Hopewell Centre stands on the slope of a hill in Wan Chai steep enough to produce a structural peculiarity: the front entrance on Queen's Road East is at ground level, but the back entrance, facing Kennedy Road, opens onto the 17th floor. Visitors arriving from two different streets enter the same building at elevations separated by sixteen storeys. Construction began in 1977 and was completed in 1980, and upon completion the building surpassed Jardine House as Hong Kong's tallest structure. It is named after Hopewell Holdings Limited, the Hong Kong-listed property company that developed it. The firm's founder and chief executive, Gordon Wu, maintained his office on the top floor. The building now ranks as the 20th tallest in Hong Kong — a measure of how dramatically the city's skyline has grown in the decades since.

On the 62nd floor sits a revolving restaurant that completes a full 360-degree rotation every hour, offering sweeping views over Wan Chai and Victoria Harbour. When it opened, the restaurant was called Revolving 62, accurately reflecting its location. Locals began calling it Revolving 66. The name stuck to the point where management eventually changed it officially to "Revolving 66" — and later renamed it again to The Grand Buffet. Getting there requires a two-stage lift journey: first to the 56th floor via either the fast office lifts or the scenic lifts with views, then a transfer to smaller lifts serving the upper floors. The white protrusions visible between the tower's windows are not decorative; they are guide rails for window-washing equipment. The circular plan that makes the building so distinctive also means that every office floor offers unobstructed views in every direction.

Hopewell Centre appears in unexpected places in popular culture. The R&B group Dru Hill filmed their 1998 music video for "How Deep Is Your Love" on location at the tower, directed by Brett Ratner. The rooftop swimming pool — the same one built for feng shui reasons — features prominently in the video. That pool also appeared in an Australian television advertisement for lottery company Tattersall's Limited. The building appeared on a different kind of document the same year: the cover of the post-hardcore band Fugazi's 1998 album End Hits. A cylindrical skyscraper in Wan Chai as the image for a Washington, DC punk band's record is the kind of cultural cross-pollination that happens in cities that have made themselves legible to the world. Hopewell Centre had become, by 1998, simply a recognizable tower — its meaning available for appropriation by whoever needed a striking vertical image.

Hopewell Holdings Limited was a publicly listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for 47 years before its privatisation in 2019. The privatisation plan, valued at HK$21.26 billion, sent shares up 31 per cent at one point before the process was completed and the company's stock ticker — number 54 — was removed from the exchange. The building continued operating through the transition. In November 2024, the Hopewell Mall opened, connected to the tower, expanding the retail presence at the base of the building. The consulates of Poland and Mexico maintain offices on the 25th floor. The Environmental Protection Department has space on the 34th. FWD Group occupies the 36th. The building functions less as a monument than as a vertical neighborhood — a cross-section of Hong Kong's professional and commercial life stacked into a circle on a Wan Chai hillside.