Book Review: From a British Colony to a Chinese Colony? Hong Kong before and after the 1997 Handover. By Gary Chi-hung Luk

Hong Kong has come a long way from its colonial past. The British takeover of the territory in the early 1840s, as Julia Lovell details in The Opium War (2011), brought sweeping changes: "Brick and stone warehouses replaced the wooden shacks that lined the northern shorefront; opium poured into the new storage space…; the place bustled with facilities, with roads, barracks, hospitals, hotels, sailors, brothels, cookshops, opium dens, banqueting houses, a newspaper, a casino…, [and] theatres." Although once a British base for the sale of opium to Chinese consumers, Hong Kong's "fragrant harbor" (Xiang Gang 香港) has evolved into a vibrant financial center, a place that Prince Charles once called "one of the most successful societies on Earth." But since the lowering of the colonial flag and the raising of the Bauhinia blakeana (洋紫荊)—Hong Kong's emblematic flag—at the 1997 Handover, anxieties over Hong Kong's future under the watchful, panoptic gaze of the People's Republic of China (PRC) have grown from discomfort to outright public protest, notably with 2014's Umbrella Movement (Yusan Yundong, 雨傘運動), a political movement that emerged alongside public protests demanding freer democratic elections.