When Lord Macartney opened his British Embassy in China in 1792, he was told to ask for bit of land or, perhaps an island, to serve as a kind of warehouse for British trade.
What he had acquired by 1842 -- the colony of Hong Kong and a web of treaty ports -- was five times what the British had expected, and more than they could handle.
Imperialists felt comfortable in Hong Kong, with their legal status as colonialists firmly in place. But Robert Bickers, the author of "Britain in China," observes that British snobbery in the treaty ports rested on shakier ground.