Hong Kong was going to have a proper wheel in the right place. Then the city did what it so often does with the interesting idea. It put it in a drawer. Lands Department would not bring the Ocean Terminal lease forward, the timetable slipped, and what we got instead, years later, was the Ocean Terminal Deck. That deck is a perfectly nice place to stand at ground level and look at the island. Ground level is not the same as 150 metres.
The Central version was small before Swiss AEX ever won the tender. In August 2011 Hall Organisation and Great City Attractions went to the harbourfront task force with a “Hong Kong Eye” at Piers 9 and 10. The height in that paper was already 60 metres. Temporary lease, 1 to 3 years, white wheel, soft lights, set 50 metres back from the seawall so the promenade still worked. The Urban Design Study for the New Central Harbourfront had already marked that strip as future open promenade, not a place for a record structure. Swiss AEX later built to the same 60 metre scale. So the smallness was not an accident that crept in during construction. It was the brief.
The Lands Department leased about 9,620 square metres between Piers 9 and 10 in May 2013. Construction only really began in May 2014. Parts came in from Europe. A Dutch wheel maker supplied the structure. The cabins came from POMA. The public opening on 5th December 2014 felt hurried. Opening day tickets were HK$100 (about US$13). The sales target was 1 million riders a year, or about 2,740 a day. The Harbourfront Commission could talk, but it did not have the power to unmake the decision.
Then came the ungainly middle chapter. In 2017 the government awarded the next operating term to The Entertainment Corporation Limited. Swiss AEX had lost the land. The wheel stopped in late August 2017. For a few weeks it looked as if the whole thing would be taken apart. On 6th September 2017 the two companies struck a deal to keep the existing wheel standing. It reopened on 20th December 2017 as part of AIA Vitality Park, painted up, sponsored, and repriced at HK$20 (about US$2.60). That price cut is the single smartest thing anyone has done with this attraction. It turned a weak landmark into a cheap outing. It did not turn it into a world class one.
Why Central Was Never Going To Allow A Giant Ferris Wheel
City Hall, Edinburgh Place, and the empty air in front of HSBC
This is the bit that has been sitting in plain sight. Walk out of the HSBC headquarters, stand in Statue Square, and look toward the water. There is a reason that foreground stays low. The Bank building was designed to face the harbour. The lions sit in an open plaza. City Hall and Edinburgh Place, just to the east, are civic buildings on purpose, not commercial towers. After the Central reclamation pushed the shoreline north, that remaining open air became even more precious. Planners have spent decades keeping tall objects out of that front row so the Bank cluster, the Cenotaph and City Hall do not end up staring at the back of a podium.
A 200 metre to 250 metre observation tower in front of City Hall and Edinburgh Place, which is what the 2013 paper actually floated, would have walked straight into that rule book. I cannot prove that a single clause on the HSBC view is why the Piers 9 and 10 wheel is 60 metres. The wheel sits a little further west, next to Two International Finance Centre, which is already 416 metres tall, so that exact plot was not being protected as a lawn in front of the Bank. What I can say is this. The whole new Central harbourfront was planned as a low, open promenade. The first serious Central bid in 2011 arrived already cut down to 60 metres. Nobody with a 180 metre drawing was going to get a warm welcome on that shore, and a giant at Edinburgh Place would have been a planning war. Height rules on the island side help explain why the city never tried to go big in Central. They are also an excellent reason to stop trying. Put the new wheel on the other side in Kowloon.
The Buried Ideas For a Ferris Wheel You Were Not Meant To Remember
Kai Tak Point, lost jobs, and the schemes that never left the folder
While the Ocean Terminal fight was on, there was a second location floating in the same newspaper paragraphs: Kai Tak Point, the tip of the old airport runway. The idea was a Ferris wheel out on the end of the concrete, which would have meant reclaiming more seabed around the old approach. It was never a full planning application with a name on the gate. It was a “proposals were considered” line, and it was not happening in the short term. That is why most people who live here have never seen it. It was not a project. It was a possible pin on a map.
Kai Tak came back twice more, in stranger clothes.
