HISTORY
The Chinese asked only to be left alone and thrived under a liberal British rule. Hong Kong became a centre of Chinese emigration and trade with Chinese communities abroad. Ocean-going shipping using the port increased from 2 889 ships in 1860 to 23 881 in 1939. The dominance of the China trade forced Hong Kong to conform to Chinese usage and to adopt the silver dollar as the currency unit in 1862. In 1935, when China went off silver, Hong Kong had to follow suit with an equivalent 'managed' dollar.
Hong Kong's administration followed the normal pattern for a British territory over- seas, with a governor nominated by Whitehall and nominated Executive and Legislative Councils with official majorities. The first non-government members of the Legislative Council were nominated in 1850, and the first Chinese in 1880; the first non-government members of the Executive Council appeared in 1896, and the first Chinese in 1926. In 1972, the long-standing arrangement that two electoral bodies - the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce and the Unofficial Justices of the Peace - were each allowed to nominate a member to the Legislative Council, was discontinued.
The British residents pressed strongly for self-government on a number of occasions, but the home government consistently 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 1936. The intention, at first, was to govern the Chinese through Chinese magistrates seconded from the mainland. But this system of two parallel ad- ministrations 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. 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 the 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 in 1889, China Light and Power in 1903, the electric Tramways in 1904 and the then government-owned Kowloon-Canton Railway, completed in 1910. There were successive reclamations dating 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. Later, the voluntary schools - mainly run by missionaries - were included in a grant scheme, in 1873. The College of Medicine for the Chinese, founded in 1887, developed into the University of Hong Kong in 1911 and offered arts, engineering and medical faculties.
After the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Dynasty, there was a long period of unrest in China and large numbers of people found shelter in Hong Kong. The agitation continued after Chinese participation in World War I brought in its wake strong nationalist and anti-foreign sentiment inspired both by disappointment over failure at the Versailles peace conference to regain the German concessions in Shantung (Shandong), and by the post-war radicalism of the Kuomintang. The Chinese sought to abolish all foreign treaty privileges in China. Foreign goods were boycotted and the unrest spread to Hong Kong, where a seamen's strike in 1922 was followed by a serious general strike in 1925-6 under pressure from Canton (Guangzhou). This petered out, though not
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