Before the electric age arrived, this hilly patch of land served a grimmer purpose. The Hong Kong Government designated it in 1841 as the earliest burial ground for the colony's non-Chinese population—a fact the elegant café terraces and gallery storefronts give no hint of today. The graves were cleared in 1889, and the slope was given over to residential buildings for local Chinese families. Within a year, Hongkong Electric had chosen the site for its first generating station, transforming a hillside once associated with endings into one humming with new beginnings. That sequence—burial ground, power station, residential quarter, boutique precinct—captures something essential about the layered way Hong Kong reinvents itself.

The Three Character Classic opens with the premise that human nature is fundamentally good, and its opening triplets—heaven, earth, and the celestial bodies—were the first words generations of Chinese children memorized. When Hongkong Electric's plant brought electric light to the neighborhood in 1890, the colonial authorities chose those same cosmic names to mark the occasion. Star Street ran closest to the generating station; Moon Street and Sun Street fanned out around it. St. Francis Street and the intimate courtyard of St. Francis Yard added a different resonance—a reminder that the Wan Chai hill had once hosted a Franciscan presence as well. The layering of names tells the story of a district where cultures were never entirely separate.

Starting in 1988, Swire Properties—the same company that developed Pacific Place in Admiralty—began quietly acquiring properties on the hillside. It was patient, deliberate work. Over the following years, Swire assembled enough of the neighborhood to reimagine it as a curated commercial precinct, retaining ownership of the car parks, restaurants, and shops while attending to details as specific as the design of individual street signs. The result was a neighborhood that felt discovered rather than built. By the 2000s, the Starstreet Precinct had become a counterpoint to the polished scale of Pacific Place below: smaller, slower, with independent galleries, florists, home-design shops, and cafés spilling onto the narrow lanes. A 280-metre covered link equipped with travelators, completed in 2007, connected the precinct to the Pacific Place complex and the Admiralty MTR station—convenience without erasure.

The precinct today is best understood as a neighborhood that has found a durable identity without shedding its residential core. Families still live on the upper floors of the low-rise blocks; locals walk dogs on the uneven pavements; the incline keeps it slightly apart from the commercial intensity of the city below. Cafés open early for the professional crowd that arrives from Admiralty; bars fill in the evening with a mix of expats and Hong Kongers who appreciate the relative quiet. Art exhibitions and cultural performances occupy the galleries and yards throughout the year. None of it feels especially curated when you are in it—which may be Swire's most accomplished achievement. The celestial names on the street signs, meanwhile, remain exactly what they were in 1890: a small tribute to the moment electric light changed everything.