Hong Kong Island was occupied by Britain in 1841 and formally ceded by the Chinese government under the Treaty of Nanking the following year. The Kowloon Peninsula was acquired under the 1860 Peking Convention and the New Territories secured on a ninety-nine year lease from 1898. At the end of more than 150 years of British rule, this book examines the career of an outstanding imperial servant in order to explain why and how the British came to assume power there at all.

Sir Henry Pottinger, soldier and diplomat, was involved in some of the great issues of nineteenth-century foreign and military policy.

As this book shows, Pottinger's role in Hong Kong was decisive. Without his influence, it is most unlikely that the island would have been brought under the Crown. It was his decision, against advice from London, to make Hong Kong the British base and he became the first Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the colony and its dependants.

Pottinger created the structure of Hong Kong's administration, applying a British system of government to an overwhelmingly Chinese population and initiating its development into a major centre for Sino-British trade during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.