The history of Hong Kong is one of trade in one form or another, which should be no surprise given the area's contemporary obsession with commerce and profit. However, prior to the arrival of Europeans the only "businessmen" on HK and other islands were probably pirates preying on ships headed for Canton (Guangzhou). In what are now the New Territories, rice was grown and a few of the eminent men of Guangzhou maintained the odd estate, but little else happened here for many centuries.

Eventually the traders of Portugal and Britain arrived in the Canton region, and the life in the area changed forever. Britain came by Hong Kong in a markedly nasty and tasteless fashion. The history of the Opium Wars, by which the British Empire forced China to accept foreign trade (in the process getting a large percentage of the region's population addicted to opium) makes for uneasy reading.

Be that as it may, by 1842 Hong Kong was a British colony. In 1860, after the Second Opium War, Kowloon and Stonecutters' Island were added to the colony under a treaty with China. It has to be said that the Victorians didn't make much of this far flung extension of the Empire. They were hardly to know that 150 years on this would be almost the last remaining outpost of colonial Britain, and one of the most wealthy.

Hong Kong only became viable in its own right when the famous 100-year lease on the "New Territories" was signed in 1898, under altogether more honourable circumstances than had accompanied the initial hand overs.

The population and the success of Hong Kong have waxed and waned remarkably in the last century or so. During the many times of upheaval in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hong Kong was occasionally flooded by Chinese refugees, while during the Japanese occupation of the Second World War, the population of the entire region dropped by over two-thirds to slightly more than 600,000. It was after WWII, though, that the economy of Hong Kong began to mature, and, although the changes have not been easy, since then Hong Kong has developed into one of the success stories of late-20th-century Asia.

In 1997, the 100-year lease on the New Territories came to an end. At the same time Britain also gave up Kowloon and HK Island under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which also defined the "Special Administrative" status that HK enjoys today. Although there was much speculation as to whether China would agree to the inclusion of an utterly capitalist pocket in its Communist world, early signs have been encouraging and the people of Hong Kong will tell you that nothing much has changed.

Of much greater significance to the Hong Kong people was the Asian economy's crash in the late 1990s, and Hong Kong has not escaped the recession. Some maintain that post-1997 "Brain Drain" has exacerbated this, but it would be hard to say for certain whether this is so. The mood instead is one of typical confidence as the 6.3 million inhabitants of the Hong Kong SAR endeavour to be at the head of the Asian Tiger economy in the new millennium.