A fishing harbour ceded after one war and leased after another, now a skyline built almost entirely on the trade those treaties tried to control.

Hong Kong entered the historical record as a modest scatter of fishing and farming settlements and a haven for salt smugglers and pirates under the Qing dynasty, its deep natural harbour otherwise unremarkable until Britain’s trade in opium, grown in India and sold into China against imperial prohibition, brought the two empires to war in 1839. Britain’s victory in the First Opium War produced the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, under which Qing China ceded Hong Kong Island outright; a second conflict, the Second Opium War, added the Kowloon Peninsula by the Convention of Peking in 1860, and in 1898 a further Convention of Peking leased Britain the much larger New Territories and outlying islands for 99 years, a lease whose 1997 expiry would later force the question of the entire territory’s return. Britain declared the young colony a free port from the outset, and traders, financiers and refugees from across a collapsing Qing empire built its early fortunes on the transshipment of goods, and people, between China and the rest of the world.

The colony’s twentieth century was interrupted by the Japanese occupation of December 1941 to August 1945, three years and eight months remembered locally as one of the harshest periods in its history, and remade afterward by successive waves of refugees fleeing the Chinese Civil War and then the 1949 Communist victory, who supplied the labour behind a rapid industrialisation in textiles, plastics and electronics through the 1950s and 1960s. Governor Murray MacLehose’s reforms of the 1970s — a mass public-housing programme, the Independent Commission Against Corruption founded in 1974, and the MTR underground railway’s opening in 1979 — turned that industrial refugee city into a more stable one just as its economy pivoted toward the trading, banking and finance that define it today. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration set the terms for what came next: sovereignty would revert to China on 1 July 1997, under a “one country, two systems” arrangement enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, guaranteeing the territory its own legal system, currency and way of life for fifty years from the handover — the same skyline of Victoria Harbour, built on a colonial land deal and a war over trade, now the backdrop to one of the world’s major financial centres.