Two protagonists

The transfer of control over the island of Hong Kong from China to Britain in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking set the official start date for Hong Kong, but that date fell well along the path of the transformation of Asian trade and finance that intermediaries in Hong Kong helped shape. The late eighteenth century offers a better perspective on this path. At that point the two main protagonists, China and Britain, stood at dramatically different junctures. The Manchu conquerors, in the midst of their long reign as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1912, devised a sophisticated two-prong strategy to retain power as a tiny minority amidst the Chinese. First, they preserved the social and political order of imperial Confucianism and integrated their rule with Chinese culture, and they encouraged mutual dependence, backed by moral approval, leading from rural peasants through the governing elite to the emperor.