Cross-Harbour Tunnel
tunnel in Hong Kong
The Cross-Harbour Tunnel (abbreviated CHT or XHT) is the first tunnel in Hong Kong built underwater. It consists of two steel road tunnels, each with two lanes constructed using the single shell immersed tube method.
It is the earliest of three vehicular harbour crossings in Hong Kong, opened for traffic in 1972. It was constructed under a 30-year private-sector franchise based on a build–operate–transfer (BOT) model, and the title passed to the Hong Kong government in 1999 upon termination of the franchise. It has become one of the most congested roads in Hong Kong and the world, with 116,753 vehicles passing through it daily in 2013.
History
The Hong Kong government used the BOT model for the implementation of the tunnel project; financing and construction was the responsibility of a private enterprise, which was granted a concession to operate and collect tolls for 30 years. The concession was given to the then Cross-Harbour Tunnel Company Limited (Chinese: 香港隧道有限公司), today the Cross-Harbour Holdings Limited (港通控股有限公司), which was founded in 1965 to carry out the tunnel project. The Hong Kong government participated to the tune of 20% in order not to fully hand over their influence on the project. The tunnel was designed with two lanes in each direction for a capacity of 80,000 vehicles. The project was structurally managed jointly by the British engineering firms Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick & Partners and Freeman Fox & Partners.
“Cross-Harbour Tunnel” enters the record as tunnel in Hong Kong. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cross-Harbour, Tunnel and tunnel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3003753. Authority coordinates are 22.293, 114.182. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1999, 2013 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cross-Harbour Tunnel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.