Hong Kong does use overhead high voltage transmission lines to carry electricity over long distances from power stations to population centres, though even these are being moved into underground utility tunnels. You can also find overhead electric, telephone, and fiber optic cables in villages, where lower population densities and complicated land ownership make it impractical to bury them. However, within urban areas and new towns, they are almost nonexistent. Almost. Here are some exceptions. 

Temporary street lighting cables

Sometimes you will see electrical cables strung between two or more streetlights. Examine the lampposts, and you may find a small label that reads “Temporary public lighting cable. DO NOT DISTURB.”

When an underground power line to a streetlight breaks, the Highways Departent’s maintenance contractors will install a temporary overhead cable. This allows the streetlight to function until a new underground cable is laid. However, like many forms of temporary infrastructure in Hong Kong, temporary cables can stay in place for years. 

Back in 2015, a report on the public lighting system by the Audit Commission discovered 103 temporary overhead cables that were at least four years old, and another 133 that had been in place for five to ten years. As repairing an underground cable requires digging up the pavement to find the fault, it might be a long time before the work goes ahead. There are also overhead lighting cables that appear to be permanent, supplying power to streetlights mounted on buildings.

From around the 1930s to the 1960s, streetlights were frequently suspended over roads. You can spot lamps resembling flying saucers in mid-20th Century photographs. The photo on the left below shows a technician repairing one outside St. Andrew’s Church in Tsim Sha Tsui. The photo on the right shows one suspended above Nathan Road in the mid-1950s. 

Early undergrounding

Hanging streetlights aside, Hong Kong started undergrounding utility cables early on in its history, setting it apart from other Asian cities of the time. Compare the following photos of Queen’s Road East and Guangzhou’s West Bund in the 1930s, and you will see a complete absence of overhead wires in the former, and a tall row of wooden utility poles in the latter.  

On Hong Kong Island, there was a roughly 50-year window where overhead wires could be easily spotted in street scenes, between the introduction of telecommunications and electricity, and the undergrounding of utility lines. Telephone poles can be identified by their numerous crossarms and very thin wires. In comparison, Hong Kong Electric’s earliest electricity poles usually only had three short crossarms with large ceramic insulators (which were needed to prevent bare wires from touching the pole). Electric wires were also significantly thicker than telephone wires and therefore easily visible in photos. Early streetlights were mounted on top of very distinctive looking latticed pylons which connected to the wires about halfway down (look closely at the streetlight in the photo of Des Voeux Road below). 

The telegraph was introduced to Hong Kong in 1871, followed by the telephone in 1877. At first, only the very wealthy, large corporations, and government institutions could afford telephones; a directory printed in the China Mail in 1891 listed only 65 subscribers, and phone numbers were just two digits long. Nevertheless, Hong Kong Island started to be criss-crossed with telephone wires. However, when telephone services were introduced to Kowloon at the turn of the century, most of the cabling was run underground from the start. Then in 1925, the government granted the Hong Kong Telephone Company (HKT) a 50-year franchise to operate all telephone services in the territory on the condition that they modernize the system and bury all the cables. By the late 1920s, most telephone poles had disappeared from urban areas. 

Overhead electrical wires were similarly short-lived. In 1890, Hong Kong Electric (HKE) commissioned its first power station in Wanchai and switched on the city’s first 50 electric streetlights. Just 15 years later in 1905, they decided to bury their electrical cables despite the great expense and difficulties with termites eating the cable sheaths, which were then often made of paper or cloth. To deter termites, they had to lay cables in cast iron troughs, fill the troughs with bitumen, then cover them with cast iron lids. This aggressive and risky business move was vindicated the following year when a major typhoon struck Hong Kong, killing thousands, sinking ships, and wrecking overhead wires. 

In Kowloon, the transition to underground cabling occurred more gradually. China Light and Power (CLP) opened its first Hong Kong power station on Chatham Road in 1903. In the 1920s, CLP began to lay underground cables to connect substations in Kowloon City and Kowloon Tong. By 1940, 150 miles (241 km) of underground cable had been laid, but overhead lines were still in the process of being replaced in the 1950s as evidenced by the photo below.   

Flying pirate cables

So far we have only discussed official utility cables laid by power and telecommunications companies, but there were and still are unauthorized ones. From around the 1960s to the 1980s, a dense, chaotic rat’s nest of illegal electrical cables sprang up on the urban fringes, connecting squatter villages with nearby buildings. These pirate connections were often provided by the triads. In 1981, then-CLP chairman Lawrence Kadoorie complained to the Chief Secretary that CLP was losing HK$300,000 a month to electricity theft. 

