![]() ![]() The book’s misfortune, as its author accepts, is that it ends in 1997, and thus lacks a post-colonial perspective. Throughout the book Mr Tsang dispenses history with even-handedness, acknowledging that Britain’s colonial years brought prosperity, an efficient administration and concepts such as due process, while never neglecting the second-class treatment of ethnic Chinese. But the Japanese conquering of Hong Kong in 1941 dispelled hubristic ideas of British invincibility. For many years, writes Mr Tsang, politicians in Westminster considered Britain too powerful (and China too backward) to make handing back its crown dependency conceivable. While Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula were awarded to Britain in perpetuity, under “unequal treaties” signed after the opium wars, the far larger New Territories, stretching from Kowloon to the Shenzhen river, were only given on a 99-year lease in 1898. Hanging over the narrative is Britain’s gradual realisation that it had a “Hong Kong problem”. ![]() ![]() This extensive history covers the period from 1841, the year before Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, to 1997, when China retook control. ![]()
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