The island of Hong Kong, at the mouth of the Pearl River on the southeastern coast of China, was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Nanking (1842) following the First Opium War, and was expanded by the acquisition of Kowloon on the mainland (1862) and the adjacent area (1898), together known as the New Territories. Since 1997 the former British colony of Hong Kong has been a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China.

The colony grew steadily as a central distribution point for East-West trade, and came to have a substantial community of Baghdadi Jew…