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@iona Yep. You've been living in 1855 this whole time! INFO DUMP!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_and_peninsulas_of_Hong_Kong
> Hong Kong comprises the Kowloon peninsula and 261 islands over 500 m2, the largest being Lantau Island and the second largest being Hong Kong Island.
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Got to know another one of HK's cool industrial areas today, as dx.com wouldn't send me my 20 HKD cable by normal post, but instead used a courier that tried to deliver to me when I wasn't home. Next try I will try to see if I can just tell them to leave the parcel with the lobby guard.
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@iona HK is worth visiting for several reasons. #1 is food, #2 is just walking around in the world's overwhelmingly scyscraper-densest place and going up in some of them for the view, and then there are some stark contrasts between the ancient and the hypermodern to enjoy.
For the cyberpunk experience, you can get some of it by just going to obscure warehouses and meet small businesses, and you can get some of it by going to the electronic markets in Sham Shui Po. But the real deal is Shenzhen. They have like 200+ makerspaces and markets where you can buy every component imaginable.
While staying in Hong Kong, one can make visa-less day trips to Shenzhen.
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@iona A one-week trip to Hong Kong becomes very compressed and selective, I would recommend anyone two weeks for their first visit, and I know some people who come for a two-week visit basically every year, to enjoy the food, beaches and shopping.
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@iona Are you from Iona? It's one of those places I've seen on an album cover and it seems absolutely gorgeous. :-)
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@iona Hotels in Hong Kong are surprisingly well worth the money. For the money you'd get a janky tent bed and cold water in Victoria, you get a four star hotel semi-central on Hong Kong Island (80-100 EUR).
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by coincidence, also called Victoria historically, coe to think of it :-)
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@iona A friend and I did travel Japan in 12 days once, which was surprisingly rewarding. But we could have easily spent a week or two in just one district in Tokyo too.
It was definitely a step up from the eurorailing another friend and I did a decade earlier, where we only stayed one day in each place. :-)
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@iona
The First Opium War ended in 1842 and resulted in the British conquering Hong Kong Island. Today 1.3M people live on the island, most of them on the northern shore or around the original Hong Kong fishing village, Aberdeen, from which the rest of the island is named (in Cantonese Aberdeen is Heung Gong Zai and the island was named Heung Gong after the British took it over).
The Second Opium War ended in 1860 and resulted in the British conquering Kowloon. 2M people live here, including not-actually-Kowloon New Kowloon, which was not yet part of HK.
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@iona
In 1898, the British leased the rest of today's HK (minus Kowloon Walled City, look that one up for a piece of very interesting history in several aspects!), called the New Territories (and I believe the Outlying Islands are also part of the Lease). It's not as densely populated as Kowloon or the northern shore of HK Island, but it's much larger than the core districts of HK and it's where the other 4M people live (including our family!).
(I'm going by Wikipedia numbers here, I hear elsewhere that HK has about 9M people, but WP says 7.5M.)
The lease ran for 99 years, and as 1997 approached, negotiations started on what to do about it. NT, KN and HK were intrinsically integrated, and colonialism had become extremely unfashionable since the 60s, so the British agreed to hand the whole package over to China (against Singapore leadership's unofficial recommendations, and without consulting the millions of people affected by the transfer).
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I'm a bit fuzzy on the details here, but I think it's roughly correct:
Back in the 50s, on the order of a million people escaped the PRC by taking their most precious possessions and swimming or taking boats from the mainland to Hong Kong (because the land border was thoroughly fenced and guarded). The policy was that anyone who reached Hong Kong land was given asylum.
In the 60s, work emigration from China was partially allowed, and another million came here for work. Since then, most of the growth of the population was organic growth.
After the Handover in 1997 and liberalized Chinese emigration rules and Hong Kong immigration rules, there is once again a noticeable stream of immigrants coming from the mainland, and organic growth has turned negative, as Hong Kong's prosperity and female employment, just like in Europe, has led to a birth rate below replacement. Still, local births are the main contributor to population gross growth.
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