In 2007 the architect Nigel Reading floated the Hong Kong Spin on the old airport site. Not a standard wheel. An inclined tower with a horizontal revolving wheel set into it, restaurants and bars in the rim, pods climbing a spiral to a top platform. He sold it as East meeting West, the Chinese character for middle crossed with the Greek letter phi. It would have been either brilliant or ridiculous. It was neither, because it was never built.
In 2011 two operators were chasing a short harbour lease. Hall wanted Central at 60 metres. Freij Entertainment wanted to plant a transportable wheel at Kai Tak, first for a six month carnival, then keep it. Neither of those bids became a record structure.
In 2013 a paper went to the Kai Tak harbourfront task force for a 200 metre to 250 metre plus vertical observation tower, described as a vertical theme park, either in front of City Hall and Edinburgh Place or at Kai Tak Fantasy beside the new cruise terminal. That tower joined the Spin and the 75 metre Ocean Terminal ring in the same quiet cupboard.
I mention Kai Tak Point only to bury it properly. As a site for a giant wheel it would have been a disaster for the same reason the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal has been a slog. The tip of that runway is a long way from the city people actually visit. There is still no proper rail station at the end. Kai Tak MTR is a very long hike. Buses and taxis crawl through the same bottleneck. A promised green transit line down the old runway is scheduled to open in 2031. Until that exists, you are asking first time visitors to spend the afternoon solving a transport puzzle before they even buy a cabin ticket.
That fiasco has already drawn blood at the top. In November 2023 lawmakers tore into the tourism minister over the cruise terminal, the missing links and the empty shops. In December 2024 Kevin Yeung Yun-hung was removed as Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism. The official language was a mid-term reshuffle. The charge sheet that had been read out in public for a year included slow tourism work and poor handling of Kai Tak, transport first. The transport minister went in the same reshuffle. Royal Caribbean, which had just made Hong Kong a home port again, said they were surprised. I am not. You cannot put a world class terminal at the end of a runway, leave the subway 30 minutes away, photograph tourists standing in taxi queues, and expect the people in charge to keep their jobs. A record wheel on that same tip would inherit the same issues.
I Have been on the Observation Wheel. The View Is Not The View They Sell
Why 60 metres on the island side was the wrong bet
I will be blunt, because polite language has already had 12 years. The location is the first mistake. You are standing on Hong Kong Island, looking across to Kowloon. Kowloon from that height is a wide, busy shore with the Cultural Centre, the clock tower, hotels, and a lot of sky. It is not ugly. It is also not the image that made this city famous. The famous image is the other way round. From Tsim Sha Tsui, from the Star Ferry, from the Cultural Centre piazza at dusk, you look at the island and Victoria Peak and the stacked lights. That is the view people fly here to see. Putting a short wheel on the island is like building a tiny viewing tower behind the stage and asking the audience to admire the back of the scenery.
The second mistake is height against context. A 60 metre wheel in a field is a decent wheel. A 60 metre wheel in front of 300 metre and 400 metre towers is a hoop. From the promenade it can photograph quite nicely, especially at night when the cabins are lit. From inside a gondola you spend a good part of the rotation looking into offices, hotel rooms and the underside of the highway structures. On a clear day you do get a sweep of the harbour. You do not get the gasp. The gasp lives much higher at Victoria Peak, or on the other side, Kowloon.
Compare that with Victoria Peak. Sky Terrace 428 sits at 428 metres above the sea, and that platform is the one that charges you. The epic viewpoints along Lugard Road and Barker Road are completely free. No ticket, no terrace fee, nothing except getting yourself up to the Peak. I have said for years that Barker Road is one of the great urban views on earth. Lugard Road is the same story, just a slightly longer walk with the harbour opening and closing through the trees. The wheel cannot compete with that, and it should never have been asked to. A wheel earns its keep when it gives you a moving, enclosed, all weather version of a view you cannot get from high ground. Ours gives you a moving version of a view you can get from the pavement.
Weather makes the gap wider. Hong Kong humidity, haze and summer rain already steal long views. If your cabin only climbs to 60 metres, haze wins more often than it should. A 180 metre or 250 metre cabin still has a chance of sitting above the worst of the low muck. That is not romance. That is how air works in this valley.
The 5th December 2024 Stoppage
A reminder that even a small wheel is a machine
On 5th December 2024, the 10th anniversary of the public opening as it happens, a backup system failure stopped the wheel and left about 190 people sitting in cabins for roughly 40 minutes. Everyone came off safely around 17:45. The Electrical and Mechanical Services Department said the safety system had done its job by freezing the ride. Operations restarted the next morning after checks. I mention it not to scare anyone. I mention it because a wheel is not a sculpture. It is a moving public structure in a typhoon city, and if we ever build a serious one the engineering conversation has to be as grown up as the marketing.
Dubai learned a harsher version of the same lesson. Ain Dubai opened on 21st October 2021 as the tallest wheel on earth, closed in March 2022 for what were called enhancements, sat dark for years, and only returned to the public on 26th December 2024. Record height without reliable operation is just an expensive silhouette. Hong Kong should want the record. It should also want a machine that turns on a Sunday in July.
The 10 Largest Ferris Wheels In The World
Measured by height, in metres and feet
This is the list that makes our 60 metre wheel look like a side stall. Heights below are the usual published structural heights. A few cities argue over a metre here or there. The order does not change the moral.
Ain Dubai, Dubai, UAE. 250 m / 820 ft. Opened 2021. Current world record. 48 cabins. About 38 minutes a turn. Capacity around 1,750. Project cost widely put near US$270 million (about HK$2.1 billion). Closed 2022 to late 2024, then reopened.
High Roller, Las Vegas, USA. 167.6 m / 550 ft. Opened 2014. World tallest from 2014 to 2021. 28 large cabins. Continuous rotation over the Strip.
Singapore Flyer, Singapore. 165 m / 541 ft. Opened 2008. World tallest 2008 to 2014. 28 capsules. The regional comparison Hong Kong should have feared in 2013.
Star of Nanchang, Nanchang, China. 160 m / 525 ft. Opened 2006. World tallest 2006 to 2008. 60 gondolas. Built in a city with a fraction of Hong Kong's visitor base.
Eye of Bohai / Bailang River Wheel, Weifang, China. 145 m / 476 ft. Opened 2017. Axleless wheel sitting on a bridge. Proof that China treats giant wheels as ordinary civic kit.
Sun of Moscow, Moscow, Russia. 140 m / 459 ft. Opened 2022. Europe's tallest current wheel. 30 cabins.
London Eye, London, UK. 135 m / 443 ft. Opened 2000. The one that restarted the whole fashion. 32 capsules. Still the wheel most visitors use as their mental yardstick.
Squirrel Windmill, Wuhu, China. 133 m / 436 ft. Opened 2020. Theme park wheel that still outclimbs anything Hong Kong has put on the harbour.
Bay Glory, Shenzhen, China. 128 m / 420 ft. Opened 2021. Qianhai waterfront. 28 large cabins. An hour from Lo Wu and already more than twice our height.
Sky Dream, Taichung, Taiwan. 126 m / 413 ft. Opened 2017. Moved from Fukuoka. 60 cabins. Still more than double the Hong Kong wheel.
Hong Kong Observation Wheel for scale: 60 metres / 197 feet, opened 2014. It would not make a top 40 list of giant wheels.
Just behind that top 10 sit Redhorse Osaka at 123 metres (404 feet), the Orlando wheel at 122 metres (400 feet), and a whole cluster of 120 metre wheels in Suzhou, Tianjin, Melbourne and elsewhere. Macau even put a 130 metre wheel at Studio City. Shenzhen, an hour away, built Bay Glory at more than twice our height while we were congratulating ourselves on harbourfront vibrancy. If you only remember one comparison, remember Singapore Flyer at 165 metres. Same league of city. Same humid air. A wheel two and a half times taller than ours, opened 6 years before ours, on purpose, as a marker.
What Size Ferris Wheel Would Actually Work In Hong Kong
Twice is the minimum. Record height is the point
Twice the current wheel is 120 metres, or 394 feet. That would finally put Hong Kong into the ordinary international club. It would still be shorter than the London Eye, shorter than Singapore, and shorter than a bridge wheel in Weifang. I would not campaign for 120 metres. That is the participation medal.
