Jewellery & Gem World Hong Kong opens this September—here’s the history that built it

The people came next. During the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, diamonds became popular with Hong Kong’s Chinese population for a practical reason: they were small enough to hide and carry. Then, after the Communist Party took power on the mainland in 1949, a wave of Shanghainese jewellers and gem merchants relocated to the colony, bringing jade-carving, pearl-trading and goldsmithing skills built up over generations in Shanghai. Diamond imports were restricted across much of Asia after the war, so merchants from across Southeast Asia began travelling to duty-free Hong Kong to source stones instead; the trade grew quickly enough that the Diamond Importers Association was formed in 1959, and one dealer, Casey Liu, became De Beers’ only sightholder in the Far East and opened the region’s first diamond-cutting factory. By the 1970s, a local manufacturing sector had grown up alongside the trading one, exporting finished jewellery in the same decade Hong Kong became known for toys and textiles.

The fair itself is a comparatively recent addition to all this, and its two branches have separate histories. The Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the body behind the March show, was only established in 1966; its own jewellery fair began in 1984, run at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, which opened in 1988, and, for raw materials, at AsiaWorld-Expo, which opened in 2005. By its 34th edition in 2017 it already drew 2,580 exhibitors; the 2026 edition, its 42nd, drew roughly 4,000. The fair opening next week has a different lineage: in 1991, four trade associations invited the HKTDC to launch a joint September show, whose first edition ran at the Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel in September 1992. Three years later, it merged with a rival September show run by Miller Freeman, the trade-show operator that, through later acquisitions, became today’s organiser, Informa Markets. Either way, the effect is the same: two organisers, three fairs a year, and a density of trade weeks that no other city in the region attempts to match.

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The last piece fell into place after the 1997 handover. Hong Kong’s free port status survived intact under “one country, two systems”, and in 2006 the mainland’s Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement gave goods of Hong Kong origin, jewellery included, tariff-free entry into China, just as China was becoming the world’s largest jewellery-buying market. Combined with a corporate tax rate of 16.5 per cent, among the lowest anywhere, that arrangement gave international suppliers reason to keep routing stones and finished pieces through Hong Kong rather than shipping direct. In 2024, Hong Kong led the world in jewellery imports, at US$18.9 billion, and ranked among the top ten exporters, at US$4.77 billion. The trade shows and the tax rate together, more than anything else, are what keep wholesalers based in Hong Kong who could technically set up almost anywhere else.

So when Jewellery & Gem World opens on September 14, and the Convention and Exhibition Centre fills up two days later for finished jewellery, its scale in any given year is only as strong as the conditions around it. What holds regardless is a duty-free port with a 116-year-old gold exchange, a diamond trade forged by war and revolution, and tariff-free access to the world’s biggest jewellery market—reasons the trade keeps landing in Hong Kong that were in place long before anyone booked the hall.

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