Andrew Whitfield examines the recovery of Hong Kong from the Japanese, 52 years before its return to China. As the clock ticks ever closer to midnight on 30 June 1997, the sun will set on Britain’s last major colonial outpost. Thousands of miles from the motherland, the colony originally acted as Britain’s gateway to the ever elusive China market; a haven from pirates and the retribution of the hostile local Chinese. From its humble beginning as a fishing village to today’s high-rise temples of glass and steel, the colony has undergone an extremely rapid transformation in the past 150 years.