May 28, 1923: A BULL RUSH FROM CHINA Owing to banditry in the interior, thousands of wealthy Chinese are fleeing to Hong Kong, Shanghai and other cities situated in foreign concessions, where their life and liberty are safe.

With them comes their cash. They are reported to be looking for good investments. In Hong Kong there was such a rush to buy taxicab stock that two prospective investors were injured and subsequently removed to a hospital with broken arms.

November 27, 1939: THE DEATH OF HONG KONG Hong Kong was once a valve controlling the flow of fabulous trade out of South China. Then the Japanese got a valve of their own farther up the pipe at Canton, and Hong Kong became a comparatively dead city. It is still one of the most beautiful ports in the world--its harbor is like a Wedgwood plate full of sugar buns--but it is now a negligible trade center, and Britain plans to abandon it at the drop of a bomb.

September 3, 1945: HIP-HIP, HURRAH! In the debate on Empire foreign policy in the House of Commons last week, it was just as hard to tell the difference between the new socialists in office and the old Tories in opposition.

The issue was Hong Kong, Britain's Chinese crown colony. Did Britain mean to keep it or give it up? First socialist Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin answered bluntly: "We have taken steps to receive the surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong." Then Prime Minister Clement Attlee made the matter crystal-clear: "Plans for re-establishing British administration in the colony are fully prepared."

Many within the sound of Attlee's voice well knew that top British officials were prepared to negotiate with China about Hong Kong's future, that it might one day be returned to China. Yet at the Prime Minister's forthright statement, both sides of the house cheered.

January 16, 1956: PEKING WOULDN'T DARE Seven years after the Communists took control of the mainland, there are fears that Hong Hong, too, could fall.

The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong perches in incongruous complacency on the coast of Communist China like a fat canary on the shoulder of a hungry tomcat.

Street stalls and numberless shops vend glowing jade, laces, lovingly carved woods and ivories from the China mainland, roasted whole pigs, tin bathtubs, hollowed-tree coffins, ancient cures compounded of dried sea horses, centipedes, lizards and snakes. Yet more than 1,500 workshops and factories, many of them new and equipped with modern Western machinery, pour forth a cascade of flashlights, rubber shoes, bicycles and cheap cottons for the marketplaces of Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong has had to make over its economy and has succeeded surprisingly well. Early Chinese refugees brought their money with them, and today operate many of the white factories and home-workshop networks that employ some 315,000 Hong Kong men and women. At first a hotel owner hesitated before renovating a wing or papering over the flaked walls of a grand ballroom, wondering whether there would be time to amortize his investment. A prospering Chinese plastics maker deliberated whether to plow back his profits or to save the cash for a future flight. But increasingly, the decision has been to take the risk. A steady flow of funds comes in from all over Asia for investment and safekeeping.

For a time, Hong Kong was a frightened place. Today Hong Kong is remarkably unfrightened. Its citizens, if they talk about it at all, exchange the mutual confidence that the big Red cat will not try to gulp down Britain's fat little Asian canary unless it is prepared to take on Britain and the whole western world in war.

October 22, 1956: A CHALLENGE TO THE BRITISH A disturbance targeting foreigners arouses concern in Peking. Through the night, thousands of Chinese ranged the streets, looting and burning shops, factories and schools considered to have pro-Communist affiliations. Then, though it had begun as an anti-Communist eruption, the violence gradually changed complexion. The crowds began singling out foreigners. Europeans were dragged from their cars, beaten mercilessly while their cars were burned.

By the afternoon of the second day, as spotter planes wheeled overhead and tear- and vomit-gas bombs popped wildly, Hong Kong's Acting Governor Edgeworth B. David at long last ordered British troops into the troubled areas, to swept rioters off the streets. There were 47 dead, almost all of them rioters destroyed by the terror they had fed. Nearly a hundred stores and buildings had been sacked and burned, and a pall of the smoke of burning loot hovered over Kowloon. Governor David ordered the first curfew in Hong Kong's history.

A pointed warning came from Communist China, just across the border. "China," said Red Premier Chou En-lai, "can neither ignore nor permit such events." Said an official broadcast: "We will watch carefully whether the British are capable of maintaining peace and order in Hong Kong and Kowloon."

November 21, 1960: WHAT A CITY Noisy, Bustling--Hong Kong is a place you gotta love. To tourists, Hong Kong seems at first a vast department store. As they step from plane or ship, tailors' touts press calling cards on them and promise custom-made suits within 24 hours for only $25. On their way to the hotel, the cab driver offers his services as guide, confidant and business agent. Climbing the broad stairs to the lobby of the popular, 274-room Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, which commands an unrivaled view of Hong Kong itself banked against the Peak across the harbor, the visitor is surrounded by shop after shop selling bargain-priced brocades, silks, cameras, pearls, jade, tape recorders, linens, carved ivory and inlaid furniture.

