Stage 6: Hong Kong Harbourfront - Hong Kong Harbourfront, 140km
GPM:
Tai Tam Gap (cat.3) 2,2km @ 7,0%
Tai Tam Gap (cat.3) 2,2km @ 7,0%
Tai Tam Gap (cat.3) 2,2km @ 7,0%
Magazine Gap via Tregunter Path (cat.2) 3,3km @ 6,1%
Mount Butler Lodge (cat.3) 1,8km @ 7,6%
Our final stage of the Tour of Hong Kong is the first, and only, which takes place entirely on Hong Kong Island, the original colony when the Britons first acquired it. Taken from the name 香港, meaning “fragrant harbour”, the characters for the SAR’s traditional name, taken from that of the island, would be Xiānggǎng in Hanyu pinyin, and Hēunggóng in Cantonese Yale (a transcription based on applying pinyin orthography, normally intended for Mandarin, to Cantonese spellings and pronunciations). Nowadays 香港島, adding the suffix -dou, is usually used to identify Hong Kong Island, as opposed to the overall territory of the SAR - nowadays, with the New Territories, Hong Kong is not even the largest island in Hong Kong, as Lantau Island, on the shores of which the new airport was constructed on reclaimed land, is larger than it.
The island known now as Hong Kong was incorporated within the Chinese Empire for the first time in around 214 BCE, during the Qin Dynasty, before which it is believed that the settlers in the area were likely to have been Austronesians. It was largely an outpost, save for a brief period where it was located close to the temporary capital of the Southern Song following the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century, and was first visited by Europeans when the Portuguese arrived in the 16th Century on one of Jorge Álvares’ explorations, setting up the Tamão trading post for a few years on an island in the area (location not certain, but the name is cognate with Tuen Mun, leading many to speculate that the two are connected), but this became less relevant to them after they secured the lease on Macau in 1557. After the Manchu conquest in the 17th Century, however, a series of policies known as “haijin” (海禁) banned sea trade to improve Chinese self-sufficiency led to the gradual dilapidation of the villages and towns in what is now Hong Kong. This was overturned by the Kangxi Emperor by the end of the century, but only Russian ships were allowed to trade anywhere except Canton until 1757, leading the city to become the main hub for European trade.
The British originally occupied the island as part of the First Opium War and it was ceded “in perpetuity” in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. At the time the island was home to around 3.000 people, but the attractive port potential of what is now Victoria Harbour came to British attention, and they established the town of Queenstown, renamed Victoria soon after in honour of the then-queen. The population of the island today, however, is around 1,3 million, reflecting just how dramatically the population has increased over the last 180 years. It was initially harsh, but the Taiping Rebellion led many Chinese traders, officials and merchants to flee and settle in the colony.
Looking back across Victoria Harbour from Hong Kong Island
The island was the last bastion of British control in the area after the Japanese invasion, with them stepping on to the island on 18th December 1941, ten days after taking Kowloon. Formal surrender came on Christmas Day. The Japanese undertook a forced repatriation program which reduced the population of Hong Kong from 1,6 million to just under half that figure, but it has enjoyed steady growth since then, until reaching its present size. It is lower than average population density for Hong Kong, but the statistics only cover the island as a whole, whereas the majority of the population of Hong Kong island is concentrated on the northern shores. This also includes most of the most affluent suburbs of the SAR.
Not least among these is the harbour-front Central district, where we hold the start/finish of this final stage, and which has been radically changed in recent years with developments to show off the economic strength of the area, with a lot of those architectural glamour projects popular in large parts of the world. Our final run-in will include a number of these, as we are going to hold the start/finish in the Harbourfront complex, just after the Culture Plaza and opposite the Central Harbourfront Event Space, on the same site that hosted the Formula E races from 2015 to 2019 in the SAR, using the straight which you see at 0:15 of
this video leaving us with a nice wide and scenic setting and a safe finish on Lung Wo Road just before Hong Kong station, which is actually the name of an MTR station in Hong Kong believe it or not! Not that this is
that likely to be a sprint, but it’s possible. This is a tricky little final stage, you see.
