The answer – well, an answer – is coal. How so? Generally, the take on the British victories tends to emphasize the fairly sorry state of the Qing military in terms of funding, equipment and training, and those forces’ huge disadvantage faced with massive broadsides of British ships and the lethal firepower of the British infantry’s muskets. It isn’t much commented on in the umpteen histories of the Sino-British wars in the 1840s and 1850s, but there was another huge advantage. For the second time in the history of warfare (everyone forgets about the 1st Anglo-Burmese War and the paddle steamer Diana) ships could be moved about independent of the wind. During the 1st Opium War, Britain was able to call on the services of not just one but 17 – yes seventeen – steam-powered warships. They could, and did, tow troopships when the wind failed. It was the same with the heavily gunned sailing ships of the line, which could be towed to where they were needed if there was no wind. The armed steamers, especially the shallow draft Nemesis, could go where the sailing vessels could not. No coal, no steam ships…and maybe a different outcome. In the 2nd Opium War almost all the British and French naval ships involved were either paddle or screw propelled steamers, so the technological advantage at sea, if not on land, was even greater because China’s navy had yet to modernize.

In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage.

The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong Kong, usually began with expats doing their thing…and too often doing it with a nasty racist bias. That’s partly because one leg of that arrival, as it were, lay in the importance of sport to British military life. Both routes led sooner or later to the establishment of clubs and associations that did not exclude people on grounds of their ethnicity…well, not so much.

On the way we’ll see how the origins of one of Hong Kong’s best known sporting outfits – the South China Athletic Association – had its origins in what became China’s first national football team.

You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network – slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B. But if one means what we’re all familiar with, timetabled services run by companies with several identical or similar vessels, the story is more nuanced. Ferries were right in there at the start with respect to linking Hong Kong to the PRD. But as far as links within HK itself - what most of us think of as a ferry - they’re actually quite a late comer. By the time the first ferry service of the sort we’d all recognize started up, modern Hong Kong was over half a century old. How come? It’s an intriguing story of changing maritime technology on the one hand and, on the other, the effects of socio-economic change on demand for properly organized local public transport ferry services.