The first impression of Hong Kong itself is of noise: the staccato of pneumatic drills, thump of pile drivers, cries of hawkers, click of mah-jongg tiles behind shuttered doors, the shouts of coolies dancing under the weight of bamboo shoulder poles. Brass bands sound funeral dirges in the narrow streets; radios whine the cacophony of Cantonese music; the rataplan of $1,000 worth of firecrackers announces a wedding, a birth, or the grand opening of a new noodle store.

Said a recent U.S. visitor: "Hong Kong is just a city you like. You arrive, and you fall in love with it the way you do with San Francisco or Paris."

May 26, 1967: CULTURAL REVOLUTION China's campaign engulfs Hong Kong and worries a VIP poodle. For the past nine months, as Red China writhed in the grasp of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong has been the chief watching point for the outside world. Last week the British Crown Colony suddenly lost its spectator status. From the colony's teeming Kowloon district, thousands of pro-Maoist Chinese poured into the streets to harass Hong Kong's British rulers with the same harsh tactics that Mao's Red Guards have used on their enemies within China.

Mobs of three or four thousand teen-age boys, usually led by older youths who wore Mao Tse-tung emblems on their shirts and waved the Little Red Book of Mao's sayings, stoned hotels, overturned autos, set fire to a double-decker bus, and showered bottles on the police.

The British reacted with extraordinary cool. When 2,500 or so more orderly demonstrators headed on foot and by car to Government House, the residence of Governor Sir David Trench, 51, Hong Kong police politely waved the Red autos to a lot marked "Official Petitioners' Car Park." Sir David reported that he was not a bit disturbed by the constant cacophony, but allowed that his poodle Peter had become so unnerved that he had to be packed off to an animal shelter.

July 21, 1967: ARMED CONFRONTATION Last week's riots began on a more ominous note than the first round of riots in May [see above], which grew out of local labor disputes. The bell for Round 2 sounded at the border between Hong Kong and its overpowering neighbor, Communist China. Across the white demarcation line that splits the main street of the small fishing village of Shataukok into Chinese and British halves stormed 300 or more Communist demonstrators. Chanting Mao slogans and waving copies of the Little Red Book of his sayings, they began pelting the local police station with stones.

The police fired tear gas and wooden slugs to chase them away. Then a light machine gun suddenly stuttered from across the Red Chinese border. In the hail of bullets, five Hong Kong police died and twelve were wounded. The British quickly rushed a battalion of Gurkha troops to the scene. The Reds at first sniped at the Gurkha, then held their fire when the Gurkha refused to fire back. An uneasy calm descended on the area, but it was the first time since the Communists came to power in China 18 years ago that British and Chinese troops faced each other in an armed confrontation.

June 27, 1977: EUNUCHS AT THE COURT As economic links across the border increase, it's clear that Hong Kong is even more valuable to China than to Britain.

The oil storage tanks loom massive and stolid beside the blue-green waters of the South China Sea. Across the harbor on crowded, bustling Java Road, a steady stream of cars fills up at Hong Kong's largest gas station. On a siding of the venerable Kowloon-Canton Railway, a long trainload of pigs, grunting and squealing and redolent of the sty, waits to go southward, food for Hong Kong's crowded urban world. Each scene in its own way illustrates the large and growing role of Communist China in the rampant capitalist world of Hong Kong--and beyond. Each also illustrates the fact that China has become a major economic force throughout Southeast Asia. Potentially it is the biggest hong [trading house] of them all. The situation has its ironies. On principle, China refuses to recognize British control of Hong Kong. That means that when Peking's agents negotiate deals like a machine-tool plant with the British government, they are essentially buying land that Peking officially regards as its own. Another irony is the fact that Hong Kong has become far more profitable to China than to Britain, which runs a substantial trade deficit with its own colony. "Everybody thinks that Hong Kong is a British colony," quips one top British executive. "Actually, it's a Chinese colony. We're just eunuchs at the Persian court."

October 11,1982: THATCHER STIRS THINGS UP While negotiations with Beijing proceed, Britain's Prime Minister visits the territory to try to shore up shaky confidence.

Thatcher had barely left the colony when Peking began to challenge her claim that Britain had an obligation to Hong Kong. Calling the three 19th century treaties an "ironclad proof of British imperialism's plunder of Chinese territory," the official New China News Agency spoke of Peking's "sacred mission" to claim sovereignty over Hong Kong. Those were hardly words that residents in the enclave wanted to hear.

