A New City from an Ancient Civilization

‘Hong Kong has become a social, political and economic laboratory where practical — though intentional — experiments in social evolution are continuously conducted in an atmosphere of high pressure created by the Colony’s compactness, large population and intense vitality. Neither wholly Eastern nor entirely Western, it is sui generis — a phenomenon never seen previously and never likely to be duplicated.’

— Robert Elegant

It is true — Hong Kong is sui generis, and perhaps more than any other city, an invention. From being a ‘barren island’, as Lord Palmerston accurately described it in 1843, Hong Kong, but thirty square miles around, has become the ‘vast emporium of commerce and wealth’ that its first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, more presciently saw as its destiny: he predicted that trade, commerce and manufacturing were to be Hong Kong’s central purpose and concern. Even he, however, would be astonished could he see it today. Its 150 years of history (brief by any standards), and particularly the past forty years of growth and transformation, have produced the unique city and state of mind we know as Hong Kong.