Hong Kong is positioned at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta on the coast of southern China and adjoins Guangdong Province in Mainland China. The city is considered a gateway between the East and the West. ‘British Hong Kong’ refers to the period under British crown rule after Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain by China's Qing Dynasty following the First Anglo-Chinese War (also known as the First Opium War, 1839-1842). In 1898, Britain was granted an additional 99 years of rule over Hong Kong under the Second Convention of Peking, which included an extension of Hong Kong's territory. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration was an important and historical watershed in the political development of Hong Kong's promulgation of ‘The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China’. It stated that Hong Kong people could live under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle for a period of 50 years after the handover on 1 July 1997, under the name ‘Hong Kong, China’. This declaration guaranteed Hong Kong a 50-year right to maintain its own capitalist system and way of life and to enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and defence. The declaration marked the beginning of Hong Kong's decolonization and the convergence of its social system with that of the PRC.