2019 Hong Kong ePrix, showing the finish area for my stage on the right hand side, with the Event Space and the Hong Kong Observation Wheel prominent, and the Exhibition Centre in the background
Like most of the stages of this race, we are starting and finishing in the same place; only stages 3 and 5 have deviated from that template, and much like stage 4, we have multiple loops of a relatively long circuit here. However, we only have three, and then lap four is a much shorter and more challenging route allowing for time gaps to be opened up with some difficult terrain.
The ‘long lap’ here is a bumpy circuit of a little under 40km in length, tougher than the stage 1 or stage 4 circuits, but still not
super challenging, what with the bumpy terrain around the coast road thanks to the hilly nature of the island. Since we’re starting in the district of Central, the former beating heart of Victoria City, this part of the circuit is very urban, although we stick to the main roads around the coast until we get to the westernmost part of the district, Kennedy Town. Central is known as Chung Wan (中环, originally 中環) in Cantonese (Cantonese has more use of traditional characters than Mandarin, as the People’s Republic introduced the simplified characters as part of a drive to increase literacy), which has the same meaning, ever since the implementation of the Island Line of the MTR. This is the oldest part of what used to be Victoria City (the name is seldom used now) and crystallised around Canton Bazaar (later rebuilt as Central Market, a large Bauhaus-style wet market). Moving out of the immediately urbanised area takes us through Kennedy Town, which includes the very first public housing estate projects of Hong Kong, the 1967 skyscrapers, underneath the watchful eye of Victoria Peak, the highest on the island (and one which was tempting to include but in order to preserve balance I chose to omit).
Central District, Hong Kong
The southern side of the island is much more sparsely populated and includes some scenic green spaces and mountainside as well as vistas out across the South China Sea and onto the outlying, less urbanised (and even in some cases unsettled) islands of the SAR, with the most notable views being from Mount Kellett and Mount Cameron, between which lies a deep valley with two reservoirs in it, called Aberdeen Country Park, after the town at the shoreline to its south - itself, of course, named after the Scottish city of the same nomenclature. It is known as 香港仔 to locals (meaning Little Hong Kong, literally Hong Kong Tsai) and is in fact where the name Hong Kong is derived; this was an old fishing port which was arrived at by Europeans not yet aware of the anchorage potential on the other side of the island; misinterpreting the name of the town as the name of the island, by the time this error had been discovered, the erroneous name had come into common practice (a similar issue explains the name of Macau, which came from Portuguese arriving in the Haojing’ao (濠鏡澳) peninsula and when they asked locals about the name of the area, as they had come from overseas, locals directed them to a temple to the sea goddess Matsu, named A Ma Kok (媽閣), from which the Portuguese name “Amacquão” was taken, which over time simplified to Macau).
Aberdeen is also well known for its floating village, with some 6.000 mostly Tanka-ethnicity people living and working full-time on their boats, with a number of floating restaurants as well as fishing livelihoods; the harbour has also appeared numerous times in film, with other parts of the sailing scenes from
Enter the Dragon appearing here (mostly once the competitors are all assembled on Han’s vessel), as well as a chase sequence in the timeless classic
Double Impact, which stars the unbeatable pairing of Jean-Claude van Damme and Jean-Claude van Damme as identical twins separated at birth who get into various scrapes in Hong Kong, one a worldly-wise smuggler and the other a fish-out-of-water martial arts instructor from Los Angeles. Actual taglines include “one packs a punch, the other packs a piece” and “double the Van Damage” - so you know we’re talking a Citizen Kane beater here.
Aberdeen Country Park and the harbour in the background
There are a couple of uncategorised bumps on this loop, one from Waterfall Bay to Pok Fu Lam Fire Station where we rejoin the ring road (1,4km at 4,2%, but the first 700m are at 6,7%), and the other one being Stanley Gap which could arguably have been a cat.3 if it was a stage 1 or stage 4 type design on one of the laps, 1,4km at 5,5%. The eastern half of the island is also less densely populated with much more green land; we will head through the only categorised climb on this main circuit through some of this, up to Tai Tam Gap (大潭峡), a mountain pass that serves as the main connection between the north and south coasts of the island on the eastern side, and has a correctional institute, serving as the first “smart prison”, near its summit. The scenery around here is spectacular with various water features and landscape that is far less spoiled by man than the rest of the densely-populated SAR.
