i'm in china
but it certainly feels like i'm in great
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britain
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hong kong under british rule has grown a
modern western city
in an eastern setting
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and right in the center of downtown hong
kong are the british cricket club
grounds
cricket has been played on these grounds
since 1880
hong kong is a peculiar place it's a
british colony until
just 1997 and because of that the
british culture here is so
visible
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this ferry was set up by the british in
1888
day and night the five-star ferry comes
and goes providing
cross-harbor transportation
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these trams brought over by the british
in the early 1900s
if you go to london you'll see double
decker buses that actually look exactly
like the buses here
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notice what side of the road they're
driving on
so many of the street names road names
are british
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the famous happy valley racetrack
reputedly
the most beautiful in the east come on
rolling through this park and i stumbled
upon a legit
bowling green a place where they play
bulls
old old old british sport that is just
right here in the middle of hong kong
the british brought good administration
and a gracious way of living
typified by these homes and apartments
on victoria peak
the late 1600s or early 1700s britain
started trading with china
china had all sorts of stuff that the
west wanted porcelain
silk but there was one thing that
britain loved more than anything else
the herb called tea
china was really the only place on earth
that was producing tea
on a massive scale and the people back
in britain became
totally hooked on it
but there was one snag for the british
government when it came to the tea trade
which is that the chinese emperor would
only take
pure silver bullion basically coins and
like bars of silver
in exchange for tea that was the deal
and the british were fine with that they
were like whatever man we'll pay for
this
such a valuable thing
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eventually britain's treasury ran really
low on silver and it became
a national crisis so britain came up
with
a horribly unethical solution to their
tea
silver problem they started smuggling in
opium the highly addictive narcotic that
was illegal in china britain would
sell this opium in exchange for chinese
silver
which they then used to buy tea and this
was the solution to their problem an
illegal drug trade which
is just mind-blowing to me
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so eventually the chinese government
caught on to this illegal drug trade
and they cracked down they seized all
the opium
and threw 20 000 chests of opium into
the sea britain wasn't happy about china
seizing all of its opium so it showed up
with its big
gun boats and started a war the opium
wars
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they eventually negotiated a series of
peace deals and a part of those deals
was that china was going to give this
rocky island that didn't really have
many people living on it
to britain in the
text of the treaty they put that the
british will have hong kong
for 99 years but the diplomat who
negotiated the treaty
said later that in his mind 99 years
was quote as good as forever meaning
they had no intention of ever giving it
back
so britain's thirst for tea brought them
into a war with china that eventually
gave them a new colony hong kong here in
asia
hong kong a british colony a tourist
paradise for duty-free shoppers
china communist china lies only a few
miles away just across the border
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just walked into this grocery store to
meet billy who's a historian here
and we're just looking at a bunch of
maps which is like my kind of
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activity
so one of the things the british did as
soon as they got here is they started
drawing
their own borders in the city to divide
them from the local chinese
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foreign
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but let's talk about tea again it
remains a
symbol as to the different cultures that
exist here in hong kong
british influence versus the chinese
influence the british prefer
milk in their tea with crumpets and
scones and little cakes
the chinese will tell you they do not
pervert their tea with
milk and they drink tea with dim sum
little buns and
cakes
a british tea situation looks very
different
these two traditions played out side by
side in the city for many years
in a divided way with the chinese down
in their crowded
slums drinking their tea in their tea
houses and the british up on the hills
in their
aristocratic homes sipping their milk
tea
but eventually over time those
boundaries dissolved and the two
cultures started to blend and fuse
together
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to where today the tea culture has
cropped up that is
a perfect fusion of the two
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but i hate to break it to you britain 99
years is not
forever like the british diplomat
thought it was going to be the actual
handover ceremony is about to stop
british rule officially comes to an end
with a handover ceremony just before
midnight
five star flag of china soon to be
sovereign
over hong kong again i should like on
behalf of her majesty the queen
and of the entire british people to
express our thanks
admiration affection
and good wishes to all the people of
hong kong
the stroke of midnight the red star flag
of china will go up
for me it was pure betrayal like we're
like being abandoned by the brits there
was pride in this
mix of like the chinese values and i
guess the western valley
an identity of a citizen is not like
determined by your passport or something
it's something that you treasure the
culture you're living in we feel lost
in our identity a very complicated
identity
britain giving hong kong back to china
is the beginning of a new chapter for
the city
and so next week i'm going to explain
what happens when china tries to
erase this border between hong kong and
mainland china
and how the people here are resisting