Lots of Hong Kong people wanted retribution for the Opium Wars—the great humiliation that allowed the British to continue taking tea and silk out of China, while imposing opium on its people and gaining Hong Kong as a British Crown colony to boot. But Hong Kong was a tiny fishing village before it was a British possession. During the Qing dynasty, with the rest of Xin’an County, it was subject to mass evacuations on pain of death. When the evacuation edict was lifted, it was repopulated by some of the same Punti people who had been forced out, and some new people. The Punti called them “guest people” and let them live only on the least fertile mountainside land. These were the Hakka, like Old Cheung, like your Auntie Siu-Wai. On top of those hatreds, Ming and Qing dynasty loyalists still struggled against one another. And the Triads played a big part in the enforcing of loyalties. Loyalties overlapped and diverged like rain and wind. And it’s not like the divisions went away after the British came. We’re such a fractured lot, and the fractures keep getting worse and more tangled up.

The coming of the British suddenly made Hong Kong a centre of trade—legal, illegal, and everything in between. The British called it the gateway to Asia. You might call it the door to another dimension, the door that, once opened, changed the continent from one thing to quite something else. Some people dreamt of getting rid of opium and, in so doing, closing the gateway and bringing back the past. But which past? I don’t want the past in which the emperor neglected the well-being of the people, women were property, everyone feared their neighbours, and no one had enough to eat. Do you? Other pasts are possible. There were times when women could be scholars, and fair-minded magistrates took the interests of the people to heart. But all pasts are only dreams, unless you have a real way of making them present. That’s what I think. In the meantime, the British brought us another way. But now they are heading out, and things are going to be different yet again. Well, nothing can stop the world from turning. But what’s that old saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Though Old Mah didn’t want the Qing dynasty past, he was a canny enough businessman to recognize that people were nostalgic for it. He branded our Dream Horse products to remind them of it. His advertising slogans called out, “Close the Gateway!” “Strong, Peaceful, and Self-Reliant!” What he didn’t advertise was that the secret ingredient of the Dream Horse pills was opium itself, albeit modern opium and not traditional poppy tears.