More accurately, it is Hong Kong’s natural 40-square-kilometre harbour – a perfectly sheltered anchorage with an abundant supply of fresh water – that has ensured its prominence on navigators’ charts for centuries and galvanised its development over the years. Drawing its name, which literally means “fragrant harbour”, from the incense factories that once lined the coast, Hong Kong evolved into a global entrepôt as the gateway to China and one of the planet’s financial titans.

“Victoria Harbour is one of the finest in the world,” says Captain Bjorn Hojgaard, CEO of Anglo-Eastern Univan Group, the world’s largest ship management company, and chairman of Hong Kong’s Maritime and Port Development Committee. “But we cannot afford to rest on our laurels: we want to enhance Hong Kong as a maritime centre.”

As any of Hong Kong’s 100 or so licensed marine pilots who expertly nurse colossal ocean-going boxships in and out of the 279 hectare Kwai Tsing Container Terminal will attest, the trade that spurred the city’s genesis continues to thrive. In any given year, the terminal’s 24 berths can handle up to 20 million six-metre-long containers that may be carrying – according to one United Nations survey – boilers, medical apparatus, toiletries, antiques, animal gut, gaiters, prefabricated buildings, tannins, rubbers, cotton, tapestry, horsehair yarn, zinc, resins, whips, cork or pyrophorics, to name but a few. Perishable goods, or those needed in a hurry, jet in and out of the airport, but everything else comes by sea – just as it did in the 15th century when the legendary Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed as far as Arabia, blending trade with diplomacy in explorations that rivalled Marco Polo’s.

“I first arrived in Hong Kong as a young cadet in 1987 aboard the 50,000-tonne containership Lica Maersk, and was overawed by the sights and sounds of the harbour surrounded by the city,” says Hojgaard. “I remember thinking that I wouldn’t mind living here one day, and a few years later I found myself doing exactly that. One day I hope to retire here – close to the harbour, of course.”

“Close to the harbour” is an ever-shifting target. It’s a rare year in Hong Kong that the coastline isn’t adjusted in one way or another. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that with just 1,114 square kilometres at its disposal, Hong Kong is short of land. When the city can’t grow any higher, it has to expand outwards, into the water.