Goldfish Market

History & Lore

The trade here traces back to the 1960s, when fish breeders from the New Territories began selling stock informally along Boundary Street. As the number of sellers grew, some relocated a block over to Tung Choi Street, and by the 1970s enough shops had clustered there that the strip earned its own name: the Goldfish Market. The 1980s cemented its identity further, as interest in fishkeeping broadened beyond its original feng shui motivations into a genuine collecting hobby. The feng shui logic is still the reason most first-time visitors are given for the market’s existence: in Cantonese, the word for fish, yu, sounds identical to the word for abundance, and gold-coloured fish read as a direct symbol of incoming wealth. Keeping a bowl of them moving near a shop entrance or living-room window is thought to keep prosperity circulating rather than stagnant — a piece of folk belief durable enough to have sustained an entire retail strip for six decades.

Layout & Local Taste

Today around 40 to 50 shops and stalls run along roughly 300 metres of Tung Choi Street’s northern stretch, packed tightly enough that browsing means walking a narrow, fish-lined corridor rather than entering individual storefronts. Stock ranges from common goldfish (Carassius auratus) sold for a few dollars to imported koi that can run into the thousands, most displayed in pressurised, oxygen-filled plastic bags hung in rows on vertical pegboards — a space-efficient method built for a district where floor area is the scarcest resource of all. Tanks of tropical fish, turtles, and other small aquatic pets fill out the rest of the trade, and the shopkeepers themselves are frequently multi-generational, with sons and daughters of the original 1970s breeders still running stalls their parents opened. The street sits directly beside Fa Yuen Street, whose curried fish balls and iron-mould egg waffles give visitors somewhere to eat between shops, and beside the Flower Market a few streets further on — together the three form Mong Kok’s cluster of specialist hawker trades, each descended from the same postwar wave of relocated street vendors.

Practical Information

Reach the market via the MTR Tsuen Wan or Kwun Tong lines to Mong Kok Station, Exit B3, following the elevated footbridge network north, or via the East Rail Line to Mong Kok East Station, about 500 metres to the east. Shops generally open by late morning and stay busy into the evening, with weekend afternoons drawing the heaviest foot traffic from local collectors topping up their home tanks. There is little in the way of formal signage explaining the market’s history to passersby, so much of what makes it worth a stop — the feng shui logic, the decades of family continuity — has to be picked up from the shopkeepers themselves rather than read off a plaque.

ESG Note

Animal-welfare groups have periodically raised concerns about how ornamental fish and small pets are kept and transported through markets like this one, including the sealed-bag display method that maximises visible stock in minimal space. Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department licenses pet shops and imposes basic care requirements, though enforcement in a dense, high-turnover market environment is necessarily lighter-touch than in a purpose-built aquarium. Most goldfish sold here are farmed rather than wild-caught, a distinction that matters for anyone weighing the market’s ecological footprint against its cultural role.