Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘The politics, in his words, were a “snake pit”. However, the nature of communist wouldn’t change and the fate of Hong Kong has already been written before the handover. The honest opinion of his observations over the Hong Kong populace is carefully crafted and one could be easily moved by his love towards the Pearl of the Orient after reading.

His predecessors had mostly been diplomats or administrators – Patten was a senior UK politician with reforming ambitions and a flair for public relations who aroused suspicion in both Beijing and Hong Kong. Patten's best efforts, Hong Kong became the canary in the mine shaft, showing what happens when the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to get its way. There is an inescapable poignancy to reading this diary in 2022: it is a snapshot of a unique moment at the end of empire, and a now fading picture of an extraordinary society that flourished in its brief moment of freedom. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.This takes the form of a passionate polemical essay, written as a postscript to the diaries, about China's increasingly brutal sabotage of the Hong Kong deals. The first is that the diaries themselves, kept from the time of his appointment in April 1992 to the handover just over five years later, have not been seen before and make for consistently good reading.

Nonetheless the sheer amount of hard work and effort he and his staff in HK put in to ensure the handover went as well as it did is to be applauded. Percy Cradock, former ambassador to Beijing and described as “working actively to scupper what we are trying to do”, is the chief villain of the piece. In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not (as other British colonies over the decades) for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. There were serious ructions with China along the way, and some within Hong Kong itself, about the new airport, passport rights, civil service pensions, Vietnamese refugees and, more than anything else, Patten’s reforms.

details his persistent but ultimately failed efforts to secure the continuance of Hong Kong's freedoms . In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not - as other British colonies over the decades - for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. Unexpectedly, his opponents included not only the Chinese themselves, but some British businessmen and civil service mandarins upset by Patten's efforts, for whom political freedom and the rule of law in Hong Kong seemed less important than keeping on the right side of Beijing. But it is also to be treasured for the brilliant and fierce concluding essay on China's recent crackdown which has destroyed Hong Kong's way of life. Patten's conviction that planting the seed of democracy would make Hong Kong more resilient after the handover to China will long be debated by historians, and this book will be an essential source.