Dried Seafood Street

With a bustling, colorful, and extremely fragrant street market, Dried Seafood Street is one of the most distinctive areas of Sheung Wan, and definitely worth wandering through.

Let your nose lead the way there—people often joke that you can smell it before you can see it!

Dried Seafood Street spans a number of blocks along Des Voeux Road West, and if you have time, the most scenic way to get there is to take the tram, which runs along Des Voeux Road, and get off at the Western Market to continue on foot.

Near Western Market you’ll find Wing Lok Street, aka Ginseng and Bird Nest Street, with shops that sell those two highly prized, and very expensive, specialized items.

If you keep wandering away from Western Market along Des Voeux Road West you can’t miss it: shop after shop after shop selling dried seafood, with an endless parade of trucks making deliveries, and bamboo baskets full of squid, fish and shrimp, put on every flat surface, drying in the sun.

For tourists, it is a fascinating place to walk through and explore, with a huge variety of dried goods, ranging from highly prized abalone and baskets of orange-hued scallops, starfish, seahorses, mushrooms and other fungi, shark fins (although we don’t recommend buying any as many species are threatened due to shark finning), and even deer antlers, plus a whole lot of things you probably can’t even begin to identify.

Dried Seafood Street sells a remedy for whatever ails you, and is a testament to Hong Kong’s long-standing faith in Chinese traditional medicine.

Be warned that a lot of shop owners do not appreciate tourists standing in front of their shops and taking pictures. Many even have signs that say ‘no photography allowed’, so if you must take some snapshots, try to be discreet about it. Shop owners are especially sensitive about people taking pictures of shark fins, due to its controversial nature.