The speed of what happened next was extraordinary. Hong Kong's port grew through the 1970s as global trade expanded and containerization transformed the economics of shipping. The original four berths of Kwai Chung Container Port grew to six in the 1980s, then expanded further with two additional terminals adjoining Stonecutters Island in the 1990s. When Container Terminal 9 was completed on Tsing Yi Island in the 2000s, the facility was renamed Kwai Tsing Container Terminals to reflect its spread across the broader area. Along the way, the port surpassed the Port of New York and New Jersey in 1986 to become the world's second-busiest container port, then overtook Rotterdam in 1987 to claim the top spot. That a city-state of six million people, on a narrow strip of reclaimed land, briefly operated the world's busiest container port is a striking measure of what Hong Kong's economy was doing in those decades.

The terminals occupy reclaimed land along Rambler Channel, the narrow waterway that separates Kwai Chung from Tsing Yi Island. Looking at the facility from the water, the scale is almost abstract: cranes rising forty meters above the wharf, container stacks stretching hundreds of meters, vessels from Maersk and COSCO and Evergreen queuing in the channel. Kwai Chung Road was built specifically to connect the port to Kowloon while the terminal was still under construction, and Container Port Road links the facility to Hong Kong's industrial areas. Infrastructure followed the port, and the port accelerated the transformation of Kwai Chung from a district of villages and light industry into the logistics hub it is today. Beneath the reclaimed land, the remains of a ship's hull lie buried — a detail that reminds you that what looks like solid ground is relatively recent geography.

The facility now consists of nine container terminals operated by a consortium of companies including Hongkong International Terminals (HIT) and others. The berths accommodate vessels with drafts of 14 to 16 meters, deep enough to handle the large modern container ships that could not call at older, shallower ports. By 2019, Kwai Tsing had fallen to the eighth-busiest container port in the world, and the slide has continued since. By 2024, the World Shipping Council ranked Hong Kong twelfth globally — the first time it had fallen outside the top ten. The rise of Chinese mainland ports, particularly Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which handle much of the trade that once moved through Hong Kong, has reshaped the regional rankings. But the terminals remain a central artery of Hong Kong's economy, handling tens of millions of twenty-foot equivalent units of cargo annually.

The terminals found their way into popular culture in 1991, when the action film Double Impact, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, used Kwai Tsing as a filming location. The stacked containers and cranes provided the industrial backdrop that action cinema tends to favor. But the more enduring story is the economic one: a government committee in 1967 looked at a channel between a peninsula and an island, looked at the future of global shipping, and made a bet. Two former islands were erased from the map to make room for what they envisioned. The bet paid off in ways that reshaped the geography of Hong Kong and the economics of East Asian trade.