(01.07.2019)

The Second Convention of Peking was a lease of a piece of land from the Qing Empire to the United Kingdom for 99 years. When the lease expired in 1997, the U.K. honoured the treaty by returning not only the New Territories, but the whole of the Hong Kong territories and the people within them, to the new leaders of China.

One may see this day as the end of 155 years of humiliating colonisation, a sad day as the sun finally set on the British Empire, or a grave violation of human rights. But beyond dispute, this is the day the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China was created