Kowloon Travel Video Guide

Kowloon Travel Itinerary

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A four-kilometre strip of the mainland grabbed by the British in 1860 to add to their offshore island, Kowloon was part of the territory ceded to Britain "in perpetuity" and was accordingly developed with gusto and confidence. With the help of land reclamation and the diminishing significance of the border between Kowloon and the New Territories at Boundary Street, Kowloon has over the years just about managed to accommodate the vast numbers of people who have squeezed into it. Today, areas such as Mongkok, jammed with soaring tenements, are among the most densely populated urban areas in the world.

While Hong Kong Island has mountains and beaches to palliate the effects of urban claustrophobia, Kowloon has just more shops, more restaurants and more hotels. It's hard to imagine that such an unmitigatedly built-up, crowded and commercial place as this could possibly have any cachet among the travelling public - and yet it does. One of the reasons is that this is the best place for viewing Hong Kong Island. The view across the harbour to the island, wall-to-wall with skyscrapers, is one of the most unforgettable city panoramas you'll see anywhere, especially at night. This, and its ritzy neon-lit streets full of hotels and restaurants in the couple of square kilometres at the tip of the peninsula that make up Tsimshatsui are enough to keep drawing in the crowds. A further attraction of Tsimshatsui is the presence of a very visible community of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Their great stronghold is the Chungking

Mansions , which, as well as being a budget accommodation haven, is a superbly atmospheric shopping arcade where the great cultures of Asia mingle in a haze of spices and incense.

North, into Yaumatei and Mongkok , you'll find less touristy districts teeming with local life, while farther north still, beyond Boundary Street - technically just outside Kowloon - is a scattering of sights including one of Hong Kong's busiest temples, the Wong Tai Sin .

Your Tips For Kowloon

• Dongbei China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Dongbei , or more evocatively Manchuria, may well be the closest thing to the "real" China that visitors vainly seek in the well-travelled central and southern parts of the country. - China
  

• Shanghai China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  After forty years of stagnation, the great metropolis of SHANGHAI is currently undergoing one of the fastest economic expansions that the world has ever seen. - China
  

• Northwest China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Reaching across in a giant arc from the fringes of eastern Siberia to the borders of Turkic Central Asia, the provinces of Inner Mongolia , Ningxia , Gansu , Qinghai and Xinjiang account for an entire third of China's land area. - China
  

• Northwest China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Reaching across in a giant arc from the fringes of eastern Siberia to the borders of Turkic Central Asia, the provinces of Inner Mongolia , Ningxia , Gansu , Qinghai and Xinjiang account for an entire third of China's land area. - China
  

• Hebei China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Hebei is a somewhat anonymous province, split into two distinct geographical areas, with two great cities, Beijing and Tianjin, at its heart, but administratively outside its borders. - China
  

• Yangzi Basin China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Having raced out of Sichuan through the narrow Three Gorges, the Yangzi widens, slows down, and loops through its flatter, low-lying middle reaches, fed and swelled by lesser streams and rivers which drain off the highlands surrounding the four provinces of the Yangzi basin - Anhui , Hubei , Hunan and Jiangxi . - China
  

• Yunnan China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Yunnan has always stood apart from the rest of China, set high on the empire's "barbarous and pestilential" southwestern frontiers and shielded from the rest of the nation by the unruly, mountainous provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou. - China
  

• Fujian Guangdong and Hainan Island China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  There's something very self-contained about the provinces of Fujian , Guangdong and Hainan Island , which occupy 1200km or so of China's convoluted southern seaboard. - China
  

• Guangxi and Guizhou China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  China's subtropical central southwest, comprising Guangxi and Guizhou , manages to include one of the country's most intensely visited areas while remaining largely unknown as a whole. - China
  

• Jiangsu and Zhejiang China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  China's original heartland may have been the dusty Yellow River basin, but it was the greenness and fertility of the Yangzi River estuary that drew the Chinese south and provided them with the wealth and power needed to sustain a huge empire. - China
  

• Tibet China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Tibet, the "Roof of the World" (Bod to Tibetans, Xizang to the Chinese), has exerted a pull of almost supernatural proportions over travellers for many centuries. - China
  

• Beijing China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  The brash modernity of BEIJING (meaning Northern Capital) comes as a surprise to most visitors. - China
  

• Yellow River China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  The central Chinese provinces of Shanxi , Shaanxi , Henan and Shandong are linked and dominated by the Yellow River (Huang He), which has played a vital role in their history, geography and fortunes. - China
  

• Hong Kong and Macau China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  The handover of Asia's last two European colonies , Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999, opened new eras for both places. - China
  

• Sichuan and Chongqing China Travel Videos
  China Travel Itinerary
  Ringed by mountains which proverbially made the journey here "harder than the road to heaven", SICHUAN and CHONGQING stretch for more than a thousand kilometres across China's southwest. - China