Views of the World, Across the Lake From Island, Peking, China

At the end of The Second Opium War, a joint Anglo-French force, under the leadership of James Bruce the 8th Earl of Elgin, High Commissioner to China, burned and looted the old and new Summer palaces just outside the city walls of Peking.  James Bruce's father was Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, the man who looted the marble friezes from the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.  I guess vandalism ran in the family.

Peking is now known as Beijing, and means northern capital.

I've got three more cards in this series, but I'm going to hold off on posting them for another month or so.  Click on Views of the World in labels to see other cards in the series.

Views of the World, Harbor of Hong Kong, China

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.