Hong Kong, under British rule, has grown a modern western city in an eastern setting.

And right in the center of downtown Hong Kong are the British Cricket Club grounds.

Cricket has been played on these grounds since 1880.

Hong Kong is a peculiar place.

It's a British colony until just 1997 and

because of that the British culture here is so visible.

This ferry was set up by

the British in 1888.

Day and night the 5 star ferry comes and goes,

providing core harbor transportation.

These trams, brought over by the British in the early 1900s.

If you go to London you'll see double-decker buses that actually look exactly like the buses here.

Do you notice what side of the road they're driving on?

So many of the street names, road names, are British.

The famous Happy Valley racetrack, reputedly the most beautiful in the east.

Rolling through this park and I stumbled upon a legit bowling green,

a place where they play bowls.

Old, old, old, British sport.

That is just right

here in the middle of Hong Kong.

The British brought good administration and

a gracious way of living.

Typified by these homes and apartments on Victoria Peak.

Around the late 1600s, early 1700s, Britain started trading with China.

China had all sorts of stuff that the West wanted; porcelain, silk.

But there was one thing that Britain loved more than anything else: the herb called tea.

China was really the only place on earth that was producing tea on a massive

scale and the people back in Britain became totally hooked on it.

But there was one snag for the British government when it came to the tea trade, which is that

the Chinese emperor would only take pure silver bullion, basically coins and like

bars of silver, in exchange for tea. That was the deal and the British were fine

with that, they were like whatever man, we'll pay for this, it's such a valuable thing.

Eventually britain's treasury ran really low on silver and it became a national

crisis so Britain came up with a horribly unethical solution to their tea

silver problem.

They started smuggling in opium, the

highly addictive narcotic that was illegal in China.

Britain would sell

this opium in exchange for Chinese silver, which they then used to buy tea

and this was the solution to their problem: an illegal drug trade, which is

just mind-blowing to me.

Eventually, the Chinese government caught on to this illegal drug trade and

they cracked down.

They seized all the opium and threw twenty thousand chests

of opium into the sea.

Britain wasn't happy about China

seizing all of its opium, so it showed up with its big gunboats

and started a war, the Opium Wars.

They eventually negotiated a series of peace

deals and a part of those deals was that China was going to give this rocky

island that didn't really have many people living on it, to Britain.

In the text of the treaty they put that the British will have Hong Kong for 99 years,

but the diplomat who negotiated the treaty said later that in his mind

ninety-nine years was quote "as good as forever."

Meaning no intention of ever giving it back.

So Britain's thirst for tea

brought them into a war with China that eventually gave them a new colony: Hong Kong, here in Asia.

Hong Kong a British colony, a tourist paradise for duty-free

shoppers.

China, communist China, lies only a few miles away just across the border.

Just walked into the grocery store to meet Billy, who's a historian here and we're

just looking at a bunch of maps, which is like my kind of activity.

So one of the things the British did as soon as they got here, is they started

drawing their own borders in the city to divide them from the local Chinese.

Now let's talk about tea again.

It remains a symbol as to the different

cultures that exist here in Hong Kong. British influence versus the Chinese influence.

The British prefer milk in their tea with crumpets and scones and little cakes.

Whereas the Chinese will tell you they do not pervert their tea with milk

and they drink tea with dim sum, little buns and cakes.

A British tea situation looks very different.

These two traditions played

out side-by-side in the city for many years.

in a divided way with the Chinese

down in their crowded slums drinking their tea in their tea houses and the

British up on the hills in their aristocratic homes

sipping their milk tea, but eventually over time those boundaries dissolved and

the two cultures started to blend and fuse together.

To where today, the tea

culture has cropped up that is a perfect fusion of the two.

But I hate to break it to you Britain, 99 years is not forever like the British

diplomat thought it was going to be.

The actual handover ceremony is about to start.

British role officially comes to an end

with a handover ceremony just before midnight.

A five star flag of China, soon

to be sovereign over Hong Kong again.

I should like on behalf of Her Majesty

the Queen and of the entire British people to express our thanks, admiration,

affection, and good wishes to all the people of Hong Kong.

The stroke of midnight, the red star flag of China will go up.

For me, it was pure betrayal.

We're, like, being abandoned by the Brits.

There was pride in this mix of like the Chinese values

and I guess are the western values.

An identity of a citizen is not, like,

determined by your passport something.

It's something that you treasure,

the culture we are living in.

We feel lost in our identity.

Our generation has very complicated identities.

Britain giving Hong Kong back to China is the beginning of a new chapter for

the city and so next week I'm going to explain what happens when China tries to

erase this border between Hong Kong and Mainland China and how the people here

are resisting.