Founded in 1880 and located on the exterior of former Tai Kok Tsui peninsula in Kowloon, the dockyard belonged to then-British owned Hutchison Whampoa.
Amid the Sino-French War in 1884 over the control of Vietnam, Chinese workers in the dockyard refused to serve on La Galissonnière, a French warship responsible for the bombardment of Keelung and Fuzhou.
[1] In 1937, a hundred Norwegian, Danish and Swedish refugees who had fled the Japanese invasion of Shanghai were housed at the dock while they waited to be resettled.
[2] The facilities closed in 1972, the dockyard was transformed from 1974 to 1976 into the housing complex known as Cosmopolitan Estate (14 13 floor towers) by Hutchison Whampoa (under the direction of Douglas Clague) in 1974.
On 16 January 1945, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in World War II, the dockyard was bombed by aircraft of the United States.