Man Yee Building (萬宜大廈))

The original Man Yee Building opened in 1957 on a sloped site between Queen’s Road Central, Pottinger Street and Des Voeux Road Central, and was the first building in Hong Kong fitted with escalators, an attraction significant enough on its own that crowds came from across the city just to ride them. The building’s manually operated Otis elevators, staffed by dedicated operators, ran until the property’s demolition, after which Man Hing Hong Property Management rebuilt it as the current 35-storey tower, completed in 1999 and designed by Rocco Design Architects, with a total gross floor area of roughly 290,000 sqft across office and retail combined.

The rebuilt tower kept the ground-level retail identity through Man Yee Arcade, a four-level shopping thoroughfare with an 18-metre atrium and two street-level entrances, one from Queen’s Road and one from Des Voeux Road, offset by two floors because of the site’s slope. INITIAL opened its first designer-clothing store here in 2000, and the arcade has continued attracting first-location openings since, including Toys”R”Us’s Central location and Australian cycling brand MAAP’s first Hong Kong flagship.

Marks & Spencer and Fortress anchor the arcade’s larger-format retail, with LensCrafters, Starbucks and Tai Cheong and Kee Wah bakeries carrying the food and beverage floor. The arcade skews toward Central’s office workforce rather than tourist or residential traffic, reflected in a tenant mix weighted toward lunch-hour dining, jewellery repair and watch retailers, and practical services like opticians and florists.

That continuity, a shopping arcade that has occupied the same footprint since 1957 despite the building above it being entirely rebuilt, makes Man Yee Arcade one of the few Central retail addresses whose brand identity dates back to the very start of Hong Kong’s postwar retail boom rather than to a later, more built-up phase of it.