![hong kong flag II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/hong-kong-flag-II.png)
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,…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins