A Brief History
In the popular mind, the history of Hong Kong, long the
entryway to China for Westerners, begins in 1841 with the British
occupation of the territory. However, it would be wrong to dismiss the
long history of the region itself. Archaeologists today are working to
uncover Hong Kong’s past, which stretches back thousands of years. You
can get a glimpse into that past at Lei Cheng Uk Museum’s
1,600-year-old burial vault on the mainland just north of Kowloon (see
page 38). In 1992, when construction of the airport on Chek Lap Kok was
begun, a 2,000-year-old village, Pak Mong, was discovered, complete
with artifacts that indicated a sophisticated rural society. An even
older Stone Age site was discovered on Lamma Island in 1996.
While Hong Kong remained a relative backwater in early days,
nearby Guangzhou (Canton) was developing into a great trading city with
connections in India and the Middle East. By a.d. 900, the Hong Kong
islands had become a lair for pirates preying on the shipping in the
Pearl River Delta and causing a major headache for burgeoning
Guangzhou; small bands of pirates were still operating into the early
years of the 20th century.
In the meantime, the mainland area was being settled by
incomers, the “Five Great Clans”: Tang, Hau, Pang, Liu, and Man. First
to arrive was the Tang clan, which established a number of walled
villages in the New Territories that still exist today. You can visit
Kat Hing Wai and Lo Wai, villages with their walls still intact.
Adjacent to Lo Wai is the Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall, built in the
16th century, which is still the center of clan activities.
The first Europeans to arrive in the Pearl River Delta were
the Portuguese, who settled in Macau in 1557 and for several centuries
had a monopoly on trade between Asia, Europe, and South America. As
Macau developed into the greatest port in the East, it also became a
base for Jesuit missionaries; it was later a haven for persecuted
Japanese Christians. While Christianity was not a great success in
China, it made local headway, evidenced today by the numerous Catholic
churches in Macau’s historic center. Intermarriage with the local
Chinese created a community of Macanese, whose culture can still be
seen in Macau’s architecture and cuisine.
The British Arrive
“ Albert is so amused,” wrote Queen Victoria, “at my having
got the island of Hong Kong. ” Her foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston,
was not so amused; he dismissed Hong Kong as “a barren island with
hardly a house upon it. ”
Hong Kong Island formally became a British possession two
years later in 1843. The British now had a base for the thriving trade
they had carried on from Canton. Trading conditions, however, were not
easy. The attitude expressed by Emperor Qianlong at Britian’s first
attempt to open trade with China in 1793 continued to prevail: “We
possess all things,” said the emperor, “I set no value on objects
strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Moreover, China would accept nothing but silver bullion in
exchange for its goods, so Britian had to look for a more abundant
commodity to square its accounts. Around the end of the 18th century,
the traders found a solution: Opium was the wonder drug that would
solve the problem. Grown in India, it was delivered to Canton, and
while China outlawed the trade in 1799, local Cantonese officials were
always willing to look the other way for “squeeze money” (a term still
used in Hong Kong).
In 1839 the emperor appointed the incorruptible
Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu to stamp out the smuggling of “foreign mud. ”
Lin’s crackdown was indeed severe. He demanded that the British
merchants in Canton surrender their opium stores, and to back up his
ultimatum he laid siege to the traders, who, after six tense weeks,
surrendered over 20,000 chests of opium. To Queen Victoria, Lin
addressed a famous letter, pointing out the harm the “poisonous drug”
did to China, and asking for an end to the opium trade; his arguments
are unanswerable, but the lofty though heartfelt tone of the letter
shows how unprepared the Chinese were to negotiate with the West in
realistic terms.
A year later, in June 1840, came the British retaliation,
beginning the first of the so-called Opium Wars. After a few skirmishes
and much negotiation, a peace agreement was reached. Under the
Convention of Chuenpi, Britain was given the island of Hong Kong, and
on 26 January 1841, it was proclaimed a British colony.
The Opium Wars
The peace plan achieved at Chuenpi was short-lived. Both
Peking and London repudiated the agreement, and fighting resumed. This
time the British forces, less than 3,000 strong but in possession of
superior weapons and tactics, outfought the Chinese. Shanghai fell and
Nanking was threatened. In the Treaty of Nanking (1842) China was
compelled to open five of its ports to foreign economic and political
penetration, and even to compensate the opium smugglers for their
losses. Hong Kong’s status as a British colony and a free port was
confirmed.
In the aftermath of the Opium Wars, trade in “foreign mud”
was resumed at a level even higher than before, although the major
traders, by now respectable and diversified, stopped their trading in
1907. Opium-smoking continued openly in Hong Kong until 1946; in
mainland China the Communist government abolished it when they came to
power in 1949.
Commerce and Wealth
The first governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Pottinger,
predicted it would become “a vast emporium of commerce and wealth. ”
Under his direction, Hong Kong began its march toward prosperity. It
was soon flourishing; with its natural harbor that attracted ships,
Hong Kong leaped to the forefront as a base for trade. Both the
population and the economy began to grow steadily. A surprise was the
sizable number of Chinese who chose to move to the colony.
In the meantime, the opening of Hong Kong was the last blow
to Macau’s prosperity. Inroads had already been made by the arrival of
the Dutch and Macau’s loss to them of the profitable Japanese trade.
From then on, until its 1970s comeback with electronic and other export
goods, Macau sank into obscurity.
