The museum first opened to the public on 8 September 2005, under the leadership of its board of directors, its first museum director, Stephen Davies, and the trustees of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Trust. It was located on the ground floor of Murray House, a reconstruction of one of the first 19th-century buildings of the British colonial period. The building had been dismantled stone by stone, stored in a rural site for over a decade, and then reassembled around a modern reinforced concrete building overlooking Stanley Bay.