Hong Kong coins featuring a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II
One hundred and eighty one years ago today, Britain's Union Jack was raised over what was then a point of land on the northwestern coast of Hong Kong Island. That which has come to be known as Possession Point is now an inland area due to land reclamation and it's easy to walk by it without realizing the place in history that it has. And unlike in Australia (which commemorates the raising of the Union Jack at Sydney Cove on January 26th, 1788), January 26th is also a day that can pass by without much notice in Hong Kong since it's not a public holiday or anything like that.
This year, however, a number of exiled Hong Kong activists and politicians (among them Finn Lau and Baggio Leung) decided to bring attention to today marking the birth of "modern Hong Kong". And when such as Promise Li took umbrage to their doing so, and decried it as "colonial nostalgia", I reckon they only succeeded in amplifying that today is indeed an anniversary of something salient to many Hong Kongers!
For the record: I'm not one of those people who wishes that the British still ruled over Hong Kong. At the same time, I understand those folks who look back at the days before July 1st 1997 as better ones for Hong Kong than those after 1997; and this particularly so after Hong Kong effectively experienced a second, scarier Handover on June 30th, 2020.
On a not unrelated note: seeing such as the Tudor crown still atop Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal Building, and coins and notes bearing Queen Elizabeth II's portrait continuing to be legal tender, represnts/represented for me a commitment to the "one country, two systems" principle that's supposed to (have) ensure(d) that Hong Kong would remain "largely unchanged" for 50 years after Britain "handed it over" to China in 1997. Which is why I took some comfort for a time in seeing these colonial vestiges in Hong Kong.
Sadly though, while those physical remnants of the British colonial era remain (including place, road and street names that are distinctly British such as Aberdeen, Stanley, Edinburgh Place and Harcourt Road), Hong Kong is a very different place from back in 1997 -- and, definitely not better in the eyes of many. But even while there are those who've concluded that it's become just another Chinese city (especially after China imposed a national security law for Hong Kong and so many Hong Kong institutions were chipped away at, removed and/or destroyed in recent years), I still will maintain that there remains a Hong Kong which is culturally quite distinct from Mainland China.
And it is that Hong Kong whose existence makes me inclined to celebrate the founding of modern Hong Kong all those years ago. In the words of the member of the Hong Kong Twitterverse who goes by Old China Bland (香港): "Born from a most inglorious episode of British imperial history, Hong Kong has grown into a land beloved as home for people with ancestry from across the globe. What a privilege it is to be able to say "Ngo hai Heung Gong Yan.""
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