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  • I'm in China, but it certainly feels like I'm in Great Britain.

  • Hong Kong, under British rule, has grown a modern western city in an eastern setting.

  • And right in the center of downtown Hong Kong are the British Cricket Club grounds.

  • Cricket has been played on these grounds since 1880.

  • Hong Kong is a peculiar place.

  • It's a British colony until just 1997 and

  • because of that the British culture here is so visible.

  • This ferry was set up by

  • the British in 1888.

  • Day and night the 5 star ferry comes and goes,

  • providing core harbor transportation.

  • These trams, brought over by the British in the early 1900s.

  • If you go to London you'll see double-decker buses that actually look exactly like the buses here.

  • Do you notice what side of the road they're driving on?

  • So many of the street names, road names, are British.

  • The famous Happy Valley racetrack, reputedly the most beautiful in the east.

  • Rolling through this park and I stumbled upon a legit bowling green,

  • a place where they play bowls.

  • Old, old, old, British sport.

  • That is just right

  • here in the middle of Hong Kong.

  • The British brought good administration and

  • a gracious way of living.

  • Typified by these homes and apartments on Victoria Peak.

  • Around the late 1600s, early 1700s, Britain started trading with China.

  • China had all sorts of stuff that the West wanted; porcelain, silk.

  • But there was one thing that Britain loved more than anything else: the herb called tea.

  • China was really the only place on earth that was producing tea on a massive

  • scale and the people back in Britain became totally hooked on it.

  • But there was one snag for the British government when it came to the tea trade, which is that

  • the Chinese emperor would only take pure silver bullion, basically coins and like

  • bars of silver, in exchange for tea. That was the deal and the British were fine

  • with that, they were like whatever man, we'll pay for this, it's such a valuable thing.

  • Eventually britain's treasury ran really low on silver and it became a national

  • crisis so Britain came up with a horribly unethical solution to their tea

  • silver problem.

  • They started smuggling in opium, the

  • highly addictive narcotic that was illegal in China.

  • Britain would sell

  • this opium in exchange for Chinese silver, which they then used to buy tea

  • and this was the solution to their problem: an illegal drug trade, which is

  • just mind-blowing to me.

  • Eventually, the Chinese government caught on to this illegal drug trade and

  • they cracked down.

  • They seized all the opium and threw twenty thousand chests

  • of opium into the sea.

  • Britain wasn't happy about China

  • seizing all of its opium, so it showed up with its big gunboats

  • and started a war, the Opium Wars.

  • They eventually negotiated a series of peace

  • deals and a part of those deals was that China was going to give this rocky

  • island that didn't really have many people living on it, to Britain.

  • In the text of the treaty they put that the British will have Hong Kong for 99 years,

  • but the diplomat who negotiated the treaty said later that in his mind

  • ninety-nine years was quote "as good as forever."

  • Meaning no intention of ever giving it back.

  • So Britain's thirst for tea

  • brought them into a war with China that eventually gave them a new colony: Hong Kong, here in Asia.

  • Hong Kong a British colony, a tourist paradise for duty-free

  • shoppers.

  • China, communist China, lies only a few miles away just across the border.

  • Just walked into the grocery store to meet Billy, who's a historian here and we're

  • just looking at a bunch of maps, which is like my kind of activity.

  • So one of the things the British did as soon as they got here, is they started

  • drawing their own borders in the city to divide them from the local Chinese.

  • Now let's talk about tea again.

  • It remains a symbol as to the different

  • cultures that exist here in Hong Kong. British influence versus the Chinese influence.

  • The British prefer milk in their tea with crumpets and scones and little cakes.

  • Whereas the Chinese will tell you they do not pervert their tea with milk

  • and they drink tea with dim sum, little buns and cakes.

  • A British tea situation looks very different.

  • These two traditions played

  • out side-by-side in the city for many years.

  • in a divided way with the Chinese

  • down in their crowded slums drinking their tea in their tea houses and the

  • British up on the hills in their aristocratic homes

  • sipping their milk tea, but eventually over time those boundaries dissolved and

  • the two cultures started to blend and fuse together.

  • To where today, the tea

  • culture has cropped up that is a perfect fusion of the two.

  • But I hate to break it to you Britain, 99 years is not forever like the British

  • diplomat thought it was going to be.

  • The actual handover ceremony is about to start.

  • British role officially comes to an end

  • with a handover ceremony just before midnight.

  • A five star flag of China, soon

  • to be sovereign over Hong Kong again.

  • I should like on behalf of Her Majesty

  • the Queen and of the entire British people to express our thanks, admiration,

  • affection, and good wishes to all the people of Hong Kong.

  • The stroke of midnight, the red star flag of China will go up.

  • For me, it was pure betrayal.

  • We're, like, being abandoned by the Brits.

  • There was pride in this mix of like the Chinese values

  • and I guess are the western values.

  • An identity of a citizen is not, like,

  • determined by your passport something.

  • It's something that you treasure,

  • the culture we are living in.

  • We feel lost in our identity.

  • Our generation has very complicated identities.

  • Britain giving Hong Kong back to China is the beginning of a new chapter for

  • the city and so next week I'm going to explain what happens when China tries to

  • erase this border between Hong Kong and Mainland China and how the people here

  • are resisting.

I'm in China, but it certainly feels like I'm in Great Britain.

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156年間の英国統治が香港をどのように形作ったか (How 156 years of British rule shaped Hong Kong)

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    Evangeline に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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