Capital of the crown colony / dependent territory | Gwulo: Old Hong Kong

Capital of the crown colony / dependent territory

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Submitted by Unknown user (not verified) on Sat, 2011-06-11 19:24

What's the capital of the crown colony (dependent territory from the early 1980s onwards with the passage of the new act)? How were capitals defined in British colonies?

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Submitted by annelisec on Sat, 2011-06-11 21:42.

Can you tell us more ? What do you need this information for ? It helps us search.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-06-19 23:06.

Very often the capital of the crown colony / dependent territories of HK is said to be the City of Victoria. And yet there's basically no statutory basis for that. In what way is the capitals of crown colonies / dependent territories determined? Is it a must to define and entrench the status of capitals in statutes?

Submitted by Adam on Mon, 2011-06-20 13:27.

According to Eitel in Europe in China (p.188), Victoria was officially announced as the city's name in the same document that proclaimed the ratification of the Treaty Of Nanking, on June 26, 1843. It was published in the Government Gazette on June 29, 1843.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-06-26 01:52.

Would Eitel's book or the gazette be available on the net or in any library? Is it HK's gazette or the London Gazette? And is that declaration / announcement still valid beyond 1st July 1997?

Submitted by annelisec on Sun, 2011-06-26 07:21.

 

http://www.archive.org/details/europeinchinahis00eiteuoft

You are writing a dissertation, right ?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-06-26 10:09.

Was the proclamation in the gazette merely proclamaing the name of the city? Or was it explicitly and specifically proclaming the city to be the capital?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-06-26 10:13.

Thank you so much. Not yet a dissertation, but yes some prelimerary prepartion.

Submitted by annelisec on Sun, 2011-06-26 17:05.

You keep asking a question we can't answer.  Why - exactly - is the actual name of the capital important to you ?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-06-26 23:36.

I'm not looking for its actual name, but for evidence to show that it was (and still is) the capital of the territory.

Submitted by annelisec on Mon, 2011-06-27 07:57.

I think we need to define "capital".

The concept of a "capital" is political.  It does not exist Hong Kong because we are just a large city, even though we are called a "special administrative region".  There are no independent government administrative areas.  The "District Councils" are advisory only, they have no legal decision making ability - and most importantly, cannot independently tax their population.

We only have neighbourhoods, really.  It is like asking what is the "capital" of New York City, or Manchester, or Berlin.

There is a single government entity, and they have departments responsible for the different neighbourhoods.

Submitted by sf (not verified) on Mon, 2011-06-27 13:06.

HK is very similar to say Singapore or Aden in that the city itself pretty much made up of the entire colony. Perhaps it has to do with the small size of the colony that rendered a so called capital unnecessary.

Submitted by David on Tue, 2011-06-28 04:41.

If you look at this list of books from the 1940's, they all say that the city of Victoria was the capital of the colony of Hong Kong.

We've got more about the City of Victoria in terms of it's area. It would be worth checking the definitions of the area to see if they mantion capital status at all.

Size doesn't seem to matter. According to the BBC's profile of Gibraltar, it still has a defined capital: 'Gibraltar town'.

Please let us know if you find out how capitals are defined.

Regards, David

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2011-07-05 00:32.

There are quite a lot of dependencies or dependent territories that are smaller than HK in terms of size, and are unitary in nature, i.e., not having any administrative units.., or like HK, where the local councils are merely advisory in nature, without any governance capacity. Yet all these territories are having capitals.

And if one compares HK with many European cities, one would agree it  is several cities and towns forming a conurbation. It isn't one city per se. Victoria City is one city, with urban sprawl along the northern shore of the island and beyond its statutory border. Kowloon and New Kowloon is another city. Sha Tin, Castle Peak (Tuen Mun) and Tsuen Wan are also cities (or very very big towns), whereas towns include Tai O, Stanley, Sai Kung, Silvermine Bay, Cheung Chau, etc.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2011-07-05 00:38.

Even microstates are having capitals, e.g., Tuvalu, Malta, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino, Luxembourg, etc.

 

HK is geographically a collection of several cities and towns, although administratively it got one single tier of government. It's simply perculiar to call it one single city according to European or even Japanese or Taiwanese standard... (or Canadian standard before all those stupid amalgamations took place).

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-07-10 02:52.

Is there any governmental document that refers the City of Victoria as the capital of the crown colony?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2011-07-10 02:55.

I don't know much about Aden.., but for Singapore, there was indeed a City of Singapore, with its own city council and charter, before Lee Kuan Yew became the PM and led the colony towards independence. It covered only a portion of the crown colony of Singapore.