Hong Kong History Museum [Joshua Burke]

History Museum

This post is going to be about the Hong Kong History Museum. 

Finally after being here a month and a half we get to go to the Hong Kong History Museum. We bought some annual passes that lets us go to all the major museums in the Hong Kong area and hopefully we will be here next spring so we get to keep using them. The Museum was about the history of Hong Kong from the beginning to the present day.

The Early History Theater  

The first couple rooms were about the start of Hong Kong.  They say that most of Hong Kong was formed by volcanoes, glaciers, and floods and that explains all the mountains here. There was also a room about the Qin and Han dynasties which was pretty neat because they had ancient pots, bronze tools, and other archeological finds.The great wall of China was also built during this time.

We then came upon the age of boat people and what was it like in the late 1700's. Speaking of boat people, they have been living on boats since very recently. My mom came to the the Hong Kong area in 2006 and she said that their were tons of boats in the harbor. Now when we are here, there are no boats in the major harbors anymore because I found out that the government moved all them out because they wanted the place to look modernized, which the place is. In this age fishing was  a huge product. In fact, they fished so much that the fish population is very low. The government wanted the fish population back up again for tourism so they bought out all the fishing companies.

Front view of the model boat that people live on. 

Me on the model boat looking in to the cramped living courters. 

The next stage in the Museum was the opium wars. During this time in History, Great Britain was trading with China, (mostly smuggling in opium in the country in turn for silk and other items). What sparked the war was that the emperor took a commissioner, Lin Zexu and put him in charge of dealing with the opium. He took care of the opium by dumping a lot of opium in trenches and then mixing it with lime to make it poisonous. It then drained into the sea. That made the British really angry and then turned into two opium wars in which the the Chinese lost badly in both of them and they had to give the Hong Kong island to the British, open up a lot of trading ports to other countries, and give a lot of silver (the equivalent of 66 million US dollars).

A model of the dumping of opium that Lin Zexu orderd. 

After the opium wars the Hong Kong area was under British control. During this time Hong Kong expanded rapidly and flourished under British control up until WW2.  

WW2 started. After the infamous December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese then started bombing Hong Kong on the morning of the eighth. Even though the British forces fought back heroically the Japanese eventually took over Hong Kong. Hong Kong then became a territory of the Japanese empire. Unfortunately the Hong Kong people suffered under the Japanese hands and they made some of the inhabitants to move off the island and on to the mainland. When the war ended it took a long time for the country to build up back again.

We then ran out of time and we didn't get to see the period after WW2 to the present day.

Just so you know if we eventually leave Hong Kong we will be going the Philippines, and then back to Malaysia.

Thats it for now 

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Joshua