Lung Tsun Stone Bridge Beneath the Reclamation

In the late nineteenth century, Kowloon City met the sea. Lung Tsun Stone Bridge was built from the waterfront toward Kowloon Walled City, giving passengers and goods a route between boats in Kowloon Bay and the fortified settlement. A recent Antiquities and Monuments Office account dates construction to 1873 and describes the bridge as an important water approach. Its name, “Dragon-Fluid Bridge,” carries a grand sound, but its practical role was straightforward: it connected a landing place to the city beyond the shore.

The bridge did not remain a single fixed structure. As silt made it harder for larger vessels to approach, a timber pier was added at its seaward end in 1892, creating a T-shaped landing arrangement. A pavilion at the bridge’s head offered shelter and was also used to receive officials. These additions show the waterfront as working infrastructure: a path on stone, a landing on timber, and a covered stopping place, each responding to how people and cargo moved through the harbour.

The harbour edge shifted as reclamation extended the land. In the 1920s, part of the bridge was dismantled and the pavilion removed. Further reclamation in 1942, for airport construction, buried the remaining bridge and pier. Rather than a single dramatic disappearance, the sequence involved demolition, burial and changing use of the bay. Archaeological investigations in 2008 brought sections of the bridge back into view during the Kai Tak Development project. Remains were subsequently preserved in place, allowing the old shoreline route to be read within a much newer urban landscape.

The surviving foundations reveal the footprint of a bridge, pier and pavilion that once organised movement between sea and settlement. The archaeological discovery also makes reclamation legible as a historical force, not simply a way to create new land. Under the present city lie successive shorelines, each carrying a different set of connections. Lung Tsun Bridge’s reappearance is therefore both a local recovery and a lesson in how infrastructure can be hidden by the next generation of infrastructure.