Address delivered by Dr. P. S. Selwyn-Clarke, C.M.G., M.C., M.D., F.R.C.P. etc., at the Annual Dinner of the Isle of Wight Division of the British Medical Association, at Ryde Town llall on the 17th of January, 1946.
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I am most grateful to you for the kindly way in which you have pledged the toast. May I thank you warmly for the honour which you have done me in inviting me to the Annual Dinner and for your Zonerous hospitality?
It has been a great pleasure and privilege to meet your Chairman Mr. Heckford - and the officers and members of the Isle of Wight Division of the British Medical Association. I am particularly glad to have had the opportunity of meeting the many prominent laymen whose interest in medical and public health affairs must be of out- standing value to the profession.
Your able and energetic Hon. Secretary Dr. Howie Wood has asked me to give you some idea of conditions in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. In order to obtain a proper perspective, I am going to take the liberty of describing, briefly, the historical background. You must please forgive me if this is already familiar to
you.
Any opinion that I may express in the course of this address should be regarded as personal and not necessarily reflecting the views of His Majesty's Government.
It is possible that a few of my listeners this evening may be unacquainted with the historical, geographical and ethnographical features of "Hong Kong.
In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, the East India Company exercised a monopoly in trade with South China through Canton.
As in the case of the "Boston Tea Party" some sixty odd years earlier, so, with the insistence on the part of the East India Company to import opium into China against the wishes of the Celestial empire, war was precipitated between Great Britain and that country.
It may interest you to know that the opium war was unpopular in this country. In fact, Palmerston was only able to obtain a majority of nine in Parliament. With the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832, followed swiftly by the pioneer action of this country in the abolition of the slave trade, there had been a moral awakening. In the opinion of some historians, the war was not waged on account of opium, but to compel China to enter into diplomatic relations with other powers on terms of equality.
The outcome of the war was the cession, in 1841, of the then almost barren island of Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River, a few hours sail from the Portuguese colony of Macau and a little longer journey from Canton. Some 2,000 British refugees, mostly merchants and their families and retainers, had sought sanctuary on the island from one of those outburst of anti-foreign feeling that culminated in the Boxer rising at the beginning of the present century. At the date of the Treaty of Nanking confirming the cession in 1842 Hong Kong had less than 6,000 resident Chinese, mostly fishermen and pirates.
In 1860, a small strip of the mainland of China opposite Hong Kong forming the Kowloon Peninsula, was also ceded (by a Treaty entered into by Lord Elgin with the Government of China) as a protection to the island from which it was separated by less than a mile at one point. To effect a somewhat better protective screen and to ensure access to an adequate water-supply, the Imperial Govern- ment of China (by an Agreement concluded in 1898) granted a lease for ninety-nine years over about 350 square miles of hinterland from the boundaries of the Kowloon Peninsula, northward to the Shum Chun River,