How many skyscrapers does Hong Kong have?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the city everyone associates with skyscrapers and then double it. The explanation gives the comparison directly: roughly twice New York. When a question asks for a record holder in a category with an obvious famous candidate, the answer is usually a different city that beats it by a wide margin.

The land constraint is the cause, and it is the genuinely surprising part: only about a quarter of the territory is developed, with the rest protected as country park and mountain. A city that cannot spread outward must build upward, so the skyscraper count is a consequence of conservation policy as much as of economics.

That inverts the usual assumption about tall buildings. They are normally read as a symbol of wealth or ambition; here they are a symptom of a hard boundary on buildable land. Density questions on this site keep producing the same finding — the shape of a city is usually dictated by what it physically cannot do.