Possession Point no longer exists as a point. It was a small headland on the northwestern coast of Hong Kong Island, where the land jutted out into the harbour and made a natural landing place for boats. Land reclamation in the decades that followed swallowed that coastline completely, pushing the shore hundreds of metres further out and leaving the original promontory buried under what is now the western approaches to Sheung Wan. The Hong Kong–Macau Ferry Terminal stands near where the shoreline once ran. Hollywood Road Park, marked on maps from the 1980s as Possession Point, preserves the name but not the geography.

What remains is a street and a bend. Possession Street runs from Queen's Road West to Hollywood Road in Sheung Wan, and the sudden turn that Queen's Road West makes at that junction — the street curving to accommodate a headland that has been gone for over a century — still traces the ghost of the original coastline. The original Chinese name for the street, Po Se Son Kai, was a phonetic rendering of the English. It was later renamed Sui Hang Hou Kai, after a nullah — an open drainage channel — that once ran alongside it. Both names are layers over the same ground.

26 January 1841 is considered the founding date of Hong Kong as a British possession, though the formal treaties and proclamations that confirmed that status came later. Bremer's flag-raising was a military act, not a diplomatic one — China had not yet agreed to cede the island, and the negotiations that produced the Convention of Chuanbi, and later the Treaty of Nanjing, were still ongoing. For the people already living in the fishing villages and farms scattered across the island's coasts, the ceremony at Possession Point was a distant event they had little part in. What it set in motion would reshape every aspect of their descendants' lives.

By the late 19th century, Possession Street had taken on a different character entirely. The area around it was dense with brothels until 1903, when authorities relocated the trade to Shek Tong Tsui to the west. That displacement triggered what became known as tong sai fung yuet — a golden era for Shek Tong Tsui — as wealthy Chinese merchants followed the nightlife westward and built hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues in their wake. In the 1980s, the last trace of the original open space the local Chinese community had used for recreation — called Tai Tat Tei — was developed into the hotel and commercial complex that now occupies the site. The founding spot of modern Hong Kong became a parking garage and a ferry terminal.

There is something fitting about the way Possession Street marks its significance: not with a monument or a grand plaza, but with a small bend in Queen's Road. Strangers pass through without noticing. The street itself is short, climbs from the tram route toward Hollywood Road through a neighbourhood of antique dealers and traditional medicine shops, and offers no obvious signal of what happened here. But the turn is there, and for anyone who knows to look for it, the original shoreline briefly becomes legible — a coastline that no longer exists, preserved in the angle of a road.