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HONG KONG
Hong Kong is on the eastern side of the Pearl River Delta on the southeastern coast of China, facing the South China Sea in the south, and bordering Guangdong Province in the north. Hong Kong is China's richest city, has one of the world's most liberal economies and is a major international centre of finance and trade.Hong Kong was a British colony from 1842, until its sovereignty was transferred to the PRC in 1997. It is governed as special administrative region under the Basic Law of Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic Age. The area now known as Hong Kong became an important trading region and a significant strategic location for the Chinese mainland during the Tang and Song dynasties. After the Mongol invasion, Hong Kong's prominence declined. Hong Kong's earliest recorded non-Asian visitor was the Portuguese mariner Jorge Álvares who arrived in 1513. The British, to redress their net outflow of payments to China for tea and to force China to conduct relations like other states, invaded China, winning the First Opium War in 1841. During the war, Hong Kong Island was first occupied by the British, and then formally ceded by the Qing Dynasty of China in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking.
Hong Kong became a crown colony in 1843. The first specially-recruited Hong Kong civil servants to be taught Cantonese were recruited in 1862, markedly improving relations. Hong Kong had been a trade port ever since the British occupation, but its position as an entrepot declined greatly after the United Nations ordered a trade embargo against the People's Republic of China as a result of the Korean War. Towards the 1970s, Hong Kong began to move away from the textile industry and develop its financial and banking economy. The liberation of Hong Kong in 1945 was celebrated at the Cenotaph in Victoria with the raising of the Union Flag and the Flag of the Republic of China. Hong Kong was transferred to the PRC at midnight on 1 July 1997, with the last governor, Chris Patten, leaving on the royal yacht. Soon after the handover in July, land values in Hong Kong collapsed substantially and expedited the burst of the bubble economy, as part of the Asian financial crisis. Hong Kong was hit badly by the outbreak of the SARS virus beginning in mid-March through the summer of 2003.
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