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Hong Kong in Touch with the World
HOBA
FORP
IN JUNE 1841, Captain Charles Elliot, RN, proclaimed that the merchants and traders at Canton, along with those from other centres 'have free permission to resort to and trade at the port of Hong Kong... and that Hong Kong being on the shores of the Chinese Empire, neither will there be any charges on imports and exports . . .'.
In December 1984, the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong provided that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, to be established on July 1, 'shall retain the status of a free port and continue a free trade policy, including the free movement of goods and capital.'
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These two statements, separated by more than 140 years, yet so similar in spirit and intent, summarise Hong Kong as it was then and as it is now - a place from which to trade. Indeed, the Hong Kong of 1841 offered few other prospects. Apart from its harbour - 'the noblest roadstead in the East' - the settlement had no room for agricultural development and possessed no natural resources. Even the small flow of fresh water which had earlier attracted passing ships was certainly not sufficient for growth.
It was an unlikely beginning for a place chosen to be an administrative, commercial and military centre in the East, and contemporary comments on Hong Kong's prospects were predictably negative. According to The Bombay Gentlemen's Gazette, in an article comparing Hong Kong unfavourably with Chusan, in January 1841, Hong Kong had been ceded to Captain Charles Elliot ‘and great offers were made by him and Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer to induce settlers to go there. The floating population on its being taken was about 7 800 smugglers, stonecutters and vagabonds; in March 1842 it rose to 12 360; in July 1845, it was about 19 000,...'
But vagabonds or not, an administration was in place by mid-1844, civic improvements had begun and the basis of a township had started to emerge along the harbourside. The arrival of the traders however, proved more a trickle than the expected flood and even official views of Hong Kong's prospects which filtered back to London along the 15 000 nautical mile sea route around the Cape of Good Hope were pessimistic.
Hong Kong was, in the jaundiced view of an early Treasurer, Robert Martin, a small, barren, unhealthy valueless island, the expenditure on which outstripped revenue by a ratio of some 10 to one'. Moreover, Martin maintained, the precipices and rocky ravines would always prevent the growth of a large town, 'the decomposing granite and disintegrating sandstone emitted a foetid odour productive of disease, the harbour was being filled up by silt . . . and the conditions that contributed to the commercial prosperity of Singapore were entirely absent in Hong Kong'.
In the settlement, Martin concluded, he had ‘in vain sought for one valuable quality', and he could see 'no justification for the British government spending one shilling on Hong Kong.