Eight Million Windows: a limited edition Hong Kong skyline art print, and the story behind it
Hong Kong holds a very special place in my heart. It was a first for so many things: the first megacity I’d seen, the first time I’d flown this far east, and probably the first time I picked up a camera with any real intent. The photo we took there for the Aviate illustration series came long before RoyPrints was even a concept, and long before our travel schedule got so hectic.
My time in Hong Kong was actually a smaller part of a month-long internship in China with Huawei, called Seeds for the Future. City visits, factory tours, late nights that blurred into each other. By the second week I’d stopped trying to keep track of what day it was.
I barely knew any Chinese, couldn’t use chopsticks, and some dinners were eaten grain by grain because of it. Some evenings ended completely lost in the city, on the 19th floor of some unlisted bar, armed with nothing but the words for sorry, thank you, and beer. Between the Shenzhen weeks, the weekend was free, and most of us chose a hop across the border to Hong Kong.
Touchdown
Three weeks into China, we thought we’d figured the place out. Almost 6,000 miles from home, the MTR doors opened, and we stepped out ready for anything. Instead, an M&S greeted us on the other side, on a street called Nathan Road, under a sign that looked airlifted straight from Ipswich.
“Why does it feel so British?”
Well for over 150 years, it was British.
Prior to Hong Kong, my only real experience of city life was London. Growing up in Milton Keynes, moving there already felt like diving into the deep end of cosmopolitan life. Roaring laughter spilling out of a bar, under a skyline just lit up enough to feel cinematic. Somewhere down the street, a kebab shop waits anxiously for that exact crowd. What more is there to city life?
Five beers strong in Lan Kwai Fong
Hong Kong doesn’t answer lightly. Every street was tightly packed with people, and the air soaked in every kind of noise. The buildings towering over them were just as decked up, often wrapped in extra neon; subtlety doesn’t fly here. By the time we reached the Star Ferry pier, we were greeted with a skyline so bright you’d forget the sun had set, energy bills be damned.
Somewhere up the hills on the island, the booming noise had a name: Lan Kwai Fong, partying HQ of Hong Kong. Unlike most bar and club districts, most of the action takes place on the road rather than in the bars, music spilling out to the street where dance battles would start out of nowhere. To this day we haven’t found a party district like it, and trust me we’ve done extensive research. You can see for yourself below.
Being in the middle of all that buzz was a highlight of the trip, no question. Only that wasn’t where our day began. Hours earlier, before any of this, we’d already seen the birds eye view from the top of Victoria Peak. That’s where our first illustration, “Eight Million Windows”, comes from. Getting up there is its own story.
Take a hike buddy
It started, as these things do, in a Burger King in Central. Six of us scrolling tram timings, when one of our mates looked up and said “should we just walk it?”. Walking up wasn’t really anyone’s first choice, but nobody spotted any red flags on the map, and turns out I’m not the best at spotting those anyway. We set off with a beer-infused spring in our step, and I wish I’d packed more beer.
On the map it looked like a hill. In person it was an incline so steep that crawling felt like the least painful option. A 477m climb in 35-degree heat and August levels of humidity completely cooked our calves. Local uncles overtook us as though it was a light jog, a sight that hurt at the time and has since become a fitness goal.
The buildings cascaded down the hillside below us as we climbed, though my will to live was dropping by the minute so there wasn’t much sightseeing. We’d come to learn that this is just the Hong Kong experience: absolutely exhausting, and something you love every minute of looking back.
Call it coincidence, reward or ridiculously sharp timing. We reached the viewpoint just as the sun started setting, right on golden hour. The bigger surprise was the clear view. Hong Kong’s clouds have a habit of swallowing the skyline for no reason at all, and that evening they stayed away.
Going down by taxi was much quicker. The driver had zero English and all the speed, and spent most of the ride on the phone repeating something that sounded a lot like “delay no more”. Promising, we thought: a man who cared about efficiency. A little more Cantonese later, I can confirm efficiency was not the topic.
We never turn down shots in the evening
Back at the top, with our legs shaking and lungs somewhere far behind us, the climb was forgotten within seconds of looking up. Most skylines don’t ask for that much suffering. When one makes you forget it anyway, it earns a section of its own.
This was the first shot we had, just as the lights were turning on. The pale blue sky slowly winding down into a deeper shade, with a burst of orange around the side. As if the horizon was a lit cigarette slowly burning through the evening.
After dark is where you get the full dose of retro city pop energy, the exact view we had in mind when hiking up. Above is the original photo, taken on a Huawei P9, not even a proper flagship phone. Before this we didn’t even know what shutter speed was. We used to let the phone do the maths. Hong Kong’s skyline doesn’t make that easy though: there’s too much light in some corners, and total darkness in others, so auto mode overcompensated and blew the whole shot out. It took switching into pro mode and turning up the shutter speed to tame the light enough to see each building for itself. That’s the only reason there are eight million windows in the shot at all, rather than one wash of white.