Tai Tam Reservoirs
The summit of these climbs falls 11,4km from the end of the circuit and we see this ascent three times. The final circuit is shorter - just 23,7km - so the final time we crest the Tai Tam Gap summit is at around 35km from the finish. The circuit becomes more urban once we descend into Shau Kei Wan and Quarry, so the last part of it is taking in some major urban roads and taking the race to the people rather than having them go to the race. Fighting our way through Quarry and into North Point sees us heading along some very well-known and historic thoroughfares of Hong Kong Island, but this run-in is mostly pretty flat which will comes as some respite for the riders especially if they are local enough to know what’s to come.
North Point is known for its population of Shanghainese Chinese, who form a significant community here especially after fleeing the Civil War (the district was known as “Little Shanghai” during British ownership post-war due to this), as well as its beaches which used to host swimming galas. It was during this period the most densely populated area on earth, though obviously it lost that crown to neighbouring parts of the colony in the 1960s. There was also a second wave of immigration from Fujian, and although most of these moved on to form large parts of the Chinese expatriate communities in Southeast Asia, elements of their legacy remain; although the Shanghainese introduced the first Mandarin-language educational institutions in Hong Kong, they largely deferred to Cantonese within a couple of generations, whereas the Hokkien community in North Point retain their mother tongue to this day. In North Point we also join King’s Road, a major East-west thoroughfare in northern Hong Kong Island which is dual-carriageway with the Hong Kong Tram System running down the central reservation.
Watch this one on mute - the sped up voices can get pretty annoying to deal with. We take the road through the whole video until 5:50 where we take the flyover across to the harbour front on laps 1-3, on the final, shorter circuit we will join this video from the junction on the left at 2:49
As mentioned, we take the flyover at Tin Hau in order to head to the coastline, and then have a left and a right to get around Wan Chai Sports Ground and onto Lung Wo Road, which takes us down a final straight which is 1500m in length - and includes two rather nice tunnel spots, including one underneath Hong Kong Exhibition Centre, giving the finish a bit of the Monaco Grand Prix vibes. It also takes us past Central Plaza, a skyscraper that, for a time, was the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world at 374m, though that only makes it the third highest building on Hong Kong Island.
Hong Kong Exhibition Centre, on reclaimed land, and the skyscraper to its left. Stage finish by the open space to the rear
This is fine the first three times, of course, but the final lap means that we don’t really expect a sizeable péloton battling it out over that long final straight, and it’s going to be more about trying to keep chasers at bay with them able to see their prey. At least, that’s what I hope for. We almost
immediately diverge from the main circuit by taking a 90º left at Hong Kong Station, and heading back on ourselves to the
Bank of China Tower, an iconic skyscraper designed by IM Pei (貝聿銘), which has been one of the most recognisable features on the Hong Kong skyline since its opening in 1990 - and was controversial as the only such building not to have seen consultation on
feng shui as was the convention at the time. And then things get pretty serious, pretty quickly. It’s been slightly uphill already to get to the tower, but after this? Well, we hang a right and then shortly afterwards a 90º left to start climbing the extremely steep rise up to the Mid-Levels. You’ll probably be aware of how steep this is - the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator system is the largest covered escalator system in the world, and were immortalised in Wong Kar-Wai’s
Chungking Express, a subtle two-story drama which is arguably the finest piece of Hong Kong cinema outside of its martial arts or action genre pieces, and which utilised the then-newly-opened system as a repeated leitmotif as Faye Wong’s quietly lovestruck waitress runs errands and silently rebuilds the life of lonely, but oblivious, police officer Tony Leung.
Faye Wong takes a break from introducing Cantonese audiences to the might of the Cocteau Twins
The escalator system today
This area is, at night, the lively
Lan Kwai Fong area, which features the bars and food stalls also shown in the film; an area of which has been dubbed “Soho” after the London district known for similar reasons, but we’re avoiding the wildest parts of town in favour of climbing a very steep ascent up Wyndham Street (one of the oldest colonial streets in Central, in fact, formerly known as Pedder Hill and once famous for its flower market, before this moved to the adjacent D’Aguilar Street in the 1920s),and then onward to Albany Road (
here is a video of somebody walking down the hill, we come out of the super-steep underpass you see at 5:30 on our way up) past
Government House, the official residence of the Governor and house of the Legislative Council from 1855 to 1931, and then we climb onward to Tregunter Path, a super-steep route which takes us into the Mid-Levels, not quite all the way up to Victoria Peak, but if we went up there we wouldn’t be able to descend back down as there’s only the one road to it and then a one-way loop around it, preventing us from accessing it.
