British preparations to storm the city were well advanced when a fresh truce was arranged. The entire British force sailed back to Hong Kong, having retreated from almost certain victory. Elliot, however, felt no disappointment; he had never wanted to use more force than necessary to restore stable trade conditions. He feared that full-scale war would bring down the Chinese government, plunging the country into revolution and chaos.
Hong Kong had become de facto British territory on January 26, 1841, when the Union Jack was raised at Possession Point and the island claimed for Queen Victoria. Its 4,500 inhabitants, who had never heard of the Queen, became her unprotesting subjects.
The acquisition of the island produced ignominy enough for both sides; Keeshen was exiled to Tartary for giving it up and Elliot was dismissed by Palmerston for accepting “a barren island with hardly a house upon it,” instead of obeying the Foreign Secretary’s orders and driving a much harder bargain.
A succession of disasters swept over the colony in its first year of existence. “Hong Kong Fever,” a form of malaria thought to have been caused by digging up the earth for new roads and buildings, killed hundreds of settlers. Two violent typhoons unroofed practically every temporary building on the rocky slopes and drowned a tenth of the boat population. The wreckage of the ships and buildings had scarcely been cleared away when a fire broke out among the flimsy, closely packed mat sheds. In a few hours, it burned down most of the Chinese huts on the island.
The flavor of disaster became a regular part of Hong Kong history. Its own four horsemen—piracy, typhoons, epidemics and fires—raced through the colony at frequent but unpredictable intervals, filling its hills and harbor with debris and death. There is still no reason to assume that they will not return, either singly or as a team, whenever the whim moves them.
Even imagining Hong Kong as an island bearing no more than a minimum burden of natural hazards, it is difficult to understand how it became settled at all. The London Times scorned it editorially in 1844 with the comment that “The place has nothing to recommend it, if we except the excellent harbor.”
The original colony and the much larger territory added to it in the next 120 years have no natural resources of value, except fish, building stone and a limited supply of minerals. Only one-seventh of its total area is arable land; at best, it can grow enough rice, vegetables and livestock to feed the present population for about three months of a year. There is no local source of coal, oil or water power. Fresh water was scarce in 1841, and in 1960, after the colony had constructed an elaborate system of fourteen reservoirs, the carefully rationed supply had to be supplemented with additional water bought and pumped in from Red China.
Hong Kong has an annual rainfall of 85 inches—twice that of New York City—but three-fourths of it falls between May and September. At the end of the rainy season, ten billion gallons may be stored in the reservoirs but by the following May, every reservoir may be empty. Water use, especially during the dry winter, has been restricted to certain hours throughout the colony’s history. Running water, to the majority of Hong Kong’s poor, means that one grabs a kerosene tin and runs for the nearest public standpipe. Those lucky enough to reach the head of the line before the water is cut off may carry home enough to supply a household for one full day.
The industries of the colony, which expanded at a spectacular rate after World War II, could never have survived on sales to the local market. Most of its residents have always been too poor to buy anything more than the simplest necessities of food, clothing and shelter. No tariff wall protects its products from the competition of imported goods, but resentment against the low-wage industries of the colony continually puts up new barriers against Hong Kong products in foreign countries, including the United States.
From its thinly populated beginnings, Hong Kong has been transformed into one of the most dangerously overcrowded places on earth, with 1,800 to 2,800 persons jamming every acre of its urban sections. Eighty percent of its population is wedged into an area the size of Rochester, N.Y.—thirty-six square miles. About 325,000 people have no regular housing. They sleep on the sidewalks, or live in firetrap shacks perched on the hillsides or rooftop huts. A soaring birth rate and illegal infiltration of refugees from Red China add nearly 150,000 people a year.