Tristram Hunt - Ten Cities that Made an Empire

The end of the line. Her Majestys Ship the Royal Yacht Britannia sails at Hong Kong harbour, 23 June 1997. The ship, which would become the floating base for Prince Charles, arrived a week before the territory was to be handed back to China after more than 150 years of British rule (1997).

A few brave commentators suggested there might be a more complex pre-history to this handover. Indeed, Martin Jacques thought the ceremony showed, no sense of contrition, of humility, of history. This was British hypocrisy at its most rampant and sentimental. Conversely, in Hong Kong itself, there was evidence of genuine regret at the passing of the colonial order. Many resident Hong Kongers admired the last governors attempts at democratic reform (not previously a British priority) and harboured understandable fears over the future security of their capitalist economy under a system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

But there was no such nuance from Britains politicians. The diaries of Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blairs director of communications, describe the scene amongst the UK delegation preparing for the ceremonial: When someone referred to the Chinese as the Dewhursts of Peking there was a mild laugh around the table. I looked at Chris Patten a bit bemused. Dewhurst as in butchers, he said. Campbell thought it all a little self-indulgent. The general sense

In his own memoirs, Blair recalls of the ceremony a tug, not of regret but of nostalgia for the old British Empire. He also admits to a startling failure to appreciate the historic significance of the return of Hong Kong as a rising, newly prosperous China sought to take its place in the world and shed the memory of its century of humiliation at the hands of British, French and American forces. After President Jiang Zemin had teased the exhausted, jet-lagged and jejune British premier about his poor knowledge of William Shakespeare

he then explained to me that this was a new start in UK/China relations and from now on, the past could be put behind us. I had, at that time, only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what the past was. I thought it was all just politeness in any case. But actually, he meant it. They meant it.

However, there was one member of the British delegation keener to cling on to the past. In a confidential diary entry entitled The Great Chinese Takeaway, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales laid bare his despair at seeing the Crown colony returned to the mainland. Watching another piece fall from his family inheritance, the prince lamented the ridiculous rigmarole of meeting the old waxwork Jiang Zemin, and the horror of watching an awful Soviet-style