The Hong Kong History Podcast

Hong Kong gets over its teething pains and begins to develop as a major international port city. The scourge of piracy is brought under some sort of control. Thanks to a huge emigrant movement from Guangdong Province, ferry and passenger traffic become big business. The port develops as a major shipbuilding and ship repair centre. And the perfidious Brits, seizing on yet another moment of Qing Dyn...

The story wanders on through Hong Kong’s patchy early years, when clever drafting by the Chinese side in the 1843 Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, left the newly founded port of Hong Kong looking at thin pickings. To get Hong Kong on a roll needed another war, for which a handy if quite bogus pretext was found…and which featured a small, walk-on part, the great Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibal...

We make a stab at answering ‘how come Hong Kong’, paying close if occasionally erratic attention to modern Hong Kong’s origins in British trade with China, a chance discovery of a good haven by an American sea otter fur and sandalwood trading ship’s captain, the secret machinations of the hydrographic surveyors of the Bombay Marine, and the need for any port in a storm when the anti-opium trade hu...