A serious Hong Kong wheel starts at 180 metres (591 feet) and should be designed to beat 250 metres (820 feet). Call it 260 to 280 metres if the engineers can make it behave in a typhoon and given we have very strict typhoon codes that is simply not an issue. That is not a childish wish for the record book. Victoria Harbour is a wide stage. Small objects die on a wide stage. The Star Ferry works because it is in the water, close to people, and loaded with 140 years of memory. A wheel has no such memory until you give it scale. Scale is how a new object becomes part of the skyline instead of clutter in front of it.
Think about sightlines. From the Kowloon promenade a 250 metre wheel would rise above most of the older TST and Hung Hom blocks and sit in conversation with the island high ground. From the island it would read as a single great circle on the opposite shore, lit at night, turning slowly, impossible to mistake for another tower. From incoming aircraft and from the harbour it would do what the current hoop cannot do: announce the city.
Cabin design should be unapologetic. Large air conditioned gondolas, some with glass floors, one or two fitted for a proper dinner sitting, one kept as a quiet cabin with no loud soundtrack. A single rotation of 25 to 35 minutes, not a fairground spin. The current 15 minutes and 2 or 3 turns feels like the operator knows you will run out of things to look at.
Put the Ferris Wheel On Kowloon Side
On the water next to Ocean Terminal, five minutes from the Star Ferry
If I could move one object in this city without asking a committee first, I would pick the wheel up, carry it across the harbour, and put it down three times larger. The island side is the wrong argument now. Height rules, City Hall, Edinburgh Place and the air in front of HSBC all say the same thing. Build on Kowloon.
The cleanest pin I can see is this. Put the new wheel on the water, next to Ocean Terminal, in the pocket between the piers that are already there. Not another mall on a podium. A piled structure in the harbour, designed so ships can still work the berths if that is what the port needs, or designed as a purpose built wheel platform if the berths can be rearranged. From the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry pier you are looking at a walk of about 5 minutes. No runway. No 45 minute bus ride. No taxi argument. You get off the Star Ferry and you are there.
That site does three jobs at once. It faces the island and Victoria Peak, which is the view that matters. It sits in the densest visitor walk in Kowloon, between the Star Ferry, the clock tower, the Cultural Centre and Harbour City. And it finally uses the water instead of hiding behind another building. Ocean Terminal already stands over the sea. The 2017 extension proved you can build a serious structure on that marine deck. A wheel between the piers is the same idea, done properly, at the height the 2001 plan was never allowed to reach.
West Kowloon Cultural District remains the civic choice if the Ocean Terminal water pocket is declared impossible. M+ and the Palace Museum do not read across the water at night the way a 250 metre lit circle would, and the high speed rail station is already feeding first timers into that end of Kowloon.
The long promenade from the Avenue of Stars through Tsim Sha Tsui East, Hung Hom and To Kwa Wan and on toward Kwun Tong is the reserve line. That walk already faces the island. The view from the Avenue of Stars and from Hung Hom is the postcard. Further east is still better than the truncated outlook at the cruise terminal tip.
What I would not do is leave it in Central and bolt on more height. The island side already has Victoria Peak. The island side already has the height rule book around City Hall and the Bank. Adding a bigger hoop in the same slot still points the cabins at Kowloon. You would spend a billion dollars to look at the wrong shore from a more expensive angle, and you would spend another five years in a planning argument that the 2011 bid already lost by arriving at 60 metres.
The Money Argument Nobody Wants To Have
A giant wheel is not the expensive item in this city
People hear world record and assume fantasy money. Look at the real figures.
Hong Kong Observation Wheel, 2014: about HK$250 million (US$32 million) for a 60 metre temporary style installation.
London Eye class wheel, mid 2000s industry talk: around £50 million (about HK$767 million / US$98 million).
Ain Dubai wheel works, commonly reported near US$270 million, about HK$2.1 billion, for a 250 metre record structure with 48 giant cabins.
Current HKOW adult ticket: HK$20 (about US$2.60). Ain Dubai standard tickets after reopening have been in the region of AED 145, roughly HK$305 or US$39.
