History of Hong Kong

Prior to the arrival of the British, Hong Kong was a small fishing community and a haven for travellers and pirates in the South China Sea. During the Opium Wars with China in the Nineteenth Century, Britain used the territory as a naval base. Following the end of the first Opium War, the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 ceded Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity. Sir Henry Pottinger, whose name can be found on a street in Central district, was its first governor. Following additional conflicts with the Chinese in 1860 Britain gained Kowloon and Stonecutters Island. In 1898 Britain acquired the New Territories on a 99-year lease.

Settlement in the territory grew slowly with the population rose from 32,983 in 1851 to 878,947 in 1931. During the teens and twenties of this century, Hong Kong served as a refuge for exiles from China following the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912.

After Japan seized Manchuria in 1932, the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937. Throughout the late thirties, as Japan advanced into China, hundreds of thousands of Chinese took refuge in Hong Kong. It was estimated that some 100,000 refugees entered in 1937, 500,000 in 1938 and 150,000 in 1939 - bringing Hong Kong's population at the outbreak of World War II to an estimated 1.6 million. It was thought that at the height of the influx, about 500,000 people were sleeping in the streets.

World War II again disrupted the social and economic life of Hong Kong. On Christmas Day, 1941, the British army surrendered Hong Kong to the Japanese. U.S. submarines foiled Japanese plans to use Hong Kong as a staging area for assaults further into East Asia. Following Japan's surrender on August 14, 1945 Britain reclaimed the territory.

After the Japanese surrender, Chinese civilians returned at the rate of almost 100,000 a month. The population, which by August 1945 had been reduced to about 600,000, rose by the end of 1947 to an estimated 1.8 million. Then, in the period 1948-49, as the forces of the Chinese Nationalist Government began to face defeat in civil war at the hands of the communists, Hong Kong received an influx unparalleled in its history. Hundreds of thousands of people - mainly from Guangdong province, Shanghai and other commercial centres - entered the territory during 1949 and the spring of 1950, the population had swelled to an estimated 2.2 million. Since then, it has continued to rise and now totals six million.

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