Hong Kong has no weekend

Today is Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong, but it isn't a public holiday. The public holiday for Mid-Autumn Festival, which is celebrated in the evening, is officially called "The day following the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival" and, as the name suggests, is celebrated tomorrow.

The only catch is that tomorrow is Saturday, a day when many people already don't have to work because it's the weekend. The naive reader (which I assure you, you are not!) would assume that since the holiday falls on a weekend, it would be moved to the next Monday. Such a reader would be wrong. This is because Hong Kong has no legal concept of weekends. Every day of the week is the same except for Sunday which is defined in the General Holidays Ordinance to be a "General Holiday" every week. Saturday is just a normal day of the week like Monday to Friday.

In fact, the Hong Kong Government used to work on Saturdays for a half-day as recently as 2006. Prior to 29 April, 1866 (that's eighteen-sixty-six...not a typo!), the Government worked all-day Saturday as well. And sometime before that they were working 7 days a week. You could say spending a lot of time at work is a very long Hong Kong tradition!

The General Holidays Ordinance also defines other named holidays such as tomorrow's "The day following the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival" as General Holidays as well, just like you're average "Every Sunday". Colloquially, though, people talk about holidays in Hong Kong as "public holidays" in a way which is intended to mean "all general holidays that aren't a Sunday".

Hong Kong, like many other places, has the cultural concept of Saturday and Sunday being the weekend. So we find ourselves in an interesting situation where the legal definitions and the cultural concepts don't match up. This leads to interesting side effects or confusion in everyday Hong Kong life.

Many transport schedules have one schedule for Monday to Saturday and another different schedule for Sundays & Public Holidays. So you might think, that a bus that doesn't run between certain hours on the weekdays should be running now because it's the weekend, only to find that it's actually not running today because today is Saturday and not Sunday.

Tunnel tolls also vary greatly depending on if it's a Sunday or Public Holiday or some other day. So you might think "oh great, it's the weekend so I can avoid the $60 Western Harbour Crossing toll" only to find out that because Saturday isn't Sunday, you still end up paying the same peak rates as your normal workday.

If you're reading this post trying to figure out when you get time off work, you'll be disappointed to learn that all of my rambling thus far in this post hasn't told you anything about holidays from work. Unfortunately, General Holidays are only a day off work if they're also Statutory Holidays. What's Statutory Holiday, you ask?That's a different type of holiday defined in a different ordinance, the Employment Ordinance. While "Every Sunday" is a General Holiday, it's not a Statutory Holiday, so you might actually have to work on Sunday! And if we exclude "Every Sunday" from our list of General Holidays, the remaining ones aren't all Statutory Holidays (yet!), so you might even have to work if it's a public (General) holiday. And even if a holiday is a Statutory Holiday, you might still have to work if your employer agrees to give you another day off instead!

All of this is to say, I hope you enjoy your weekend....now get back to work!