Despite the differences between the Chinese majority and
the European minority, relations were generally cordial. Sir John
Francis Davis, an early governor, disgusted with the squabbling of the
English residents, declared: “It is a much easier task to govern the
20,000 Chinese inhabitants of the colony than the few hundreds of
English.”
There were a few incidents: On 15 January 1857, somebody
added an extra ingredient to the dough at the colony’s main
bakery — arsenic. While the Chinese continued to enjoy their daily
rice, the British, eating their daily bread, were dropping like flies.
At the height of the panic, thousands of Chinese were deported from
Hong Kong. No one ever discovered the identity or the motive of the
culprits.
Conditions in the colony in the 19th century, however, did
not favor the Chinese population. The British lived along the
waterfront in Victoria (now Central) and on the cooler slopes of
Victoria Peak. The Chinese were barred from these areas, and from any
European neighborhood. They settled in what is now known as the Western
District. It was not uncommon for several families and their animals to
share one room in crowded shantytowns. So it is not surprising that
when bubonic plague struck in 1894, it took nearly 30 years to fully
eradicate it. Today in the Western District, you can still wander
narrow streets lined with small traditional shops selling ginseng,
medicinal herbs, incense, tea, and funeral objects.
In 1860, a treaty gave Britain a permanent beach-head on
the Chinese mainland — the Kowloon peninsula, directly across Victoria
harbor. In 1898, under the Convention of Peking, China leased the New
Territories and 235 more islands to Britain for what then seemed an
eternity — 99 years.
The 20th Century
The colony’s population has always fluctuated according to
events beyond its borders. In 1911, when the Chinese revolution
overthrew the Manchus, refugees flocked to the safety of Hong Kong.
Many arrived with nothing but the shirts on their backs, but they
brought their philosophy of working hard and seizing opportunity.
Hundreds of thousands more arrived in the 1930s when Japan invaded
China. By the eve of World War II, the population was more than one and
a half million.
A few hours after Japan’s attack on the American fleet at
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a dozen Japanese battalions began an
assault on Hong Kong; Hong Kong’s minimal air force was destroyed on
the airfield at Kai Tak within five minutes. Abandoning the New
Territories and Kowloon, the defenders retreated to Hong Kong island,
hoping for relief which never came. They finally surrendered on
Christmas Day in 1941. Survivors recall three and a half years of
hunger and hardship under the occupation forces, who deported many Hong
Kong Chinese to the mainland. A number of Hong Kong’s monuments were
damaged during this time: St. John’s Cathedral was turned into a
military club, the old governor’s lodge on the Peak was burned down,
and the commandant of the occupation forces rebuilt the colonial
governor’s mansion in Japanese style.
At the end of World War II, Hong Kong took stock of what
remained — the population was down to half a million, and there was no
industry, no fishing fleet, and few houses and public services.
Hong Kong Comes Back
China’s civil war sent distressing echoes to Hong Kong.
While the Chinese Communist armies drove towards the south, the flow of
refugees into Hong Kong multiplied, and by the time the People’s
Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949, the total population of Hong
Kong had grown to more than two million people. The fall of Shanghai in
1950 brought another flood of refugees, among them many wealthy people
and skilled artisans, including the Shanghai industrialists who became
the founders of Hong Kong’s now famous textile industry. In the late
1970s Hong Kong became the conduit for China’s goods, investment, and
tourism. It also found itself famous as a worldwide bargain shopping
center.
Housing was now in desperately short supply. Housing had
always been scarce for Hong Kong’s Chinese. The problem became an
outright disaster on Christmas Day in 1953. An uncontrollable fire
devoured a whole city of squatters’ shacks in Kowloon; 50,000 refugees
were deprived of shelter. The calamity spurred the government to launch
an emergency program of public-housing construction; spartan new blocks
of apartments put cheap and fireproof roofs over hundreds of thousands
of heads. But this new housing was grimly overcrowded, and even a
frenzy of construction couldn’t keep pace with the demand for living
space. In 1962 the colonial authorities closed the border with China,
but even this did not altogether stem the flow of refugees: The next
arrivals were the Vietnamese boat people.
Into the 21st Century
As 1997 drew nearer, it became clear that the Chinese
government had no intention of renewing the 99-year lease on the New
Territories. Negotiations began, and in 1984 Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which Britain
confirmed the transfer of the New Territories and all of Hong Kong to
China in 1997. For its part, China declared Hong Kong a “Special
Administrative Region” and guaranteed its civil and social system for
at least 50 years after 1997. Although China’s Basic Law promised that
Hong Kong’s existing laws and civil liberties would be upheld, refugees
began flowing the other way. The British Nationality Act (1981) had in
effect prevented Hong Kong citizens from acquiring British citizenship,
and thousands of people, anxious about their future under China’s rule,
were prompted to apply for citizenship elsewhere, notably in Canada and
Australia. The protests in 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square sparked
sympathy marches in Hong Kong, and further increased tension with
China. Some companies moved their headquarters out of Hong Kong.
Ironically, as the handover approached, the British granted
the Hong Kong Chinese more political autonomy than they had done since
the colony was founded, including such democratic reforms as elections
to the Legislative Council.
Since the handover in July 1997, China has generally
followed a hands-off policy. Many who fled have returned. What controls
heartbeats in Hong Kong are the fluctuations of the Hang Seng Index,
foreign currency exchange rates, and skyrocketing property prices. In
short, the status quo prevails. Everybody hopes Hong Kong will remain
stable, but everyone also has their doubts. In the meantime, the
philosophy is to seize present-day opportunities in the thriving
economy.
