Wellington Barracks , Hong Kong Wellington Barracks ( ) was a military barracks located to the east of Garden Road in Admiralty , Hong Kong . Named after Arthur Wellesley , 1st Duke of Wellington , it was built in the 1850s on the site of an earlier military hospital that was destroyed in July 1841 . One of many military complexes constructed by the British Army in the area , the land was returned to the Hong Kong government in the 1970s and gradually reverted to civilian use . As a result , the barracks was closed at the end of that decade , demolished in the mid - 1980s and replaced with Harcourt Garden . History . Original hospital ( 1841 ) . During the First Opium War , the British occupied Hong Kong in 1841 and one year later , Hong Kong Island was ceded to them in the Treaty of Nanking . The new administration chose the site between the bottom of Government Hill and Wan Chai as land for military use . The British Army erected the Naval and Military Hospital in a matshed in January ( or April ) 1841 . However , it was obliterated just six months later when a typhoon struck Hong Kong . Wellington Battery . As early as 1842 a " Battery of 5 Guns " appeared on maps at the site which later became Harcourt Garden . Starting in 1854 , it began being marked as " Wellington Battery " , named after Arthur Wellesley , 1st Duke of Wellington . Starting from the 1900s , the battery ceased to appear on maps . Barracks . The military then utilized the site to build Wellington Barracks circa the 1850s . The new barracks was just one of several military buildings constructed by the British Army in Admiralty . These included Murray Barracks , Victoria Barracks and Admiralty Dock . Located to the east of Garden Road , Wellington Barracks was previously situated on Hong Kong Island ' s waterfront with Victoria Harbour , with a seawall running to the north of the barracks ( however , the site is located much farther inland now due to the amount of land reclamation that has been undertaken since ) . It was connected with Victoria Barracks by a set of cables that ran across Queensway and was used to transport ammunition between the two sites . The barracks housed a gold - coloured bell to help keep time at the military base . It was this very bell that gave Admiralty its name in Chinese ( 金鐘 ; literally " Golden Bell " ) . Electricity was first supplied to the Wellington Barracks in 1910 . On September 7 , 1945 , following the end of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong at the end of World War II , the Royal Navy re - established their naval base , the HMS " Tamar " at Wellington Barracks , vacated by the British Army . As Hong Kong began to expand over the years , the presence of the barracks proved to be problematic . This was because it divided Central and Wan Chai , since development on the site of the barracks was not permitted . This forced developers to construct commercial and residential complexes solely to the east of the barracks in Queen ' s Road East . As a result , the Government of Hong Kong repeatedly attempted to obtain the site from the military in order to unite the two districts , but to no avail . In 1959 , the Hong Kong Government paid HK $ 24 million to the War Department for the release of the land of the Wellington Battery area . Eventually , the military relented and handed back the land to the government in the late 1970s . Both the Wellington and Victoria Barracks were demolished in the mid - 1980s . The new Pacific Place was built on a fraction of the land previously occupied by Victoria Barracks , opening in 1990 . The site of Wellington Barracks was replaced by Harcourt Garden .