From Barren Rock to Barren Rock?

Following the planting of the Union Jack at Possession Point on Hong Kong Island by Captain Charles Elliot on January 26, 1841, the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston, dismissed the new crown colony as a “barren rock with hardly a house upon it”.

Forty-two years later in 1883, the seventeen-year-old future Chinese national leader Sun Yatsen was stunned by what he saw when he set foot on Hong Kong for the first time to attend secondary school: “Foreigners had done such marvellous things with this barren rock during only seventy or eighty years whilst China with 4000 years of civilisation had not even one place like Hong Kong.” While he was still a student in Hong Kong, he recalled, “My decision to overthrow the Manchu regime and to establish a republic was made in the year 1885 when the Sino-French war took place.”

This essay appears in the most recent Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe

But nobody in China at the time felt that way. Censorship then, as now,…