The Old Stanley Police Station was built in 1859 and is the oldest surviving police station building in Hong Kong. After the war it resumed its original role and continued to operate as a police station until 1974. Its long institutional life anchors Stanley’s history in everyday government and policing, not only in the district’s better-known waterfront setting.
From the journal
Stanley’s Local and Wartime Histories
Stanley’s institutional history spans an 1859 police station, a school used as a military hospital and an internment camp during the Second World War.
In this district · Southern ↗A police station from 1859
A school changed by war
St Stephen’s College was founded in 1903 and moved to Stanley in 1928. During the Japanese invasion in 1941, the college was pressed into service as a military hospital; after the surrender, it became an internment camp for Allied civilians until 1945. For the college, war transformed the campus from a school into a place of emergency care and then civilian confinement.
A chapel of remembrance
The postwar chapel was consecrated in 1950 and dedicated to people who died or suffered at Stanley. A memorial window recalls the internment camp, while the college continues to mark Remembrance Sunday. The chapel turns a difficult institutional history into a place of commemoration. The chapel and school buildings keep Stanley’s wartime landscape tangible in the present.