Hong Kong’s modern history begins with a war about opium and is still, in a real sense, working out its consequences.

Before 1841

Not the “barren rock” of the colonial account. The area held fishing villages, salt production, pearl fisheries and the walled settlements of the Five Great Clans — the Tang, Hau, Pang, Liu and Man — some of whom had been in what is now the New Territories since the Song dynasty. Around 7,000 people lived on the island and many thousands more on the mainland part.

The Ping Shan Heritage Trail is what that looks like on the ground.

The Opium Wars

Britain had a trade deficit with China and closed it by selling Indian opium. When the Qing government moved to stop the trade — Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed some 1,000 tonnes of it at Humen in 1839 — Britain went to war.

Hong Kong Island was occupied in January 1841 and ceded by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. Kowloon followed in 1860 after the Second Opium War. In 1898 the New Territories were added on a 99-year lease expiring on 30 June 1997 — a date that determined everything afterwards.

The colony

Hong Kong grew as an entrepôt — a free port between China and the world. Population rose from a few thousand to over a million by 1941, mostly through migration from China during the upheavals of the late Qing, the republic and the civil war.

The 1894 plague killed thousands in Tai Ping Shan and led to the demolition of the district. Chinese residents were excluded from the Peak by law until 1946.

The occupation

Japan attacked on 8 December 1941, hours after Pearl Harbor, and Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day after eighteen days. The occupation lasted three years and eight months.

The population fell from about 1.6 million to 600,000 through deportation, flight and starvation. It was the worst period in the city’s history.

The refugee city

After 1945 and through the Chinese civil war and the years that followed, hundreds of thousands crossed the border. The population reached 2.2 million by 1950 and kept rising.

They lived in hillside squatter settlements. On Christmas Day 1953, a fire at Shek Kip Mei destroyed a settlement and left around 53,000 homeless overnight — and the government began the public housing programme that now houses close to half the population.

Manufacturing — textiles, plastics, toys, electronics — built the economy. The Kowloon Walled City grew in the jurisdictional gap.

The 1967 riots, an overspill of the Cultural Revolution, killed 51 people and prompted substantial social reform.

From the 1980s manufacturing moved across the border into Shenzhen and Hong Kong became a financial and logistics centre instead.

The handover

Because the New Territories lease expired in 1997 and the colony was not viable without them, Britain negotiated. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 provided for the transfer of the whole territory and for “one country, two systems” — Hong Kong to keep its own legal system, capitalist economy and way of life for fifty years, to 2047.

The Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitutional document, was promulgated in 1990.

Tiananmen in June 1989 produced the largest demonstrations Hong Kong had seen, with a million people marching, and shaped the decade before the handover.

On 1 July 1997 sovereignty transferred at a ceremony in the rain.

Since

2003 — half a million marched against proposed national security legislation under Basic Law Article 23, and the bill was withdrawn.

2014 — the Umbrella Movement, 79 days of street occupation over the method of electing the Chief Executive.

2019 — protests against an extradition bill grew into the largest and most sustained demonstrations in the city’s history, running for months.

June 2020 — Beijing imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong, creating offences of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, with provisions for trial without jury and extraterritorial reach.

2021 — the electoral system was restructured to ensure “patriots” administer Hong Kong, substantially reducing directly elected seats.

2024 — Hong Kong’s own legislature passed the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance under Article 23.

Since 2020 a substantial number of people have emigrated, principally to the United Kingdom under the BN(O) visa route opened in 2021, and to Canada, Australia and Taiwan.

For a visitor

Hong Kong remains an extremely easy and safe place to visit. Entry is straightforward for most nationalities, the transport works, the food is superb, and ordinary life goes on.

What has changed is the space for political expression. Protest is heavily restricted, several newspapers have closed, and books have been withdrawn from public libraries. Visitors are not the target of any of this, and it is nonetheless a real change from the city described in older guidebooks — which is why this page sets it out rather than leaving a twenty-year gap in the story.