Hong Kong

• 1. Fragrant Harbour

  ›

  Hong Kong fits 7.5 million residents into a 1114 square kilometre strip of land on China's southern coast, just south of Shenzhen. It is the fourth-most densely populated region in the world. Sit with that for a moment. The territory ranks behind only New York City and London among global financial centres, yet the place began as a scatter of farming and fishing villages. The name itself first appeared in writing as He-Ong-Kong in 1780. It described a small inlet between Aberdeen Island and the southern shore, where British sailors first met local fishermen. The phrase is generally read as the Cantonese hēung góng, meaning fragrant harbour or incense harbour. The fragrance may have come from freshwater pouring in from the Pearl River. It may have come from incense factories lining the coast of northern Kowloon. How did an inlet named for incense become the city with the most skyscrapers on Earth? How did a British colony end up governed by China under a principle called one country, two systems? And why do residents here live longer than people anywhere else in the world? The answers run through opium wars, a 99-year lease, a midnight handover, and a skyline built on reclaimed sea.

• 2. Opium And Cession

  ›

  In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor rejected proposals to legalise and tax opium. He ordered imperial commissioner Lin Zexu to wipe out the trade entirely. Lin destroyed the opium stockpiles and halted all foreign commerce. That decision triggered a British military response and the First Opium War. The British had been selling large amounts of Indian opium to China to fix a stubborn trade imbalance. European buyers wanted tea, silk, and porcelain, but China wanted little in return, so the goods could only be bought with precious metals. Charles Elliot and Qishan signed the Convention of Chuenpi, ceding Hong Kong Island, and British forces took control on the 26th of January 1841. Neither side was satisfied, and neither ratified the deal. After more than a year of further fighting, Hong Kong Island was formally ceded to the United Kingdom in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. Piracy, disease, and hostile Qing policies kept commerce away at first. The Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s changed that, as wealthy Chinese merchants fled mainland turbulence and settled in the colony. A second clash over opium followed. The Qing lost again and gave up the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island in the Convention of Peking. By then Hong Kong had grown from a transient outpost into a major entrepôt. The final piece arrived in 1898, when the United Kingdom obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories, a clock that would one day run out.

• 3. War And The Tigers

  ›

  On the 8th of December 1941, the same morning Japan struck Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army attacked Hong Kong. The territory was occupied for almost four years before the British resumed control on the 30th of August 1945. Before the war, Governor Geoffry Northcote had declared Hong Kong a neutral zone to protect its status as a free port. The colonial government evacuated all British women and children in 1940. After the war, the population rebounded fast as skilled Chinese migrants fled the Chinese Civil War, and more crossed the border when the Chinese Communist Party took mainland China in 1949. Hong Kong became the first of the Four Asian Tigers to industrialise during the 1950s. With a swelling population, the government built public-housing estates, founded the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and laid the Mass Transit Railway. Public discontent still boiled over repeatedly between the 1950s and 1980s. In the 1967 riots, pro-PRC protestors clashed with the colonial government. As many as 51 people were killed and 802 injured, including dozens killed by the Royal Hong Kong Police through beatings and shootings. As labour and property costs rose, manufacturing faded and a service economy took its place. By the early 1990s, Hong Kong stood as a global financial centre and shipping hub, just as the question of its future was about to come due.

• 4. The Countdown To Handover

  ›

  Governor Murray MacLehose raised the matter of Hong Kong's status with Deng Xiaoping in 1979, as the New Territories lease neared its end. The talks produced the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. The United Kingdom agreed to hand over the colony in 1997, and China would guarantee Hong Kong's economic and political systems for 50 years afterward. Fear travelled faster than reassurance. Residents worried about losing civil rights, the rule of law, and quality of life, and over half a million people left the territory during the peak migration period from 1987 to 1996. The Legislative Council became a fully elected legislature for the first time in 1995. At midnight on the 1st of July 1997, after 156 years of British rule, Hong Kong passed to China. Crisis followed almost at once. The government burned through foreign exchange reserves to defend the Hong Kong dollar's currency peg during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Recovery was dulled by an H5N1 avian-flu outbreak and a housing surplus, then by the 2003 SARS epidemic and the worst economic downturn the territory had known. Chinese communists framed the return as a key moment in the PRC's rise to great power status. The deeper argument, over whether one country, two systems would hold, was only beginning.

• 5. Autonomy Under Strain

  ›

  In June 2019, mass protests erupted over a proposed extradition amendment bill that would allow fugitives to be sent to mainland China. Organisers claimed more than three million Hong Kong residents joined, the largest demonstrations in the territory's history. The roots went back years. A central government decision to pre-screen candidates before chief executive elections had sparked the 2014 Umbrella Revolution. The disqualification of elected legislators after the 2016 elections deepened worries about the region's autonomy. After 2019, the responses came in waves. In June 2020 the Legislative Council passed the National Anthem Ordinance, which criminalised insults to the national anthem of China. Beijing enacted the Hong Kong national security law, criminalising secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign elements. In March 2021, the central government cut directly elected seats and required every candidate to be vetted by a Beijing-appointed Candidate Eligibility Review Committee. By 2021 the pro-democracy and localist groups had lost all representation, and since 2025 all 90 Legislative Council members come from the pro-Beijing camp. The United Kingdom considers the security law a serious violation of the Joint Declaration. The United States ended its preferential trade treatment of Hong Kong in July 2020. In February 2024, Xia Baolong, head of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said one country, two systems would be kept permanently.

• 6. A City Of Skyscrapers

  ›

  Hong Kong holds 554 towers taller than 150 metres, the most skyscrapers of any place on Earth. The shortage of buildable land forced development upward into dense residential tenements and commercial complexes packed tightly together. Single-family detached homes are rare and mostly confined to outlying areas. Much of the ground beneath the city was taken from the sea. About 70 square kilometres has been reclaimed, roughly 6 percent of total land and about a quarter of developed space. The highest point is Tai Mo Shan at 957 metres above sea level, and around 40 percent of remaining land sits in country parks and nature reserves. Older landmarks survive amid the high-rises. The 1846 Flagstaff House, once home to the Commander of the British forces, is the oldest Western-style building in the territory. The Tin Hau Temple dedicated to the sea goddess Mazu, first built in 1012 and rebuilt in 1266, is the oldest existing structure. Belief shapes the buildings too. Construction projects often hire feng shui consultants, bagua mirrors deflect evil spirits, and buildings often skip floor numbers containing a 4. In Cantonese, the number sounds like the word for die. Béthanie, built in 1875 as a sanatorium, now houses the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

• 7. Wealth And Its Gaps

  ›

  Hong Kong has the most billionaires per capita of any city, one for every 109,657 people. It also holds the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world and the highest in Asia. The territory is the world's third-ranked global financial centre, the ninth-largest exporter, and the eighth-largest importer. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is the fifth-largest in the world, valued at HK$48.2 trillion. Beneath the towers, the divide is severe. Median income for the top 10 percent of earners is 57 times that of the bottom 10 percent, and the 90th percentile of earners receive 41 percent of all income. The city has the second most expensive residential property market in the world. Mainland firms now make up over half the Hang Seng Index value, up from just 5 percent in 1997. The territory's GDP relative to the mainland peaked at 27 percent in 1993, then fell below 3 percent by 2017 as China developed. Daily life runs on the Octopus card, a contactless payment accepted on railways, trams, buses, ferries, and in most shops. Over 90 percent of daily trips are made by public transport, the highest share in the world, and the MTR runs at a 99.9 percent on-time rate.

• 8. Hollywood Of The East

  ›

  When Bruce Lee's The Way of the Dragon released in 1972 and Enter the Dragon in 1973, local productions broke out far beyond Hong Kong. The industry had taken shape in the late 1940s, when Shanghai filmmakers migrated south and built the colony's entertainment business. By the 1960s, films like The World of Suzie Wong had reached overseas audiences. The 1980s and 1990s widened the range with A Better Tomorrow, God of Gamblers, Police Story, In the Mood for Love, and Chungking Express. The reach earned the city its nickname, Hollywood of the East. At the peak in the early 1990s, more than 400 films were produced each year, a number that fell to about 60 by 2017 as momentum shifted to mainland China. Music carried its own wave. Cantopop emerged in Hong Kong during the 1970s from Shanghai-style shidaiqu, Cantonese opera, and Western pop, and peaked in the 1990s when the Four Heavenly Kings ruled Asian record charts. Hong Kong has never had a national anthem separate from the country controlling it. Its official anthem is the PRC's March of the Volunteers, while protestors have used the song Glory to Hong Kong as an unofficial anthem of the city.