Noah’s Ark Hotel & Resort

Architecture & Design

Noah’s Ark Hotel & Resort sits at 33 Pak Yan Road on Ma Wan, the small island wedged between Tsing Yi and Lantau that the Tsing Ma and Ting Kau bridges cross en route to the airport. The resort’s centerpiece — and the reason most visitors know the name at all — is a full-size reconstruction of the biblical ark, built to the proportions given in Genesis: 300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high, worked out here as a steel-framed hull roughly 450 feet in length clad in composite panels. The 25,000-square-metre complex around it folds guest rooms, exhibition halls, and landscaped gardens into the same footprint, with the Tsing Ma Bridge visible from much of the site’s northern-facing rooms and public spaces.

History & Context

Planning for Ma Wan Park began in 1997, with the government agreeing to subsidise construction; work started in 2005 and the ark itself opened to the public in May 2009, developed by Sun Hung Kai Properties and financed jointly by the Kwok family and five Christian organizations as an educational and recreational attraction rather than a religious site in any formal sense. The development sits on an island whose own history runs far deeper than the resort’s: Ma Wan’s Tin Hau Temple, built in 1857 by Tanka fishing families and still standing near the old village, predates every structure of the modern Park Island and Noah’s Ark developments by more than a century, and the open ground before it once served as communal space for drying shrimp paste, the trade the original fishing village depended on. Further back still, the Tung Wan Tsai North archaeological site on Ma Wan — excavated in 1997 just as the park’s planning got underway — uncovered twenty burial graves and pottery, stone tools, and ornaments dating from the Late Neolithic through the early Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 1000 BC. The find was significant enough to be named one of China’s Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries that year, and in 2021 one of the country’s Top 100 Archaeological Discoveries of the past century — evidence that people were living and burying their dead on this small island four millennia before Sun Hung Kai Properties broke ground on a resort themed around a very different flood story.

Practical Information

Reaching Ma Wan means committing to a specific route: most visitors take the MTR Tung Chung Line to Tsing Yi station, then transfer to a resident-and-visitor bus service — routes NR330 and NR332 among them — that crosses onto the island via the road deck of the Tsing Ma Bridge. A direct ferry from Central Pier 2 offers a slower but more scenic alternative, running roughly 25 minutes each way. The hotel itself provides 201 rooms configured for families and corporate groups, alongside event halls used for conferences and the Treasure House museum documenting the island’s fishing-village and archaeological history for visitors who want context beyond the ark replica itself. Because Ma Wan sits apart from Hong Kong’s denser dining districts, most guests eat on-site or make the short trip back across the bridge into Tsuen Wan, where Chiu Chow noodle shops and dim sum restaurants offer a more typical Hong Kong meal than anything available on the island itself.

Local Character & Economic Context

Ma Wan’s transformation from working fishing village to planned residential and leisure island happened within a single generation. The original village, home to Tanka boat-dwelling families for well over a century, was progressively resettled as Sun Hung Kai Properties built the Park Island residential towers on the island’s northern side through the early 2000s, with the last village residents relocated by 2011. What remains of the old settlement — abandoned houses, the Tin Hau Temple, narrow lanes now overgrown in places — sits within walking distance of both Noah’s Ark and the modern apartment blocks, an unusually direct juxtaposition between a fishing community’s material remains and the resort economy that succeeded it. That contrast is deliberate to a degree: the resort’s own heritage displays and the island’s informal walking routes past the old village both trade on Ma Wan’s layered history as part of the visitor draw, alongside the ark replica itself. For a hotel built almost entirely around a single themed attraction, that access to genuine, walkable local history — spanning four thousand years from Neolithic burial grounds to a mid-19th-century fishing temple to a 21st-century biblical theme park — gives Noah’s Ark Hotel & Resort a depth of surrounding context unusual for a property this compact and this focused on one single themed attraction.