A Brief History of Hong Kong

Early history

• Prehistory: People settle the area now called Hong Kong from the Stone Age onward, and more arrive under the Han Dynasty. You can still visit the Han-era Lei Cheng Uk tomb in Kowloon.
• 618–907: Under the Tang Dynasty, people here live off salt, pearls, fishing, and trade with nearby Guangzhou. Tuen Mun, in today’s New Territories, is a busy port and naval base; the Tang court garrisons it in 736 to guard the coast, and its salt is valuable enough to attract smugglers.
• 16th century: Portuguese mariners are the first Europeans to reach the area by sea. Jorge Álvares lands at Tuen Mun in 1513, and Portuguese traders run a post there until the Ming navy drives them out in 1521. The British do not arrive in force until the Opium Wars, three centuries later.

Opium Wars

• Early 19th century: Britain has a large trade deficit with China, because British buyers want Chinese tea, silk, and other goods while China wants little from Britain in return. To close the gap, British merchants flood China with opium from British India. Many Chinese people become addicted, and when the Qing government tries to stamp out the trade, Britain goes to war to keep the drug flowing. These become the two Opium Wars.
• 1842: Under the Treaty of Nanjing, China cedes Hong Kong Island to Britain, which turns it into a free port. Merchants and migrants soon arrive from across the world.
• 1860: Britain wins the Second Opium War and forces the Qing Empire to cede the Kowloon Peninsula.
• 1898: Britain leases the New Territories from China for 99 years. Because that lease is due to end in 1997, Britain and China eventually have to negotiate the return of the whole territory.

British rule

• 1841: British forces raise the Union Flag at Possession Point on 26 January. That day is now remembered as Hong Kong’s founding. About 7,450 people live on the island, and most are Tanka fishing families or Hakka charcoal burners in a handful of coastal villages.
• 1850s: During the Taiping Rebellion, large numbers of Chinese people move south into Hong Kong. Others come to escape floods, typhoons, famine, and the fighting on the mainland.
• 1941–1945: Japan occupies Hong Kong for what residents still call the ‘three years and eight months’. By the end, only about 600,000 people are left, down from 1.6 million in 1941, after mass starvation, disease, executions, and forced deportations to the mainland. Much of the city is in ruins.
• 1945: British forces return in August, and civil government follows the next year. Many who fled the occupation return, and the population is back to a million again within a year, as the government sets about rebuilding.
• 1949: The Communists win the Chinese Civil War, and the defeated Nationalist government retreats to Taiwan. Industrialists from Shanghai and other mainland cities move their capital and machinery to Hong Kong to avoid the new government, and others follow them south, from professionals to labourers. Perhaps a million migrants will settle in the colony over the following decade.
• 1950s–1970s: The Shanghai industrialists and their workforce build Hong Kong into a manufacturing powerhouse. Workers turn out textiles, plastics, toys, and later electronics, while traders keep the harbour busy as an entrepôt between China and the West. By the 1970s, finance is as central to the economy as manufacturing.
• 1980s: Britain and China open talks over what will happen when the New Territories lease ends. In 1984, the two governments sign the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Under it, China agrees to take Hong Kong back in 1997 as well as to leave its economic and legal system in place for 50 years.
• 1990: China’s legislature passes the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. In it, China guarantees ‘one country, two systems’ until 2047. Long-term residents and investors now keep an eye on that 2047 deadline when they weigh up the city’s future.

Handover and after

• 1997: Britain hands Hong Kong back to China on 1 July, under the formula of ‘one country, two systems’. Beijing promises to preserve the territory’s autonomy, courts, currency, and capitalist economy for 50 years.
• 1998: Voters go to the polls in the first Legislative Council elections since the handover.
• 2003: Around half a million people march on against a proposed national security law under Article 23 of the Basic Law. The government shelves the bill soon afterwards.
• 2006: Tens of thousands march again to demand universal suffrage and a firm timetable for full democracy.
• 2014: For 79 days, protesters occupy major roads to demand the right to elect their own leader, in what becomes known as the Umbrella Movement. Beijing makes no concessions, and the occupation ends without political change.
• 2019: When the government proposes a bill that would let suspects be sent to mainland China for trial, enormous crowds come onto the streets; organisers claim as many as 2 million marchers at the June peak. The clashes turn violent through the year. Police fire tear gas and rubber bullets, and some protesters throw petrol bombs and vandalise targets they link to Beijing. The government withdraws the bill in the autumn, but the wider protests carry on for months.
• 2020: Beijing imposes a national security law. Under it, secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces become criminal offences, and the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. The government says the law is to restore order after the 2019 unrest, but critics at home and abroad call it a rollback of the autonomy promised in 1997. Police go on to arrest many opposition politicians, activists, journalists, and publishers under the law.
• 2020–2023: Hong Kong is one of the last places outside mainland China to hold to a strict ‘zero-Covid’ approach. The government seals the borders early in the pandemic and, for a time, sends even mild and symptom-free cases into hospital or government isolation. It later lets people isolate at home instead, and only drops the last compulsory isolation orders in early 2023, well after most of the world has relaxed Covid rules.
• 2024: Hong Kong’s legislature unanimously passes a home-grown national security law, the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, under Article 23 of the Basic Law. This is largely the same legislation that the government dropped in 2003 after half a million people marched against it. Under the new law, treason, sedition, espionage, and the theft of state secrets become offences, alongside those already set out in the 2020 law. Although the government presents it as the final piece of the security framework, rights groups and several Western governments read it as a further narrowing of dissent.
• Today: Hong Kong is calmer and more tightly controlled than it was a decade ago. The organised opposition has largely gone, and people weigh their words more carefully under the security laws. Tens of thousands had left during the upheaval and Covid years of the early 2020s, many of them middle-class families and British passport holders who resettled in the UK. But the government has since drawn in new arrivals through its talent schemes, most of them from mainland China, and by the mid-2020s, some international professionals are moving back as well. Hong Kong is still a leading global financial centre, its taxes are among the world’s lowest, its economy is ever more tied to the mainland, and its character is changing along with its population.