Hey everyone, Lauslle Montgomery here with another China History Podcast.

Today we're going to continue on with our history of Hong Kong overview, Part 8.

Hong Kong is now liberated from the Japanese and it's a new beginning there.

Other than inflation, a shortage of hard currency, unemployment, looting, abysmal health and hygiene conditions, insufficient housing, intimidation

from triads, and 80% of the Hong Kong people being malnourished other than all that.

The place was still standing and ready to make a quick and miraculous comeback.

After eight months of military administration, beginning with Cecil Harcourt in August 1945,

Sir Mark Young returned to Hong Kong, landing at Queens Pear on May Day, 1946, to restore civil administration, and begin picking

up the pieces.

For those eight months prior to Young's arrival, Hong Kong had been run by the colonial secretary David Mercer

McDougal, who hailed from Perth in Scotland.

He had quite an interesting life.

At the Battle of Hong Kong Kong he made a daring escape from

certain death at the hands of the Japanese. He made a break with a bunch of

fellow intel officers and went on to make it to Chongching where the nationalist government had

reconstituted itself. McDougal later traveled the Burma Road and worked in Burma

until the end of the war. McDougal was on hand when Harcourt accepted the surrender from the Japanese

and he served excellently in the interim until Governor Young was able to sit behind his desk again at Government House.

It was a new age in Hong Kong.

First of all, the British had lost a massive amount of prestige in the eyes of the Hong Kong people when they were so quickly

overwhelmed by the Japanese in 1941.

The British of all people, when they sailed into Hong Kong themselves a century before, who could have ever thought in a million years these guys could be beat,

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