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More than 10 years ago the Great Britain has lost its last colony in Southeast Asia, China, but Hong Kong still remains a little British.
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More than 10 years ago the Great Britain has lost its last colony in Southeast Asia, China, but Hong Kong still remains a little British.
The official name of this place now - the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, though the word Hong Kong comes from the southern dialect that has no official status. The today authorities of China like the Beijing dialect more, and therefore prefer this place to be called Xianggang. To understand its particular role in the geography and history of China, it is enough to have a look at the map. Several rivers, among them full-flowing Beijiang, flow into the South China Sea, forming a long and wide bay Zhujiangkou. The bay ends with two peninsulas jutting out far into the sea - the western one is called Macau, and the eastern – Kowloon. Kowloon is the edge of a new autonomous region of China. Then it spreads to Hong Kong Island and many small islands. The attractiveness of these places for explorers of the past is more than obvious: it is here where their months-long journeys from Europe ended.
Till relatively recently Macao belonged to the Portuguese and Hong Kong – to the UK. However, the pioneers of those lands (China) were also he Portuguese, who arrived here in the beginning of XVI century - the Age of Discovery. Local inhabitants had no thoughts about transoceanic trade and active smuggling - inhospitable, sparsely populated islands, with scattered here and there fishing villages, appeared in front of the explorers.
Europeans quickly appreciated the dignity of this place. Profitable trade with Chinese goods began here.
By the end of XIX century, authorities of China began to sweat because of the arrogance of Europeans running their businesses here, and in 1840 the first English-Chinese war broke out (it is called the Opium War: a pretext for the outbreak of hostilities was the order of the Government Commissioner Lin Zexu to destroy stockpiles of opium belonging to the British), which finished in 1842 with the signing of a peace treaty, according to which Hong Kong passed into "eternal possession" of Great Britain, in other words it turned into its colony. At the border between China and British territory a rather strange settlement has appeared - something like a fortress with a name Kowloon Walled City. By the end of 1980s there lived more than 50000 people on the land with sizes 100mx200m. Neither Chinese authorities nor British ones didn't will to accept them as citizens. In 1997 the United Kingdom finally gave back the colony to China, giving to the population a possibility to get British citizenship and move where they want.
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