Whatever Solomonic solution Peking accepts on the sovereignty issue, there is still a lingering fear that the Communists may ultimately find Hong Kong unmanageable. Gabriel Ip, a part-time worker in a Hong Kong apartment rental agency, puts it in stark terms: "They cannot allow us to get too close to them, to take us into their system because they know we are like germs. We will transmit disease to them."

October 8, 1984: U.K. RETREAT For China, the declaration promised to eliminate a key vestige of foreign colonial rule on its territory after what will have been 155 years of British presence. For Britain, it marked the empire's final retreat in Asia, a closing chapter in what has been one of the most successful, and certainly most prosperous, of all its colonial administrations. For Hong Kong, a bustling territory of 5.5 million people, mostly Chinese, living for more than three decades in the shadow of an increasingly powerful motherland, it heralded the coming of a new and uncertain era. The unease was compounded by the fact that the people of Hong Kong played no role in the Sino-British talks that decided their fate. For better or worse, the groundwork was now laid for a bold experiment: the grafting of a small but thriving capitalist enclave onto the body of the world's most populous Communist state.

July 11, 1988: CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE Fears about the future under Beijing's control prompt more than 100,000 Hong Kong citizens to resettle overseas.

Nineteen-ninety-seven. For residents of Hong Kong, the date when the British crown colony will revert to Chinese sovereignty looms like a thunderhead on the horizon, fraught with uncertainty, perhaps even peril. "At every gathering, people talk about it," says a young banker. "'What's your plan? What's your arrangement?' The more you hear about it, the more you question why you're staying. You feel that someday you could be the only one left behind."

Although he would rather stay on in Hong Kong, the banker (who, like many would-be emigrants, prefers to remain anonymous) has succumbed to migration fever and accepted a transfer to the U.S. As many as 100,000 other Hong Kong Chinese have already left, and at least 50,000 more are making arrangements to secure new homes overseas. British authorities in Hong Kong insist there is no crisis as yet, but they recently set up a task force to determine the dimensions of the exodus. Says Hong Kong's Governor, Sir David Wilson: "Quite clearly, it is becoming a problem."

June 19, 1989: THE TIANANMEN FALLOUT Beijing's savage assault on its student demonstrators also wiped out any goodwill it had built up with Hong Kong.

The glittering glass-and-steel Bank of China, Southeast Asia's tallest building and a prominent addition to Hong Kong's spectacular skyline, was to embody the faith that both Hong Kong and China placed in a common future, a visible symbol of the "one country, two systems" promised when the British crown colony reverts to China in 1997. Last week two enormous black-and-white banners drooped across the tower's facade bearing a grim message in Chinese characters: blood must be paid with blood.

Overnight the savage massacre in Tiananmen Square shattered Hong Kong's wary faith in that future. Says Dame Lydia Dunn, the senior member of Hong Kong's governing Executive Council: "In one week China has wiped out what it had accomplished in ten years. Fears now have to be recognized."

July 1, 1996: IS HONG KONG TOAST? With only one year to go before the territory reverts to China, fears are growing that Beijing might just ruin the place.

That is the question: Will China's takeover ruin Hong Kong as it is known today, or merely alter it? With only 12 months to go, the answer remains unclear, though the signals are anything but encouraging. President Jiang Zemin, involved in his struggle to succeed the ailing Deng Xiaoping as China's leader, has found the hard line the most beneficial in sustaining support within the Communist Party and the politically powerful People's Liberation Army. One result of that stubbornness is that conjectures on Hong Kong's future are becoming significantly more specific--and darker.

C.Y. Leung, a pro-China property developer, compares the entire process of Hong Kong's handover since 1980 to a 90-min. suspense movie. "We are now in the last six minutes," he says, and the suspense is killing. "If I could press a button that would fast-forward us beyond this difficult transition period," says Leung, often mentioned as a future chief executive for Hong Kong, "I would."

November 11,1996: THE HANDSHAKE Hong Kong's first post-colonial leader was anointed the day China's Jiang sought him out for a personal greeting.

On a blustery day last January, a long line of Hong Kong luminaries filed into the cavernous Great Hall of the People in Beijing for the inaugural meeting of the 150-member Preparatory Committee, the body appointed by China to help manage the territory's transition from British sovereignty. After posing for an obligatory group photo with the visiting compatriots, President Jiang Zemin spotted an unassuming man with a graying crewcut standing a row away from him. Cameras flashed as a smiling Jiang stepped past other members and held out his hand to Tung Chee-hwa. "It was nothing significant," Tung told friends afterward, with customary modesty. "I was simply sitting between him and the door." But seasoned China-watchers saw in that greeting the anointment of Beijing's candidate to be the first Chief Executive of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.