Sky Terrace 428 and Peak Tram combinations commonly run well over HK$200 (about US$26) once you add the pieces together.
A private gondola on the current wheel is HK$160 (about US$20.50) for up to 8 people. That is still less than a taxi across the harbour in Friday traffic if you are not careful.
HK$2 billion (about US$256 million) sounds large until you place it against the projects Hong Kong already treats as normal. Cruise terminals, park islands, cultural barns, road decks, and tourism schemes that never quite become places people plan a trip around. A wheel is a single object with a single job. It either turns or it does not. It either rises above the skyline or it does not. That simplicity is worth a great deal in a city that loves complicated diagrams.
This is the part the brochures keep missing. Hong Kong already spent the hard money on the big four attractions - the Peak. Disneyland, Ocean Park, Ngong Ping 360 and the Big Buddha were complicated. A giant wheel is not. The engineering is known. The operators exist. The visitor appetite is already proven at HK$20 (about US$2.60) on a short ride. What has been missing is not a feasibility study. What has been missing is one senior person who will take the file to the Development Bureau, the Tourism Commission and a builder who has already put a 150 metre plus wheel in the ground somewhere else, and who will not let the thing become another harbourfront workshop.
Revenue is not mysterious. The current wheel proves demand at the cheap end: millions of rides at HK$20 (about US$2.60), and only about 20% of those rides are residents. A record wheel would not stay at HK$20 (about US$2.60) for every cabin at sunset, and it should not. A layered ticket works. Day ride at a public price. Sunset premium. Night premium. Private cabin. Annual local pass. Sponsor cabin. The London Eye has lived on that model for a quarter of a century. Singapore Flyer too. You keep a low local price at off peak hours so residents still use it, and you charge visitors what the view is actually worth. The mistake in 2014 was charging HK$100 (about US$13) for a 60 metre view. The mistake now would be assuming that HK$20 (about US$2.60) is the only number the public will accept for something genuinely tall.
Sponsorship already works on the small wheel. AIA did not stay for 9 years because the structure is shy. A record wheel on the Kowloon shore would be one of the most valuable outdoor advertising and brand stages in Asia. Lighting rights, cabin naming, festival skins, New Year countdowns. That is not a dirty word. It is how you stop the taxpayer carrying the whole thing.
Why A Giant Ferris Wheel Still Beats A Lot Of Other Ideas
Icons versus homework
I have to be careful here, because I like country parks and I like the fact that this city still has wild cattle and empty trails 30 minutes from a tower block. That is part of the real Hong Kong. It is not, by itself, a strategy for holding international visitors for a fourth night. Eco sites matter. They do not replace a harbour icon. In the age of short videos, people arrive with a picture already in their head. If your new attraction cannot hold that picture for 3 seconds, it will not travel.
A giant wheel does a simple piece of work.
It photographs from every shore, every hotel window, every incoming ferry.
It works in the evening, which is when Hong Kong is at its best and when a lot of walking tours have already finished.
It works for children, grandparents, wheelchair users and people who will never climb Lugard Road.
It does not need a 90 minute coach transfer, which is the sentence that should have been written on the Kai Tak file in large letters.
It can sit inside a public waterfront rather than behind a ticket gate in a theme park.
It gives you a controlled, seated, air conditioned way to show first timers the geography of the harbour in one rotation.
It becomes a meeting point. Meet me under the wheel is a better sentence than meet me near the temporary event lawn.
Disneyland, Ocean Park, the Big Buddha, Ngong Ping 360 and Victoria Peak already do their jobs. The harbour itself is still the main character. The wheel should have been the moving punctuation mark on that harbour. Instead it became a comma.
What The Current Operator Gets Right
Credit where it is due before I keep complaining
Fairness requires a paragraph that the earlier posts did not always pause for. After 2017 the site became more useful to ordinary residents. HK$20 (about US$2.60) removed the snobbery and the rip off feeling. The park around the wheel now holds concerts, markets, charity nights and outdoor films. An AR app tried to add history to a view that was otherwise thin. The 5 year extension and the promise to hold the price are aimed at locals as much as visitors. On a Sunday afternoon the place is alive in a way the 2014 opening never managed.
