The foundation stone was laid on 24 February 1847, and the building that rose from it cost £14,393 to complete. By the standards of mid-nineteenth-century Hong Kong — a young colony still finding its footing on a rocky island — the sum was considerable. The result was a two-storey structure at St. John's Place in Central that would house the Colonial Secretary's Department, the Legislative Council, and the Public Works Department all under one roof. It was, in every functional sense, the government of Hong Kong. For more than a century, it would remain so.
The land that became the Secretariat Building was not empty when the colonial administration decided to build. Four existing government buildings occupied the site before they were cleared to make way for the larger, unified structure. The decision to consolidate reflected an administration that was beginning to think beyond improvisation — no longer making do with adapted structures but commissioning something that announced permanence.
Construction ran from 1847 to 1848. The building opened as the "Government Offices, St. John's Place," a name that placed it in the civic geography of the young colonial capital. St. John's Cathedral, consecrated in 1847, stood nearby. The colonial government was building its institutions close together, establishing a Central district that would remain the heart of Hong Kong's administration for generations.
By the late 1800s, the Secretariat Building was running out of room. The colonial administration had grown, the population of Hong Kong had grown, and the two-storey structure — spacious when built — was no longer adequate. The Surveyor General proposed constructing a new government office building on Murray Battery, but nothing came of it.
In 1934, the Legislative Council created the Government House and City Development Fund, which was supposed to finance a comprehensive redevelopment of the former City Hall, Government House, and the Secretariat Building together. The plan was abandoned in 1939 due to insufficient funding. A scaled-down scheme was proposed as a fallback, but that too never advanced — presumably overtaken by the approach of World War II and the constraints it imposed on everything else.
The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong lasted from December 1941 until August 1945. When the colonial administration returned, it found a city whose population had begun to grow rapidly again, straining every institutional resource. Government departments scattered across Central in rented and requisitioned premises, unable to consolidate. The old Secretariat Building — never repaired to meet the postwar demands placed on it — developed problems that went beyond overcrowding.
White ants and timber rot had taken hold. The building that had housed the colony's government for a century was being consumed from within. The two-storey structure was demolished in 1954, replaced by new Central Government Offices on the same site. Those buildings now form part of Justice Place.
Nothing of the 1847 building stands today. It was demolished entirely, and the replacement structure that took its place has itself been repurposed. What persists is the record: the foundation stone date, the cost, the names of the departments that occupied each floor, and the accumulated history of decisions made in those rooms — treaties negotiated, laws drafted, budgets argued over, the machinery of colonial governance running through its daily business in a building that white ants eventually claimed.
The site at St. John's Place in Central remains part of the civic heart of Hong Kong. The layering of uses — original government offices, replacement offices, current Justice Place — is typical of Central's compressed urban archaeology. Each generation of buildings displaces the last but rarely quite erases it from memory.
The Old Central Government Offices stood at approximately 22.2799°N, 114.1578°E in the Central district of Hong Kong Island, on the hillside above the harbour. The site, now occupied by Justice Place, is within the dense civic cluster of Central — the High Court, Government House, and St. John's Cathedral are all within a short radius. From the air, the green belt of Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens marks the area's northern edge. Hong Kong International Airport (VHHH) is on Lantau Island approximately 28 km to the west-southwest. The Star Ferry terminal and Victoria Harbour are less than a kilometre to the north.