ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Hong Kong's origins and its colonial development in its first century. Colonial Hong Kong represented both a site of profound global clashes of place, power, and meaning and a divided city embodying Frantz Fanon's characterization of the colonial city as "a world cut in two" where "the two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity". Today, visitors to Hong Kong's refurbished History Museum must ascend to the Opium Wars and British occupation, while the initial exhibits on the ground floor offer a long saga of formation from geological processes through the Qing dynasty and Hong Kong folklife. Claims that Hong Kong was a product of British intervention reinforced its status as a Crown Colony. For the British, Hong Kong remained a "hardship" posting through the 1990s, with ample housing allowances for civil servants posted there and provisions to educate their children in England.
