This special souvenir issue of time is a lot like Hong Kong: crowded, picturesque, flashy, irreverent, throbbing with life, rich in history, preoccupied with the present, confident (mostly) about the future. Crammed into this web site, you'll learn about the people, culture, cuisine, customs, traditions, institutions, crustaceans and miscellaneous unclassifiable creatures that make Hong Kong such a fascinating place.

We wanted to do something special because, as everyone on the planet knows by now, this longtime British colony reverts to China at midnight on July 1. For the first time in history, a territory and its people are being transferred from one sovereign power to another without a shot being fired, if you don't count the Noon Day Gun. But instead of focusing on the politics and policy implications of this event--as we do relentlessly in our regular issues--we had another idea: to distill, within the pages of a magazine, what it is that makes Hong Kong so unlike any other place on earth.

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