I'm in China, but
it certainly feels like I'm in Great Britain. Hong Kong, under British rule, has grown a
modern western city in an eastern setting. 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. This ferry was set up by the British in 1888. Day and night the 5 star ferry comes and
goes, providing core harbor transportation. 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. Do you notice what side of the road they're driving on? So many of the street names,
road names, are British. The famous Happy Valley racetrack, reputedly the
most beautiful in the east. Rolling through this park and I stumbled
upon a legit bowling green, a place where they play bowls. 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. Around the late 1600s, 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, it's such a valuable thing. 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. Eventually, the Chinese government
caught on to this illegal drug trade and they cracked down. They seized all the
opium and threw twenty thousand chests of opium into the sea. Britain wasn't happy about China seizing all of its opium, so it showed up
with its big gunboats and started a war, the Opium Wars. 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 ninety-nine years was quote "as good as
forever." Meaning 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. Just walked into the 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 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. Now 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. Whereas 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. To where today, the tea culture has cropped up that is a perfect
fusion of the two. 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 start. British role officially comes to an end with a handover ceremony just before
midnight. A 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. We're, like, being abandoned by the Brits. There was pride in this mix of like the Chinese values and I guess are the western values. An identity of a citizen is not, like, determined by your passport
something. It's something that you treasure, the culture we are living in. We feel lost in our identity. Our generation has very complicated identities. 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.
As a person who lives in Hong Kong, there are surprisingly many English speakers there. Most of the people people on Hong Kong also hate mainland China
Anybody else can't hear shit in this? the music is way too loud it seems, can't hear the dude
But how was the tea situation solved after they acquired Hong Kong. They left the story incomplete!