As an example, in 1972, the government counted 310 illegal wires stretching between individual flats in Chai Wan Estate and the squatter area on the other side of Chai Wan Road. HKE and HKT complained that they posed a danger to maintenance workers, the Fire Department expressed extreme dissatisfaction about the hazard they posed to firefighting operations, and the Police Force warned of public disorder if the government tried to disconnect them. Even the bus company complained. So in the 1970s, the government introduced a squatter area electrification scheme to help HKE and CLP provide electricity to squatter areas legally. As the programme’s reach expanded, then later as urban squatter areas were cleared, scenes like the one above faded. 

However, if you look up in older parts of the city, you will still spot cables of indeterminate origin or purpose. Some might be supplying electricity illegally to hawker stalls, even though the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department has required them to have their own metered connections since 2010, after a late night fire in Fa Yuen Street resulted in nine deaths.  

Others, which extend down from rooftops, are most likely connected to TV aerials or satellite dishes. Christopher Lui, who began installing TV aerials in the 1990s, says in the days of analogue signals, people tried to obtain the clearest signal by mounting their aerials on the tallest building nearby, even if it had to be done without the rooftop owner’s consent. Then, technicians would “fly” the cables into customers’ homes. 

“It was really dangerous to fly cables,” says Lui, “because throwing wires down from the roof to the street for someone to catch was a ridiculous business. In those days, we didn’t have network TV or the internet. Besides TV there was no entertainment, so whether or not you had a clear signal was really important. Installation sifus risked their lives for it.” 

Technicians would pierce a tennis ball, thread a rope through it, then fling it across to another rooftop, or lower it down to the ground. When a colleague had caught the ball, they would use the rope to pull a TV cable into place. Lui adds that with so many wires flying left and right, residents would sometimes get annoyed and cut the ones dangling in front of their windows. He would then have to come back to reinstall them. “It was really strange, this practice, really funny. That’s how it was in the past, no-one would dare do it now.” 

With the transition to digital signals between 2007 and 2020, aerial height no longer made a difference to picture quality, so many TV cables fell into disuse. Look carefully, and you can spot bundles of wires hanging down from rooftops into empty air. 

Lui says that nowadays, you mainly see haphazardly strung cables in villages where fiber optic cable installers were too lazy to fix them to walls. In the past year, he has been called to deal with several cases where cables were blown down after typhoons. 

Hong Kong’s built environment has always had a strong undercurrent of informality which generates a gap between between what is supposed to happen in urban space and what actually does. The appearance, disappearance and reappearance of flying cables throughout the 20th Century illustrates this ongoing tension between tidiness and chaos, planning and improvisation. As long as we remain a wired society, we will probably never be entirely rid of flying wires.  

References

Special thanks to Tymon Mellor, Christopher Lui, and Gwulo.com forum participants aagg, IDJ, Klaus, and moddsey. 

Audit Commission, “Chapter 8: Highways Department—Management of the Public Lighting System”, 27 October 2015, HKSAR Government.

Mark Clifford (2023), “Let there be light: How electricity made modern Hong Kong”, New York: Columbia University Press.

Austin Coates (1977), “A mountain of light: The story of the Hong Kong Electric Company”, London: Heinemann. 

Alan Smart and Chi Keung Charles Fung (2023), “Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963-1985”, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Hugh Farmer, “The origins of the telephone in Hong Kong”, Hong Kong Industrial History, 15 November 2025.

Hugh Farmer, “CLP: The construction of Hok Un power station 1921, Part One”, Hong Kong Industrial History, 31 October 2021.

Hugh Farmer, “The Hongkong Telephone Company, 1925 to 1933, Far Eastern Review article”, Hong Kong Industrial History, 19 August 2020.

Jason Wordie, “Then & Now: How advent of the telegraph made Hong Kong a global communications hub – no more 6-week waits for mail from Europe to arrive”, South China Morning Post, 21 November 2023.

Jason Wordie, “Hong Kong’s telephone system, before smartphones – from the 1920s to the 70s”, South China Morning Post, 31 October 2024.

Staff writer, “Kowloon’s demands for electricity: China Light and Power company’s meeting, Profits and Prospects” Hong Kong Daily Press, 23 December 1927.

Staff writer, “Our Telephone System: The Kowloon Extension”, The China Mail,  26 September 1905.  

Staff writer, “The China & Japan Telephone Company Limited. List of Subscribers to the Hong Kong Telephone Exchange”, The China Mail, 6 November 1891.