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History

On 20 January 1841, following the negotiation under the Convention of Chuenpi (Chuanbi), Elliot demanded the cession of Hong Kong Island. On 26 January, a naval landing party hoisted the British flag at Possession Point near present-day Hollywood Road Park in Sheung Wan, and the island was formally occupied. In June, Elliot began to sell plots of land and settlement began. Neither side accepted the Chuenpi terms. The cession of a part of China aroused shame and anger among the Chinese, and the unfortunate Qishan was ordered to Peking (Beijing) in chains. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was equally dissatisfied with Hong Kong, which he contemptuously described as 'a barren island with hardly a house. upon it, and refused to accept it as the island station that had been demanded as an alternative to a commercial treaty.

'You have treated my instructions as if they were waste paper, Palmerston told Elliot in a magisterial rebuke, and replaced him with Sir Henry Pottinger, who arrived in August 1841 and conducted hostilities with determination. A year later, after pushing up the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) and threatening to assault Nanking (Nanjing), he ended the hostilities with the Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842.

In the meantime, the Whig government in England had fallen and, in 1841, the new Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, issued revised instructions to Pottinger, dropping the demand for an island. Pottinger, who had returned to Hong Kong during the winter lull in the campaign, was pleased with the progress of the new settlement and, in the Treaty of Nanking, demanded both a treaty and an island, thus securing Hong Kong.

Five Chinese ports, including Canton, were also opened for trade. The commercial treaty was embodied in a supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (Humen) in October 1843, by which the Chinese were allowed free access to Hong Kong Island to trade.

Lease of the New Territories

The Second Anglo-Chinese War (1856-58) arose out of disputes over the interpretation of the earlier treaties. The Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) in 1858 ended the war and gave the British the privilege of diplomatic representation in China. The first British envoy, Sir Frederick Bruce, who had been the first Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong, was fired on at Taku (Dagu) Bar on his way to Peking to present his credentials, leading to renewed hostilities in 1859 that subsided in 1860.

Troops serving on this second expedition camped on Kowloon Peninsula, as Hong Kong's earliest photographs show. Finding it healthy, they wished to retain it as a military cantonment, with the result that Sir Harry Parkes, Consul at Canton, secured from the Viceroy a lease of the peninsula as far north as Boundary Street, including Stonecutters Island. The Convention of Peking in 1860, which ended the hostilities, provided for its outright cession.

Other European countries and Japan subsequently demanded concessions from China, particularly after Germany, France and Russia rescued China from the worst consequences of its defeat by Japan in 1895. In the ensuing tension, Britain felt the need to control the land around Hong Kong.

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