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Hong Kong: Rising from the Water


	Photo: Joe Jimenez

Only two hundred years ago, no one would have bet that a few steep mountains jutting out of the South China Sea would become a powerhouse economic force. China ceded Hong Kong to Britain in 1843 after the Opium Wars and the British established a port for trade there. With the closure of China during the decades after the establishment of Communist Rule in China in 1949, Hong Kong’s population and business community swelled with people and corporations fleeing China. Over the next decades, Hong Kong grew like gangbusters and was even referred to (along with Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea) as one of the Four Asian Tigers.

Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, but still has a certain degree of autonomy in local affairs. Today, its graceful green peaks are still frequently cloaked in fog, but the lowlands are often marred by smog wafting over from the industrial mainland. Hong Kong harbor is constantly morphing as land is filled into the harbor so skyscrapers can rise. The shiny new Hong Kong International Airport has been built on landfill on Lantau Island. Connected to the city by a high-speed train, it has wide runways that can handle sixty airplanes an hour. This smooth efficiency replaces the nerve-wracking landing between peaks on the old Kai Tak Airport’s lone runway. As the city grows into its new role as an extension of south China, Hong Kong will continue to enjoy a smooth ascent as an international center, proving that geography is not always destiny.