Hong Kong historical timeline

Origins

Before the British arrived this was a scatter of fishing and salt-producing villages on the edge of the Chinese empire, worked by Punti, Hakka and boat-dwelling Tanka communities, some of whose walled villages still stand in the New Territories. Britain took Hong Kong Island in 1842 after the First Opium War, added Kowloon in 1860, and in 1898 leased the New Territories for ninety-nine years — a number that would eventually decide everything.

Turning points

The colony grew as an entrepôt, trading on the deep-water shelter of Victoria Harbour. Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945 was the worst period in its history. After 1949 hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived from the mainland, and the city turned from trade to manufacturing, then from manufacturing to finance, in the space of two generations. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 settled the lease question, and on 1 July 1997 sovereignty passed to China under a framework promising Hong Kong its own legal and economic system for fifty years. The Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the much larger protests of 2019 tested that arrangement, and a national security law imposed in 2020 reshaped its politics.

Influential people

Sun Yat-sen studied medicine here and planned a revolution from it. Run Run Shaw built a film studio that supplied Chinese-language cinema across Asia, and Bruce Lee made the city’s martial-arts cinema a global export. Li Ka-shing turned a plastics factory into one of Asia’s largest business empires. Deng Xiaoping supplied the formula — one country, two systems — that the handover was built on, and Chris Patten, the last governor, presided over its beginning.

Cultural evolution

Cantonese is the language of the street, and the hybrid it produced — British common law and Chinese practice, yum cha in the morning and a cha chaan teng serving milk tea and macaroni soup at lunch — belongs to nowhere else. Cantopop and Hong Kong cinema dominated Chinese-speaking popular culture from the 1970s into the 1990s, an outsized cultural reach for a territory of seven million.

Present-day significance

Hong Kong remains one of the world’s major financial centres and its busiest container ports, increasingly integrated with the Greater Bay Area cities across the border. Emigration since 2020 has been substantial, and the political settlement has changed considerably from the one agreed in 1984. The fifty-year guarantee runs to 2047, and what follows it is an open question the city discusses constantly.