Located above Possession Point at 12 Po Yan Street in Sheung Wan, it is the first hospital established in Colonial Hong Kong for the general public in the 1870s.

The push for the facility's construction began when the British colony's Registrar General saw an indiscriminate mix of the dead and dying huddled together in the nearby Kwong Fook I-tsz [zh], a small temple built at Tai Ping Shan Street.

[2] The large number of deaths were in part due to the arrival of the upcoming Third Pandemic of bubonic plague from China, though it[clarification needed] was not declared an official establishment until 1872.

A lot of cultural prejudice existed at the time, with Chinese citizens not trusting western medicine and other practices such as surgery.

[1] It is affiliated with the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong.