BP GEOGRAPHIC

Out there at the coast of southern China are a group of islands and a peninsula which British seafarers found suitable to colonialise when they arrived there in the 19th century. At that time a small fishermen’s village, it soon grew to a town, then a city, and since the immigration of many Mainland Chinese who would not fit into the system of New China, which was founded in 1949, it grew to a world metropolis. It obtained the name Fragrant Harbour, in the local language Cantonese called Heung Kong, so we know it as Hong Kong.

It is a place of differences, between the cool winter with nearly European weather and the sweltering heat and humidity in summer, between the heat outside and the refrigerator-like coolness in buildings and the MTR, between British and Chinese culture, between multicultural areas like Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon and the nearly all-Hongkonger towns like Tsuen Mun in the New Territories, between scyscapers in the top ten of the tallest buildings in the world and the countryside of the New Territories or the small fishing town Tai O on Lantau Island, and just in the north of the scarcely populated island is the Hong Kong International Airport located.