A 99-year lease decided when Britain would hand Hong Kong back
Hong Kong Island and Kowloon had been ceded to Britain permanently, but the New Territories, making up 86.2 per cent of the colony's land and over half its people, were only leased in 1898 for 99 years. As expiry approached, Britain saw no workable way to split the territory, so all of it returned in 1997.
British rule grew out of the opium trade. In 1839 the Qing commissioner Lin Zexu forced foreign merchants in Canton to surrender their opium and confined them without supplies, prompting London to send an expeditionary force. During the First Opium War, the trade superintendent Charles Elliot negotiated the Convention of Chuenpi and chose the barren island for its harbour, valuable to traders based in Canton. Britain occupied it on 26 January 1841, and the Treaty of Nanking formalised the cession the following year.
Expansion came in two steps. Kowloon was added in 1860 after further conflict sparked partly by the seizure of the Hong Kong-registered ship Arrow. Then, seeking better defences, Britain signed the Second Convention of Peking on 9 June 1898. By then foreign powers had agreed that outright annexation of Chinese territory was no longer acceptable, so the extension, covering land south of the Sham Chun River and 230 islands, took the form of a lease.
Japan invaded on 8 December 1941 and held the colony until 1945. Occupation proved harsh, food ran short by 1943, and the population halved from 1.6 million to about 750,000 as people fled, though many came back once Rear-Admiral Cecil Harcourt accepted the Japanese surrender that September. Afterwards the administration concentrated on the economy, welcoming investment from both sides of the Chinese Civil War.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 settled the future: Hong Kong's economic and social systems were to stay largely unchanged for 50 years, with the territory becoming a special administrative region of China until at least 2047. Britain's rule ended on 30 June 1997.
Source: British Hong Kong
