The original Hongkong Hotel was owned by The Hongkong Hotel Company. That company eventually became Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels — the parent organization behind The Peninsula Hotels chain, one of Asia's most prestigious luxury hospitality brands. A single address on Queen's Road, opened in 1868, lies at the genealogical root of The Peninsula Hong Kong, The Peninsula Tokyo, The Peninsula New York, and every other property in that portfolio. The connection is not symbolic; it is direct corporate lineage. In the late 1880s the company built a six-storey north wing facing the waterfront, with entrances on Pedder Street, Queen's Road, and Praya Central — what is now Des Voeux Road Central. The north wing competed directly with the Peak Hotel, owned by the Star Ferry Company, and the rivalry played out in the services each establishment offered to newly arrived passengers.

The north wing burned down on New Year's Day, 1926. It was a significant loss: six storeys of waterfront property in the commercial heart of Victoria City. In 1928 the site was acquired by Hong Kong Land, and Gloucester Tower was subsequently constructed there in 1932. That site was later redeveloped into The Landmark in 1979. Then the south wing's north wing — the original building — burned down in 1929. Gripps Restaurant, located in the original section of the hotel, survived and continued to draw crowds; it was popular enough that even after the hotel itself had declined, people still came for it. But the hotel eventually closed in 1952, ending an 84-year run. The building that had housed Gripps was later demolished.

After the hotel closed in 1952, the building was acquired by the owner of the 1949 Hong Kong Derby Champion, who was also the lead investor in a company that was later renamed Central Development Limited. Extensive renovation followed, but the section that had housed the celebrated Gripps Restaurant was torn down rather than preserved. In 1958, Central Building opened as a modern retail and office building on roughly the same footprint where the original Hongkong Hotel had stood. It remains there today. The Kuhn and Komor shop that had occupied the hotel's ground floor along Queen's Road is also long gone — though Kuhn and Komor, an arts and antiques dealer with origins in Shanghai, operated in Hong Kong for over a century. The layers of replacement at this corner of Queen's Road Central compress almost the entire arc of colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong into a single address.

To understand what the Hongkong Hotel was competing against, it helps to know what the Peak Hotel was. Owned by the Star Ferry Company and situated at the top of Victoria Peak, the Peak Hotel offered travelers altitude and cooling breezes in an era before air conditioning — a genuine selling point in a subtropical city. The Hongkong Hotel responded not with scenery but with service: the private launch that intercepted passengers before they reached the public piers, the Gripps Restaurant that became an institution in its own right, the north wing that brought the hotel directly onto the waterfront. That competition between two visions of Hong Kong luxury — the elevated and the accessible, the panoramic and the immersive — shaped what the city's hospitality industry became. The Hongkong Hotel's lineage won, in the end, if winning means founding a dynasty.