For those of you who were waiting for a continuation of this series, you are in luck. Views of the World (Click in labels for the others.) is back!
Anyway, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the history of Hong Kong. There's plenty of info available on line, and quite frankly, it would take way too long to type it all up. In a nutshell, Hong Kong Island wasn't much until the First Opium War. The freebooters of The British East India Company were making lots of cash addicting the people of China to opium. When the Chinese Emperor objected to seeing his people all zoned out, and decided to end the opium trade, the British invaded, won, and forced China to cede the island to them in perpetuity. After the Second Opium War, the Brits added the Kowloon Peninsula to their colonial empire. In the end, China wanted it's territory back, England wasn't in a position to stop a takeover by force, so, after all the diplomatic niceties were observed, China got it's land back. Technically, the Chinese dictatorship is supposed to recognize the democratic rights of Hong Kong's citizens, but that's an iffy thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment