Excerpt from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Thirteen years earlier, when Britain's ninety-nine-year lease on Hong Kong came to an end, there was little evidence of such Sino-British harmony. Then, it was all tears and angst, pride and regret. At the stroke of midnight the Union Jack was lowered to the strains of 'God Save the Queen', the Hong Kong police ripped the royal insignia from their uniforms, and Red Army troops poured over the border. Britain's last governor, Chris Patten, recorded the final, colonial swansong in all its lachrymose glory: its 'kilted pipers and massed bands, drenching rain, cheering crowds, a banquet for the mighty and the not so mighty, a goose-stepping Chinese honour guard, a president and a prince'. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played 'Rule, Britannia!' and 'Land of Hope and Glory', on the last, symbolic voyage of the Royal Yacht Britannia, 'we were leaving one of the greatest cities in the world, a Chinese city that was now part of China, a colony now returned to its mighty motherland in rather different shape to that in which it had become Britain's responsibility a century and a half before'.1

In London, responses to the handover ran the gamut, from anguished to humbled, emblematic, in a way, of the conflicted reexamination of Britain's colonial legacy that has been underway for some years. At the shrill end of the spectrum: 'The handover of Hong Kong to China strikes many westerners as a disgrace and a tragedy,' thundered The Economist. 'Never before has Britain passed a colony directly to a Communist regime that does not even pretend to respect conventional democratic values.'2 Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail, concurred: 'The surrender of the free colony of Hong Kong to the totalitarian Communist government is one of the most shameful and humiliating episodes in British history.' The scuttle from Victoria Harbour gave Fleet Street just the cue it needed for an enjoyable bout of colonial self-indulgence. 'All the rest of our empire has been given away on honourable terms,' continued Johnson. 'All the rest of our colonies were meticulously prepared for independence, by setting up model parliaments. . . and by providing a judiciary professionally educated on British lines to maintain the rule of law.' Shamefully, the same could not be said of Hong Kong.3

Other brave commentators suggested there might be a more complex pre-history to this handover. Author Martin Jacques thought the ceremony showed, 'no sense of contrition, of humility, of history. This was British hypocrisy at its most rampant and sentimental.'4 Instead of a moment of self-regard and imperial nostalgia, the journalist Andrew Marr thought this final, colonial retreat should have been an opportunity for a new British identity to emerge. 'So enough Last Posts and folded Union Flags. Enough "Britannia" and enough weary self- deprecation from the Prince of Wales. We should not leave Hong Kong with too much regret.'5

In his memoirs, Prime Minister Tony Blair admits to a startling failure to appreciate the historic significance of the return of Hong Kong to China, as a rising, newly prosperous country sought to take its place in the world and shed the memory of its 'century of humiliation' at the hands of British, French and American forces.* After President Jiang Zemin teased the jet-lagged and jejune British premier about his poor knowledge of William Shakespeare

he then explained to me that this was a new start in UK/China relations and from now on, the past could be put behind us. I had, at that time, only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what the past was. Ithought it was all just politeness in any case. But actually, he meant it. They meant it.6

However, one member of the British delegation remained determined to cling on to the past. In a confidential diary entry entitled 'The Great Chinese Takeaway', His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales laid bare his despair at seeing the Crown colony returned to the mainland. Watching another piece fall from his family inheritance, the prince lamented the 'ridiculous rigmarole' of meeting the 'old waxwork' Jiang Zemin, and the horror of watching an 'awful Soviet-style' ceremony in which 'Chinese soldiers goose-step on to the stage and haul down the Union Jack'. Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor knew all too well that, when his time came to assume the throne, the loss of Hong Kong meant Britain's imperial role would be long past. 'Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.'7

Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.