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HISTORY
the China trade forced Hong Kong to conform to Chinese usage and to adopt the silver dollar in 1862 as the currency unit. In 1935, when China went off silver, the Colony had to follow suit with an equivalent 'managed' dollar.
Hong Kong's administration followed the normal Crown Colony pattern, with a governor nominated by Whitehall and nominated Executive and Legislative Councils with official majorities. The first unofficial members of the Legislative Council were nominated in 1850, and the first Chinese in 1880; the first unofficial members of the Executive Council appeared in 1896, and the first Chinese in 1926. Two electoral bodies, the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, and the Unofficial Justices of the Peace, were each allowed from 1885 onwards to nominate a member of the Legislative Council. The British residents on a number of occasions strongly pressed for self-government, but the Home Government steadily refused to allow the Chinese majority to be subject to the control of a small European minority. A Sanitary Board was set up in 1883, became partly elected in 1887, and developed into an Urban Council in 1935. The intention at first was to govern the Chinese through Chinese magistrates seconded from the mainland, but this system of two parallel administrations was only half-heartedly applied and broke down mainly because of the weight of crime. It was completely abandoned in 1865 in favour of the principle of equality of all races before the law, and in that year the Governor's Instructions were significantly amended to forbid him to assent to any ordinance 'whereby persons of African or Asiatic birth may be subjected to any disabilities or restrictions to which persons of European birth or descent are not also subjected'. Government policy was laissez- faire, treating Hong Kong as a market place where all were free to come and go and where Government held the scales impartially.
Public and utility services developed; the Hong Kong and China Gas Company in 1861, the Peak Tram in 1885, the Hongkong Electric Company 1889, China Light and Power 1903, the electric tramways in 1904 and the government-owned Kowloon-Canton Railway, completed in 1910. There were successive reclamations from 1851, notably one completed in 1904 in Central District, which produced Chater Road, Connaught Road and Des Voeux Road, and another in Wan Chai between 1921 and 1929.
A system of public education began in 1847 with grants to the Chinese vernacular schools, and the voluntary schools, mainly run by missionaries were brought in by a grant scheme in 1873. The College of Medicine for the Chinese, founded in 1887, developed