🇭🇰 Hong Kong

Where is Hong Kong?

Hong Kong lies in Eastern Asia, on the continent of Asia.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 2 479 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 733 km long.

It shares a border with 1 country: China.

How big is Hong Kong?

Hong Kong covers 1 104 square kilometres.

Luxembourg is about 2.3 times bigger.

If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 6 749.1 people on every square kilometre.

Who lives in Hong Kong?

About 7.5 million people live in Hong Kong.

People here speak English and Chinese.

They pay with the Hong Kong dollar ($).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 80 years.

The land of Hong Kong

Its coast runs for about 733 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 37 days.

It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes Hong Kong different?

A dish the country is known for: Char siu.

Websites from here often end in .hk.

Hong Kong and the rest of the world

Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 1 live in Hong Kong.

It takes up about 0 % of all the land that countries stand on.

That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.

Hong Kong and its neighbours

China, its largest neighbour, is about 8 792.5 times bigger.

China has more people: 1.4 billion against 7.5 million.

A country, or a territory?

Hong Kong is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.

Its nearest neighbour by land is China.