Hong Kong

Hong Kong (Chinese: 香港; literally: "Fragrant Harbour" or "Incense Harbour"), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is an autonomous territory south to Mainland China at the Pearl River Estuary of the Asia Pacific. With a total land area of 1,106 square kilometres (427 sq mi) and a population of over 7.3 million of various nationalities, it ranks as the world's fourth most densely populated sovereign state or territory.

After the First Opium War (1839–42), Hong Kong became a British colony with the perpetual cession of Hong Kong Island, followed by the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and a 99-year lease of the New Territories from 1898. Hong Kong was later occupied by Japan during the Second World War until British control resumed in 1945. In the early 1980s, negotiations between the United Kingdom and China resulted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which paved way for the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997, when it became a Special Administrative Region with a high degree of autonomy.

Links To Peel
Peel visited Hong Kong in 1986 before flying of from there to Japan. In Hong Kong he visited the BFBS radio station at HMS Tamar, the name for the British Royal Navy's base in Hong Kong from 1897 to 1997 and also managed to collect many Cantonese pop records from the territory, which he played some of them on his BBC Radio One shows after coming back from Hong Kong and Japan.

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