Hong Kong's commercial heart did not arrive fully formed. The original Canton Bazaar opened in 1842 on Queen's Road Central, in the earliest days of British administration, and earned a second name — the Middle Bazaar — by the following year. It moved more than once, pushed aside by fires that drove Chinese residents to Tai Ping Shan, then displaced again when naval construction claimed the land near the harbour. By the 1850s, the market had settled on Des Voeux Road, then known simply as The Praya, and taken the name Central Market. A Victorian rebuild in 1895 gave it a three-storey marble structure topped by a central tower — a fittingly imperial flourish for the colonial era. The marble didn't last. By 1937, that structure too came down.

Construction of the current building cost HK$900,000 and was completed in 1938; the market reopened on 1 May 1939. In a city where tropical heat and humidity are relentless, the design was quietly radical: a four-storey reinforced concrete shell with a generous central court, high ceilings, and walls of glass for cross-ventilation and natural light. Two hundred booths filled the interior. At its peak, Central Market was the largest meat market in Southeast Asia, significant enough that Governor Alexander Grantham paid a visit, as did Governor David Trench in 1967. Then the war arrived. During the Japanese occupation of 1941 to 1945, the Chinese name at the entrance was changed. That altered sign remained for nearly five decades after peace returned.

The market closed in March 2003. For the better part of two decades, the building sat in a strange half-life. Most of it stood empty, but along a renovated pedestrian corridor — the Central Escalator Link Alley Shopping Arcade — a handful of shops persisted: tailors, collectors, cleaners, the particular businesses that survive on foot traffic rather than destination shopping. On Sundays, the corridor became something else entirely: a gathering place for Filipino domestic workers, one of the informal social nodes that the city's migrant communities carved out of the urban fabric. Footbridges connected the building to the Hang Seng Bank Headquarters and the Central Elevated Walkway, threading the empty market into the living city around it.

The Urban Renewal Authority oversaw the restoration from 2017 to 2021. The challenge was preservation without museum-ification: keeping the bones of a working building while making space for contemporary use. The renovation retained the original stairwell — now an architectural centrepiece — along with some of the original market stalls. On 23 August 2021, Central Market reopened to retailers, eateries, and the public, operated by the Chinachem Group on a ten-year lease. It is listed as a Grade III historic building and anchors the Central and Western Heritage Trail. Central Market remains one of only two surviving Bauhaus market buildings in Hong Kong, the other being Wan Chai Market — a pair of functional monuments to a moment when modernist principles met a subtropical city.