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Majesty's Government to offer corresponding advantages in
Hong Kong to the Chinese Administration.
These arrangements were confirmed and extended to
1904 under the Chinese Telegraph Convention of 1896 and
again until 1930 by the agreement of 1904, both of which
were signed by representatives of the British, Danish and
Chinese Governments.
The lease of the New Territories to Great Britain under
the Angio-Chinese Convention of 1898 was the cause of
further complications in an already complicated arrangement.
Until 1898 the land wires of the Chinese Telegraph
Administration nad been joined to the Eastern Extension
Company's Hong Kong cable, under the 1884 arrangement, at
a point in kowloon situated on the Anglo-Chinese boundary.
Under the Convention of 1898 however the area of the
British colony of Hong kong was considerably extended with
the result that a length of the anton-Kowloon lire, perhaps
twenty miles in all, owned and worked by a company under the
control of the Chinese Government, fell within British
territory.
A proposal was made in 1899 that this section should be
taken over by the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company but
this was not agreed to by the director of the Chinese Telegraph
Administration who pointed out that it was a privately owned
line. A more pointed request in 1903 that he would remove
within six months the terminal station of the chinese line
from nowloon to a point on the new frontier of the colony
drew from him a reply that the Kowloon Station being within
the new territories was in a position analogous to that of
the...