Tregunter Path
Nevertheless, this climb - which crests at 20,3km from the line - is absolutely brutal. It’s only short, but this is a Basque type climb; the first part on Wyndham Street is fairly typical fare, but as we cross onto Albany Road and go through the underpass the gradient leaps up to 23%, and stays at 20% or more for the next 300m. It flattens out a little to a couple of hundred metres at “just” 10% or so around where the video I linked earlier starts, then onto Tregunter Path it’s 400m at 13,5% before the gradients start to ease off at the summit. Overall it’s 1,45km at 13,4%, which puts it in the same kind of ballpark as climbs like the Alto de Aia or the Muro di Montelupone, two beloved muritos in world cycling.
And you know what’s best?
It isn’t even categorised.
That’s right, not one single, solitary mountain point to be given here. That’s because we’re going for a double summit approach, so the points are given out at the second summit, which is slightly higher. We therefore descend around 900m at 8,3% past the Peak Tram May Road station, and onto the road up to Magazine Gap. (馬己仙峽道), a mountain pass leading to the affluent Peak area from the Mid-Levels. Had we not turned right at the Bank of China Tower, this is the street we would have been on, and it also merges with the road that we passed under at the start of the most brutal ramps of Albany Road too. There’s a slight downhill after joining the road to the housing establishment Magazine Heights, but then there is a very steep, short, final ramp up to the pass itself which is 700m at 13,7% - very steep and potentially selective in its own right, another Tirreno-Adriatico murito classic that crests at 18,3km from the line. This gives us a nasty-looking double climb, but where the gradients are not such that one part is
significantly steeper than the other, so it’s not like the Alto de Aia double-climb; I thought about comparing it to that time the Itzulia categorised Ixua despite it being a lower summit after ascending Usartza via the hormigón side from Matxaria (
this one), but the final ramp was too short there. Eventually probably the best comparison point would be - for traceurs at least - a sort of miniature version of the
Fumanyà-Pradell doublette. And with under 20km left and GC on the line, surely we can see some action. Especially considering at this kind of gradient, drafting and pacing becomes an absolute irrelevance a lot of the time for the péloton’s elites, let alone the lower ranked riders and teams. As a result I have given this a cat.2 status despite there being barely 2km of climbing, and the overall stats of 3,3km @ 6,1% really don’t even come
close to telling the whole story.
Profile of the double climb
From here, the descent back into town is pretty relaxed by comparison; it’s 4,9km at 5,1%, passing through Wan Chai Gap, around the northern face of Mount Cameron, and to the lower pass of Wong Nai Chung Gap, at which a couple of relics of the colonial era lie - in typical British fashion, the most affluent parts of society are settled at the top of hills, as was often the case with European colonists setting up hill stations in warmer climes, and with this being an area often settled by the colonial elites, the sports of the colonial elites were set up here, with the Hong Kong Tennis Association and the Hong Kong Cricket Association both being based here. The latter actually had some level of prominence for some time after the handover, as Hong Kong hosted and arranged a unique tournament of six-a-side cricket at the Kowloon Cricket Club which lasted all the way until 2017 - following another tradition of reduced side British sport; the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens were until very recently the most prestigious seven-a-side tournament in fact (it is, like six-a-side cricket, played on a full-size pitch but with reduced numbers, so is more like the three-a-side basketball or regular season overtime hockey, rather than futsal or arena football which it is often compared to), but have now been usurped by the Olympic Games.
