Estimating the number of Britons in Hong Kong, as with the rest of Asia, can be difficult for a variety of reasons. One reason is that not all immigrants or visitors register with the British Consulate-General in Hong Kong. Another is that a large part of the British population is transitory, working in the city for only a few months or years. Hong Kong's Immigration Department estimated that there were 35,000 British citizens living in the Special Administrative Region eight months after the handover of sovereignty in 1997. A large proportion of the British who were government employees left following the handover. There have been noticeably fewer native Britons emigrating to Hong Kong since the handover. During British Hong Kong era, Britons wishing to live and work in Hong Kong were not subject to the immigration and visa restrictions that would apply today. It was common for young Britons to go to Hong Kong to work in blue-collar occupations, particularly during economic downturns in Britain. This advantage ended with the handover: Britons applying for permission to work in Hong Kong must now prove they will have jobs that cannot be filled by local residents, which means blue-collar jobs in Hong Kong are for the most part no longer an option for Britons. In the decade before the handover around 3.4 million British Dependent Territories Citizens of Hong Kong acquired the status of British National by registration. They do not have the right of abode in the UK, and China does not recognise Hong Kong-born ethnic Chinese BNs as British nationals. However, BN are considered British outside China.
Migration history
The first British presence in the area was the British East India Company, which started trading in the area in 1699 and set up a trading post in Canton in 1711. The British captured Hong Kong Island in 1841 during the First Opium War and were officially ceded the territory in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking. Over the next 150 years Britons came to Hong Kong in relatively large numbers—many to work in the colony's administration, trading houses, and merchant banks—along with other Europeans and Americans. Between 1991 and 1996 there was a substantial increase in the number of British citizens in Hong Kong; the number of UK passport holders in Hong Kong more than doubled, to over 34,000. This increase was mainly due to the British Nationality Selection Scheme, which granted British citizenship to 50,000 families, some of whom did not emigrate. However, in those years many young people from the United Kingdom went to Hong Kong to take up unskilled jobs.
Ethnicity
Among the 33,733 citizens of the United Kingdom living in Hong Kong, 19,405 are white, 6,893 are Chinese, 2,337 are Indian, 1,047 are Pakistani, 829 are Nepalese, 273 are other Asians, 227 are Filipino, 98 are Thai, 40 are Japanese, and 40 are Indonesian. 2,544 other Britons are of a different ethnicity or race.
