British Hong Kong British Hong Kong British Hong Kong denotes the period during which Hong Kong was governed as a colony and British Dependent Territory of the United Kingdom. Excluding the Japanese occupation during the Second World War, Hong Kong was under British rule from 1841 to 1997. The colonial period began with the occupation of Hong Kong Island in 1841 during the First Opium War. The island was ceded by Qing China in the aftermath of the war in 1842 and established as a Crown colony in 1843. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War
Young Plan (Hong Kong) 1980s during the Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong's sovereignty. The demand and attempts for constitutional reform in Hong Kong had occurred from time to time, but it had been an intractable problem for the Colonial Government due to the overwhelmingly majority of the Chinese population. Until during the Second World War when Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation, the collapse of the British imperial power in East Asia in the face of Japanese onslaught and also the emergence of a demand form the Chinese Nationalist Government under Chiang Kai-shek for the retrocession of Hong Kong during the war, forced the