QCI016
After losing the first opium war in 1841, the Qing government agreed to make Hong Kong Island a crown colony, ceding it to the British Queen ‘in perepetuity to provide British traders with a harbour where they could unload their goods’ Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary at the time was less than impressed by the outcome, calling Hong Kong, ‘a barren rock with scarcely a house upon it’.Hong Kong remained a British colony for the next 156 years.