I am unable to escape from Hong Kong.
My mother lived there for her formative teenage years with the rest of her family, an interlude that they all enjoyed immensely. This means that all 18 years of my life have been filled with a near constant stream of Stories About Hong Kong. I've heard about the neighborhoods, the house keeper, the food, the locals, the British, the bars - pretty much every single quirk that my family encountered whilst there in the seventies. My parents went back for a visit when I was very young - 3 or 4 - and I mostly remember receiving an incredibly awesome plastic Chinese dragon as a souvenir. Obviously it was inevitable I would have to go to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a modern, fancy, and fast-paced city, setting the pace for the rest of China's somewhat unnerving capitalist explosion. It has not always been that way. People have lived on Hong Kong in one capacity or another for over 5000 years, but there were no big doings until the Tang dynasty, where, due to the proximity of Guangdong as an important trading port, Hong Kong's New Territories became a catch-all port for all manner of capitalism - legal, illegal, and shades of grey in between. The Mongol invasion of 1276 saw the beleaguered Song court decamp to Kowloon, which didn't help matters much - the child emperor, Zhao Bing, drowned himself with his underlings after being routed in the battle of Yamen.
The population expanded during the Mongol period, but not much else of note happened until the Opium Wars, when the British got rather kerflumpt over the fact that the Chinese decided they didn't want opium anymore. During this conflict, the British occupied Hong Kong Island in January of 1841, claiming it as a colony. It officially was ceded to the English in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking, wherein it became a formal Crown Colony, eventually leading to its curious juxtaposition of dim sum and cricket. (The Chinese and British did share bad teeth.) In 1898, the British decided to expand their holdings for security reasons, leasing the New Territories in the Second Convention of Peking - which was set to expire on June 30th of 1997.
Hong Kong grew and grew and grew, housing 1.6 million people by 1941. The British, holding to usual form, did their best to keep the Chinese locals from holding any power, preventing them from living on Victoria Peak or participating in a meaningful way in government. World War II, a period of nastiness for pretty much everyone, saw the Japanese occupation, lasting from 1941 to 1945, wherein the Japanese treated the natives horribly, cut rations, and dramatically reduced the population by means of deportation and general bad treatment. After 1945 and the Communist takeover, Hong Kong's population began to boom again, as mainland Chinese came over to escape the new regime (and the Great Leap Forward.)
Hong Kong got richer and richer, owing to the ascendant manufacturing industry in the 1960's. It became a business and tourism center, and great advances in education were made as well. Hong Kong was a very nice place to be indeed, with a high standard of living and an exciting social life, fed both by Chinese influence and a healthy influx of travelers from all over the world, who were thrilled to find themselves at Susie Wong strip clubs and sleazy, sleazy bars.
The 1997 handover back to China began to loom in the eighties, prompting many people to emigrate to wherever would take them. On July 1st, 1997, the British officially handed back Hong Kong to the Chinese government. Concern over the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government has been raised, but so far, this has only been expressed through peaceful protest. Hong Kong's economy is still chugging along, and it's still a cosmopolitan city with a profusion of bars, knock-off fashion stores, and tremendous amounts of dim sum. We can only hope it remains that way.
(My mom's old haunt in Hong Kong. We'll see if it's still there.)
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