None of that changes the structural verdict. You can put excellent events around a short wheel. You still have a short wheel. Events are weather and programming. Height is geometry. Geometry is what you cannot fix with a mural. And the rider split tells you the cheap ticket is doing more work for visitors than for the people who live here.
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Day and Night View if the Mega Wheel was on Kowloon Side
Out Of Left Field, And I Mean It
Ideas that will never survive a working group, which is why I like them
If we are going to reboot, we may as well reboot with some imagination. Here is the unfiltered list.
Build the record wheel on the water next to Ocean Terminal, in the pocket between the existing piers. Five minutes from the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry. Face the island. Leave Central alone.
If that water pocket is declared sacred for ships, put the wheel on the promenade line from the Avenue of Stars through Hung Hom toward Kwun Tong. Same view. Same walk.
Sell a combined Star Ferry plus wheel ticket. Harbour at water level, harbour at 250 metres, same afternoon. That is a complete geography lesson, and the walk between them is short enough that people will actually do it.
Keep one cabin as a marriage cabin. Hong Kong already does chapel views in hotels. A turning cabin above the harbour at dusk would be booked every Saturday for 20 years.
Keep one cabin silent. No video, no sponsor loop, no soundtrack. Just glass and the city. You would be surprised how rare that is.
Light the rim as a civic clock. Slow colour change at 12 and at 6, and a proper evening turn at 8pm now that A Symphony of Lights will be gone by the end of 2026. The harbour will still want one moment in the night that people can set a watch by
Design the structure for Signal No. 3 operation where safe, and for a dignified halt at No. 8. Publish the rule. Visitors already live by typhoon signals. Stop pretending weather is a surprise.
Put a public free viewing terrace at the base, so people who will never buy a cabin ticket still get a framed harbour picture. The wheel then works as architecture even when you do not ride it.
Do not attach a shopping mall to the legs. We have enough malls. Attach shade, rest rooms, a decent cafe and a place to sit. That is it.
Do not put it at Kai Tak Point. The cruise terminal already taught that lesson, and it helped cost a tourism minister his job. Wait until 2031 for a transit line if you want to decorate the old runway. Do not hang a world record wheel on a site people cannot reach.
Do not put a 250 metre object in front of City Hall and Edinburgh Place. That civic front is kept low for a reason. The Bank can keep its air. The new wheel can keep the other shore.
Run the cabins with a live harbour briefing in English, Cantonese and Putonghua, written by people who have actually stood on these streets since the 1970s, not by a slogan committee.
Make the local off peak price low enough that a local family can ride after dinner without a debate. The prestige ticket can wait for sunset. Do not dress the visitor price up as a resident gift.
Give one named official the file and the authority to walk it to a builder. Do not send it back into a harbourfront workshop for another round of vibrancy language. The simple project dies when nobody owns it.
If the government insists on eco tourism as well, fine. Put a second, small, honest wheel nowhere. Put the money into one giant harbour wheel and let the country parks stay country parks.
Feng Shui, Superstition And Why That Is Not A Joke Here
A circle on water is not a neutral object in this city
The Marks Barfield Ocean Terminal scheme bothered to turn the wheel to 218 degrees for feng shui. That detail is easy to smirk at if you live somewhere else. After more than 50 years here I take it seriously even when I cannot recite the compass school chapter and verse. A great circle on the harbour edge will be read as a gate, an eye, a coin, a hole in the skyline. Some people will love that. Some will worry about it. Ignore the worry and you spend a decade in letters to the editor. Hire someone who knows the harbour dragon lines and the old Kowloon waterfront temples, listen, adjust the alignment a few degrees, and then build. That is not surrender. That is how large objects get permission to belong.
The same instinct is why the air in front of HSBC still matters. Sir Norman Foster left the ground floor of that building open so the Bank could see the water. The lions face the harbour. You do not drop a 250 metre wheel into that gaze and then act surprised when the argument starts. Put the circle on the Kowloon side and let the Bank keep its view.
