There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, for example, but looking at all the known ships that have had ‘Hong Kong’ in their names (about 127 of them) offers interesting perspectives on Hong Kong’s maritime story. Who called their ships after our home city? Not the big local colonial shipowners like Jardine’s or Butterfield & Swire is one answer. The ship names with Hong Kong in them are revelatory not just of Hong Kong’s story either. Looking at the kinds of ships and when they were in business tells us a lot about the development of the technical worlds of ships and cargo carrying in general. Developments on which the fortunes of Hong Kong were built and that are still important today.