From its inception Hong Kong has existed on trade, exchange and the provision of financial services. Its Chinese, European and Indian peoples have had little in common beyond a shared respect for making money. Fortune-seekers have been attracted to the territory from the start in the expectation that individual effort might be rewarded and that the authorities would not look too closely at the books. The ethos is unapologetically materialistic. The colony exists to the present on clear mid-Victorian lines. The North-China Herald's economic editor's blunt explanation to his readers in 1864 that the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's sole ‘objective’ was ‘to make money for the public by making money out of the public’ applied throughout the colony. Profit was king and the overscrupulous might find it wiser to take themselves and their consciences to safer havens. The skyline of central Hong Kong in 1896 and 1996 is indicative of where the territory's heart has long been located. It was and remains a business city. It is banks and high-rise offices rather than church spires and towers that crowd the waterfront. The parallel is with the secularism of Tokyo and Singapore rather than the Christianity of Manila and Seoul. Hong Kong's small Anglican cathedral is dwarfed by skyscrapers and overhead road systems.

It was British traders rather than missionaries or marines who invented Hong Kong.