Then there’s the edited version beside it, after a few hours tinkering with every Snapseed setting available. If there’s one photo that says “this is it, this is the dream,” we don’t need to look any further. The city, the mountains, the harbour all showing their full and true colours. The constant movement and ambition all around deeply resonate with us. Turning it into an illustration gave the skyline a story that we can connect with, and a dream to aim for.
Plenty of places are magnificent enough to visit once and never need again. Hong Kong isn’t one of them. You’re in the one of the busiest transit points on earth, the global gateway into China and North East Asia. Unimaginable numbers of people, cargo, and capital flow through the city every day. Translated to street level: making friends here means making friends with the world, and with people already going places. Everyone seems to be reaching for something, in their careers and in their lives. They work hard and play harder, and nobody hands you a rulebook for the second part. Ambition here comes without the stiff collar.
Half the world’s population is within a five-hour flight. Bangkok, Seoul and Osaka are just weekend trips. A lot of who you meet in life is down to fate, and Hong Kong gives fate the best odds going.
All those routes out, and leaving is still the hard part. It’s a city people move to, stay in and build lives around, and everyone I know who’s been keeps finding a reason to come back. Trust me, I was clawing at the plane window when we had to leave. I still am, every time I leave Hong Kong.
We decide our own chapters
Eight Million Windows isn’t really about the skyline. It’s about the stories that make up each of the lights, and about coming back enough times to turn the postcard view into familiarity, one visit at a time.
Some of those visits barely touch the ground. Hong Kong has no room to spread out, so it stacks, and the nights stack with it. Mine began as a pub crawl in Lan Kwai Fong, where we met the Mrs Miyagi of partying. Leading us to an axe throwing bar that sat further inside the same building. Once the Jägers had done their work, the search for food went further inside still, ending at a restaurant attached to someone’s flat that served the best thing a drunk stomach could ask for. Nepalese chow mein. We ran out of building at 7am and caught the first ferry back to Kowloon.
Mrs Miyagi turned out to be a bachata teacher. Naturally, the following night brought a barbecue, my first lesson, and a running joke: meeting a close friend of mine also lives in England, but only in Hong Kong. Somewhere in that skyline is a window from the Nepalese restaurant. Somewhere in that skyline there’s also me in a minibus, motion sick and trying to yell 巴士站，唔該 before it flies past my stop entirely.
It all traces back to that first weekend. This illustration is where it started: one phone photo, taken at the top of a hill that nearly finished us. I’d already been learning Mandarin in Beijing and Shenzhen, and I came home determined to keep going, knowing full well that Hong Kong runs on Cantonese. What Hong Kong gave me was different: a pull toward the city, and toward the stories carried in its people and its food. A pull that’s never really let go.
Photography stopped being a hobby and became the anchor I built everything else around. Skip that weekend, and there’s a version of me who never picked up a camera, or fell for a city that speaks a language I still don’t. Instead, I’ve now been back to Hong Kong more than I’ve visited family in India.
Eight Million Windows, on the wall
If this whole episode sounds like a memory you’ve already built, this is the view you’ll want on the wall. If it’s still ahead of you, well, now you know where to start. This is our first print collection, so every piece is hand signed and hand delivered. Each one arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity. Eight Million Windows is a limited run of only 25 prints for sale. Each one is a giclée print on 300gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag fine art paper, 50 x 70cm with a 5cm border, so you’ll want an 60 x 80cm frame. To purchase, send an email to jayant.roy@royprints.co.uk and I’ll send the price and delivery details.
Every adventure starts and ends the same way: on a plane. Either looking down at a city about to become part of you, or leaving with a piece of it still close to your heart. That’s why every illustration has one, somewhere in the sky.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next instalment of our Aviate series, as we head further east again, to Tokyo.
Stay well, stay happy, and stay curious.
Key Takeaways
- Eight Million Windows began as a phone photo taken from Victoria Peak in 2018. This article is the story behind the print.
- It is a hand signed limited edition run of only 25 for sale, measuring 50 x 70cm, printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, with a certificate of authenticity.
- A giclée print is a fine art inkjet print. This one is on 300gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a paper made for art reproduction.
- It’s a print for anyone with a Hong Kong story of their own. Enquire for the price and delivery details.
Founder and Creative Director of RoyPrints, a travel photography brand turning original images from Europe and Asia into limited-run crossbody bags, apparel, and accessories. Often found in the depths of China with no signal but unlimited views.