Hong Kong Landscapes: Shaping the Barren Rock

Hong Kong has a largely mountainous terrain, very little flat land, no major rivers, no great forests, and a paucity of mineral wealth. The relative poverty of the place led the British Foreign Secretary to remark, in 1841, that Hong Kong was a "barren rock with hardly a house upon it". Prior to that date, the rugged landscape of Hong Kong had evolved, with little human interference, over about 400 million years.