Kindle Notes & Highlights
Opium became, so it is said, not only the principal export of the Indian Empire, but actually the largest single article of international commerce anywhere in the world.
What finally brought Hong Kong into its own was the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.
In 1950 however the western boycott of all things Chinese temporarily put an end to the old purpose, and obliged Hong Kong to find other ways of earning a living.
In 1898 the British ruled nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, governed a quarter of its population and commanded all its seas. It was the widest dominion the world had ever known, and its confidence was overweening.
It was an accord specifically between London and Beijing. The people of Hong Kong took no part in the negotiations, as they had taken no part in any of the previous compacts between the Empires that ruled their destinies.
Some 80 per cent of the people live in 8 per cent of the land, and parts of Kowloon, with more than a quarter of a million people per square mile, are probably the most crowded places in all human history.
plaque at the Hilton used to mark the table where Richard Hughes, an Australian journalist who was for years probably the best-known of Hong Kong expatriates,8 liked to drink with his friends and brainpickers.
‘Corruption,’ snorts John Le Carré’s world-weary Hong Kong police superintendent in The Honourable Schoolboy, set in 1974, ‘they’ll be discovering bloody steam next.’
anyway.