I still rub the HSBC lions in Central. I was born on Friday the 13th. I know how this city mixes luck and steel. A record wheel should be opened on a date that does not fight the calendar, with a ceremony that looks like Hong Kong rather than a product launch.
What I Would Say To The Next Committee Discussing New Attractions in Hong Kong
A short brief, because long briefs are how 75 metre ideas become 60 metre ones
Do not renovate the current wheel and call it a new chapter. Do not add a light show and call it vision. Decide whether Hong Kong wants an observation wheel that can stand next to Singapore and Dubai, or whether it wants a cheap family ride in Central. Both can exist. They are not the same project.
Hong Kong already has Victoria Peak, Disneyland, Ocean Park, Ngong Ping 360 and the Big Buddha. Those are not small things. A giant wheel is the simple add-on. It needs a site, a height and an owner. It does not need another slogan.
If the answer is a true wheel, write four lines and stop.
Height: not less than 180 metres, with a design target that beats 250 metres.
Shore: Kowloon. First choice, on the water next to Ocean Terminal between the existing piers, about 5 minutes from the Star Ferry. Second choice, the promenade from the Avenue of Stars toward Hung Hom and Kwun Tong. Not Kai Tak Point. Not Edinburgh Place.
Ticket: a low local off peak price and a premium sunset price, in HK dollars and US dollars, published in the open. Do not pretend the cheap ticket is mainly for residents if the rider mix says otherwise.
Owner: one named official with the file, plus a builder who has already done a 150 metre plus wheel. No further workshop required.
Everything else is engineering, wind, leases and patience. Those are hard. They are not mysterious. Other cities have already done the mysterious part.
A Personal Closing Note
I keep coming back to this subject because it is a perfect miniature of a larger Hong Kong habit. We have the harbour. We have the high ground. We have the ferries. We have millions of people who still want to stand and look. Then we install something half the size of the idea, in the wrong place, and we ask the brochure to do the rest. The current wheel is not a scandal. It is worse than a scandal. It is a shrug.
A 60 metre ride for HK$20 (about US$2.60) is a perfectly decent way to kill 15 minutes with a child who wants to go round and round. I will keep saying that. I will also keep saying that this city can do better than decent. Size is everything with a wheel. We need a replacement at least twice the size. I would rather it was four times the size, on the water off Ocean Terminal, five minutes from the Star Ferry, lit at night, turning above the most photographed piece of water in Asia. That would be a tourist attraction. That would also be a gift to the people who already live here and who still, after all these years, like to look at their own city as if they had just arrived.
But heck, what do I know. I have only been looking at this harbour since 1972.
So there you go
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Go here for the Hong Kong Michelin Restaurant Guide which includes the Bib Gourmand Category
I do not do Food Tours in Hong Kong but I know people that do!
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The information above can be shown to restaurant managers in Hong Kong if you are intolerant to gluten and nuts,
I do not do food tours as mentioned above, I have very specific reasons and part of it is that I do not speak Cantonese or write Chinese, I am from Yorkshire in England and I lack the language gene and it is not through lack of trying and yes a lot of restaurants do not have English menu’s or staff who speak conversational English.
.. and yet I have eaten at close to 1,400 restaurants in Hong Kong since January 2nd 1972, my wife was born in Hong Kong and we have been together over 40 years and her first language is Cantonese and a lot of her family are Chinese or half Chinese so I have never had much of an issue!
This does not translate to doing food tours though, yes, I could do them, no problem there but they would never ever be as good as the food tours done by my friends (see the 3 links above) most of their awesome guides are locally born Hong Kong Chinese and obviously food culture is part of their DNA, it is impossible for me to compete with that!
So please feel free to contact them for food tours
I do not do Hiking Tours in Hong Kong but I know someone that does!
I do not do Hiking Tours, never have and never will even though I used to go Hiking a lot when I was a lot younger, The Hong Kong Government is promoting hiking tours so I urge you to contact my friend Sabrina at Hong Kong Trails and Tours, she is a long time Hong Kong resident and and a very experienced hiker with close to 700 Hikes in 15+ years under her belt, please click on the link below
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© Copyright Acknowledged | All rights reserved | images taken by Jamie
