Life was far from easy for Hong Kong's early colonial residents. Primitive conditions made the territory vulnerable to health epidemics. Fires and typhoons took their toll, as did an unchecked criminal element.

Hong Kong's fortunes began to pick up in the 1850s and '60s. Refugees from the chaos and war in China flooded into the territory. The new arrivals helped the colony evolve from a trading outpost into a settlement. But it was also during this time that Hong Kong society began to divide, into wealthy Westerners and the Chinese they employed and governed.

During these years, Hong Kong Chinese were, in theory, not allowed out after dark. They were barred from some residential districts. A British bishop noted the anger most local Chinese had toward Westerners -- who, he said, treated the Chinese as "a degraded race of people." "You cannot be two minutes in a Hong Kong street," wrote another observer of the time, "without seeing Europeans striking coolies with their canes or umbrellas."

An example of these racial tensions surfaced in 1857, when a Chinese baker attempted to poison hundreds of his Western clients by placing arsenic in their bread. No one died in the incident, and the baker was later acquitted.

By the 1880s Hong Kong was in full stride. Trains connected it to the Chinese interior, ships to ports all over the world, and the telegraph to its administrators in London. Asia's first cable railway, the steam-powered tram to Victoria Peak, opened. Public education was introduced; hospitals, schools and colleges were established.

Sun Yat-sen, who eventually led the revolution that ousted China's Ching Dynasty, received his medical degree in Hong Kong in 1892. He would later tell a Hong Kong audience that the order and calm he found in the colony, compared with the chaos then convulsing parts of China, affected him deeply.

The Revolution of 1911, and the ensuing unrest in China, brought with it a new wave of refugees to Hong Kong. Its population had grown from about 33,000 in 1851 to nearly 900,000 by 1931. Chinese nationalism and the global economic Depression contributed to strikes and anti-British sentiment in the colony.

But by the end of the 1930s, it became apparent that Hong Kong might soon have even greater issues to worry about, from a growing regional power -- Japan.