The Regent hotel, witness to Hong Kong history with its stunning harbour views, its time as the InterContinental and rebirth under its original name

The Regent Hotel, with its massive harbour-facing windows, was the place to witness Hong Kong history – the 1997 handover, the turn of the millennium

Having become the InterContinental in 2001, it has reclaimed its original 1980 name and reopened with a brand new look, but the same old prestige

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The Regent Hotel witnesses the ‘first vertical facade dance in Hong Kong’ as it celebrates the readoption of its original name. The Regent opened in Hong Kong in 1980 before becoming the InterContinental in 2001. Photo: Regent Hong Kong

Published: 12:43pm, 20 Nov 2023Updated: 3:39pm, 20 Nov 2023

On October 1, 1980, the Regent Hotel officially opened at the eastern end of the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, in Kowloon. Exactly a week later, the Hong Kong Space Museum opened next door; hotel guests could see the gleam of its planetarium dome, like a huge white egg, as they were driven up the adjacent slope and into what looked like an unremarkable office building.

In both cases, it was only when you stepped inside that you could appreciate the stellar view.

More than 40 years and several shifts of history later, The Regent – which became the InterContinental in 2001 and has reverted to its original name – is still the hotel offering the most spectacular aspect of Hong Kong Island. Every Hong Kong resident knows that reclamation and construction mean you cannot take a view for granted but, overall, the one from the Regent is better now than it was.

When Robert Burns, Adrian Zecha and Georg Rafael, who had founded the Regent group in 1970, made the Hong Kong hotel its flagship, there was no Central Plaza, no Peak Tower, no Norman Foster-designed HSBC, no I.M. Pei-designed Bank of China, no IFC glittering on the opposite shore. A harbourside room cost HK$600.

Manila model Tetta Ortiz in Hong Kong for Fashion Week at the Regent hotel in 1988. Photo: SCMP

Old-school purists may pine for less jumbled slopes and environmentalists groan at the light pollution; but even if you have seen that Christmas-bauble panorama a hundred times, the way it is framed in the Regent’s massive windows can leave you – to use a word favoured by the colonial era’s last governor, Chris Patten – gobsmacked.

And when Patten sailed away on Her Majesty’s Yacht Britannia in the early hours of July 1, 1997, having handed Hong Kong back to China, the Regent’s party (tickets were a capitalist HK$2,500 – plus 10 per cent) offered a perfect perspective of the cheers, the tears, the flotilla of boats, the news helicopters, the ceaseless rain …

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