From here we could have descended direct to the Exhibition Centre and the finish but I wanted to get a bit more action once gaps have been forced by the double-climb to Magazine Gap. As a result, therefore, we head down into the Happy Valley area, around the Queen Elizabeth Stadium which hosted the 1983 Asian Basketball Championships and hosted many indoor events such as badminton and squash at the 2009 East Asian Games, and to the Happy Valley Racecourse, one of just two in Hong Kong (and the primary one), with a capacity of 55.000 and home to the Hong Kong Racing Museum. It is one of the earliest sporting venues in the SAR, having been constructed by the Britons in 1845 due to its suitability, being the only flat land large enough to house a racecourse at the time. It is also a fully open racecourse with members of the public able to access the frequent Wednesday night meets. The inside of the racecourse has been developed several times and now houses a number of facilities for other sports, as well as the Hong Kong FC Stadium, a 2750-capacity stadium which is the home to the historic sports club which is Hong Kong’s oldest soccer AND rugby team. They were originally based on Sports Road, but the stadium’s importance largely lived and died with the tournament; after the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament grew too large for the stadium in 1982 and was moved to the Hong Kong Stadium nearby, the local club games were not large enough for the regular stadium and so they moved into a smaller facility on the racecourse infield.
Happy Valley Racecourse
Looping around the racecourse, however, we then turn back uphill again for our final climb of the stage, a more conventional ascent toward Mount Butler. The main body of this climb is Broadwood Road, a kilometre at 8,6% with a maximum of 16% which actually runs specifically between the racecourse and the
Hong Kong Stadium, which with its 40.000 capacity is the largest in the SAR (at least until the completion of the Sports Park at Kai Tak) and is home to the national soccer and rugby union teams, as well as where the Hong Kong International Rugby Sevens are held every year, as well as, on two occasions, once in British Hong Kong and once in the Chinese SAR of Hong Kong, the Rugby Sevens World Cup. It has also served as a guest host for internationals between other teams, most notably two games between Australia and New Zealand as a neutral venue in 2008 and 2010. It is expected to be partially dismantled in order to reduce capacity once the Kai Tak stadium is completed, but plans for that are on hold at the moment while completion is awaited.
Broadwood Road
The top of Broadwood Road sees a brief flat stretch on Tai Hang Road before a final 400m at 11% to the Mount Butler Lookout, however we have to turn left back toward town before the peak because this road becomes a dead end. This climb overall is 1,8km @ 7,6% and crests at 10,4km from the line, which again could be less had I wanted it to be, but instead of descending directly into Causeway Bay I chose to go for a less steep descent and keep moving eastward along the elevated mid-levels road and pass the traditional Tin Hau Temple of Causeway Bay (銅鑼灣天后廟) to give a bit of a counterpoint to all of the urban sprawl that has characterised the latter part of the stage, now that we’re not enjoying the hinterlands of the south of the island on this fourth lap. This entails an extension to the circuit of around 4km, but apart from a downhill of 700m at 8,5% at one point it’s mostly downhill false flat or undulating terrain so should also help with a chase scenario, as this section is quite twisty, whereas once we rejoin King’s Road things get very straight and would favour the chase, so it’s better to let the attackers have a bit of time to consolidate and try to get out of sight, no?
Either way, this would then give way to a final 5km of mostly very straight urban roads heading through to that final 1500m dead straight that will hopefully look pretty stylish on screen. I would hope that the parcours I’ve come up with here would give us a nice and varied route; we have two stages for the sprinters, one for pure sprinters and one perhaps suiting slightly more durable riders; I have a short-mid-length ITT, a mountain stage which is not quite Unipuerto but where time gaps at the business end ought to be relatively small as the final climb will see all of the notable time made; and then a final weekend featuring a medium mountain stage with back to back steep medium-length climbs late on but then a bumpy run-in, and then this, a hilly stage which features some brutal gradients but only on very short climbs. The race also, although it covers a small amount of area and does include some repetition, showcases the geographical diversity of Hong Kong; only stages 1 and 2 are fully urban, with stage 4 in particular focusing on outlying natural beauty in the New Territories, and stages 3 and 5 featuring the most important parts of the stage in lush green mountains. Stage 6 is kind of the opposite, with beautiful vistas of the shoreline and the sea in the first half of the stage, and the GC-relevant parts of the stage being in the urban setting in the latter part. However, it should really showcase that Hong Kong could be as varied for cycling as it is culture-wise, as a consequence of its unique melting pot and cultural history.
And all with short stages, so this could make an early season flyaway race that teams could attend on their way back from the Tour Down Under if using this in the same fashion as the Tour of Guangxi is not preferred.