After close to two centuries of writing about Hong Kong, the archive bursts with spatial metaphors: gateway, door, pivot, portal, sentinel, node, hub. A wide array of disciplines in humanities and social sciences have put this global metropolitan under the spotlight: history, sociology, anthropology, economics, media studies, political science, etc. Many scholars have substantiated Hong Kong’s connectedness with profuse examples. Some connections are old: worshippers of Immortal Zhu triangulate Tai O, Macau, and Pinghai. Some were imperial: when the Komagatsu Maru sailed in 1914, it met empire-wide restrictions. Some are new: the jollof and fufu of Chungking Mansions links Kowloon to Accra. But metaphors of Hong Kong connections sometimes float abstractly. Invocations of ‘hubs’ drift like mists over the mountains. Or they become entrenched: particularly in the quadrant of London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Washington. This conference invites consideration of connectedness on two different grounds. First it invites specificity: what were the precise contours, pathways, technologies, infrastructures linking Hong Kong to other specific sites round the world, in particular Southeast Asia and Singapore? Second it invites surprise. Beyond the Cold War quadrant, what connections, networks, exchanges, assemblages linked Hong Kong to more unexpected sites: to Sandakan, Curaçao, Bangkok, say? Or, as in the naval career of Edward Belcher, from Victoria Harbour to Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut? Thinking with specificity and surprise, this conference invites re-conceptualisations of Hong Kong’s global localities from different disciplines. It calls for a transdisciplinary exchange via, and of, Hong Kong. It is not only an arena for meaningful dialogues between scholars of disciplinary tradition in the study of Hong Kong, but also a collaborative process of knowledge production among researchers from different disciplines and representatives outside academia, aiming for manifold interactions and integrations of frameworks, theories, and methodologies (Pohl et al. 2020). This conference is significant in three ways: 1) de-territorialising and re-territorialising the geographical and sociopolitical imaginations of Hong Kong; 2) showcasing ‘Hong Kong as a global node’ and the interplays with Hong Kong’s reconfigured imaginaries, involving other countries and geographical regions; 3.) discovering and uncovering unexpected or underexplored connections.