The original structure on this site dates to 1842 — just a year after Britain established its foothold in Hong Kong. Known then as Johnston House, it was a mansion that sat on Government Hill at a height that communicated status, if not permanence. Among its early occupants were the tai-pans of Augustine Heard and Company, an American trading firm that, like many such enterprises, found the China trade more complicated than anticipated. The firm went bankrupt in 1876.

Before and around that failure, the building had other tenants. HSBC used it at some point. The Russian Consulate occupied it during the 1870s, an early signal that the building on the hill would always attract occupants with outsized ambitions. The Hong Kong government leased the building from 1879, beginning a long relationship between this address and official power.

In 1915, the Paris Foreign Missions Society acquired the building and commissioned a major renovation. The architects were Leigh & Orange, a Hong Kong firm that shaped much of the colony's built environment. The work was substantial enough that contemporaries described it as an 'extensive rebuilding.' When it reopened in 1917, the structure was three storeys of granite and red brick in Neo-Classical style, with a chapel topped by a cupola added to the north-west corner.

The red brick facing was new, giving the building the warm, reddish tone it still carries today. The chapel's cupola is visible from below, rising just above the building's roofline as a modest ecclesiastical gesture. After serving as a mission for several decades, the Paris Foreign Missions Society eventually departed, and the building moved on again.

The building's post-mission decades were a relay race of institutional tenancy. The Education Department took it over. Then came the Victoria District Court, occupying it from 1965 to 1980. The Supreme Court followed from 1980 to 1983. Government Information Services moved in starting from 1987.

Each of these functions took advantage of the same quality the building has always offered: dignity. It sits on a podium on Government Hill, elevated above the commercial activity of Central, with St. John's Cathedral visible nearby. The position announces importance. The building looks like a place where decisions are made. Hong Kong's courts understood this and used it accordingly.

The most significant chapter in the building's institutional life began on 1 July 1997, the day sovereignty over Hong Kong transferred from Britain to China. On that same day, the Court of Final Appeal — Hong Kong's highest court — took up residence in the Former French Mission Building. The timing was not incidental. Establishing the court in a declared monument, in a building with colonial-era presence, was a statement about continuity: that the common law tradition would persist under the new arrangement.

The court remained until 6 September 2015, when it moved to the Old Supreme Court Building nearby. During those eighteen years, the French Mission Building served as the venue for Hong Kong's most consequential legal decisions. The building was declared a monument on 14 September 1989 — before the handover, before the court arrived — a designation that protected its physical fabric whatever else might change.

Since 2015, the building has been renovated as part of Hong Kong's Legal Hub — a complex it shares with the adjacent Justice Place. Law-related organisations, local and international, moved in when renovation works completed in mid-2020. The granite walls and red brick facade have outlasted every previous tenant; the cupola still catches the light above Battery Path, and St. John's Cathedral still stands visible from the building's upper levels, as it has since both structures were here. The building has found its latest purpose in the same world it has always occupied: law, authority, and the institutions that need a credible address.