Hong Kong and Macau_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 14th Edition) - Andrew Stone [7]
Though neither side, in fact, accepted the terms of the convention, a couple of subsequent events decided Hong Kong’s fate. In January 1841 a naval landing party hoisted the British flag at Possession Point (now Possession St) on Hong Kong Island. The following month Captain Elliot attacked the Bogue Fort in Humen, took control of the Pearl River and laid siege to Guangzhou, withdrawing only after having extracted concessions from merchants there. Six months later a powerful British force led by Elliot’s successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, sailed north and seized Amoy (Xiamen), Ningpo (Ningbo), Shanghai and other ports. With the strategic city of Nanking (Nanjing) under immediate threat, the Chinese were forced to accept Britain’s terms.
The Treaty of Nanking abolished the monopoly system of trade, opened five ‘treaty ports’ to British residents and foreign trade, exempted British nationals from all Chinese laws and ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British ‘in perpetuity’.
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BRITISH HONG KONG
‘Albert is so amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong’, wrote Queen Victoria to King Leopold of Belgium in 1841. At the time, Hong Kong was little more than a backwater of about 20 villages and hamlets. It did offer one distinct advantage for the British trading fleet, however: a deep, well-sheltered harbour strategically located in the Far East.
Hong Kong formally became a British possession on 26 June 1843, and its first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, took charge. A primitive, chaotic and lawless settlement soon sprang up.
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GROWING PAINS
What would later be called the Second Opium War (or Second Anglo-Chinese War) broke out in October 1856. The first stage of the war was brought to an end two years later by the Treaty of Tientsin (now Tianjin), which gave foreigners the right to diplomatic representation in Beijing.
Despite warnings from the Chinese, the British tried to capitalise on this agreement in 1859 by sending a flotilla carrying the first British envoy and minister plenipotentiary up the Pei Ho River to Beijing. The Chinese fired on the armada, which sustained heavy losses. Using this as a pretext, a combined British and French force invaded China and marched on Beijing. The victorious British forced the Chinese to the Convention of Peking in 1860, which ratified the Treaty of Tientsin and ceded the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island to Britain. Britain was now in complete control of Victoria Harbour and its approaches.
Hong Kong’s population had leapt from 33,000 in 1850 to 240,000 in 1896, and the British army felt it needed to command the mountains of the New Territories to protect the growing colony. When the Qing dynasty was at its nadir, the British government petitioned China to extend the colony into the New Territories. The June 1898 Convention of Peking handed Britain a larger-than-expected slice of territory that included 235 islands and ran north to the Shumchun (Shenzhen) River, increasing the colony’s size by 90%.
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A SLEEPY BACKWATER
While Hong Kong’s major trading houses, including Jardine Matheson and Swire, prospered from their trade with China, the colony hardly thrived in its first few decades. Fever, bubonic plague and typhoons threatened life and property, and at first the colony attracted a fair number of criminals and vice merchants. Opium dens, gambling clubs and brothels proliferated; just a year after Britain took possession, an estimated 450 prostitutes worked out of two dozen brothels, including a fair number of foreign prostitutes clustered in Lyndhurst Tce.
Gradually, however, Hong Kong began to shape itself into a more substantial community. Gas and electrical power companies sprang up; ferries, trams, the Kowloon-Canton Railway and the newfangled High Level Tramway (later known as the Peak Tram) provided a decent transport network; and land was reclaimed. Nonetheless, from the