Britain relinquished its main remaining colony of Hong Kong to China 20 years ago this weekend. The handover ceremony at the hastily completed Convention Centre was a perfect tableau of the dignified end of empire; under giant Chinese and British flags, President Jiang Zemin and Prince Charles shook hands watched by Tony Blair, senior Chinese officials and, to the left of the stage, the last governor, Chris Patten. With Chief Secretary Anson Chan perched like a monarch above the proceedings, the final act of a sequence agreed between London and Beijing more than a dozen years earlier passed off like clockwork.

As it pursued its opening-up to the world and prepared for entry into the World Trade Organisation, China was anxious not to disturb the golden goose it had acquired. Deng Xiaoping had died four months earlier and it fell to Jiang to undo the first of the “unequal treaties” that had accompanied China’s decline in the previous century. Proud of its record in presiding over Hong Kong’s evolution from a barren rock to a major global metropolis, Britain was keen to make the best it could of handing over to the last major Leninist state on earth a relatively free territory of 7m people where crowds turned out each June 4 for a candlelit vigil to remember the victims of the 1989 massacre in Beijing.

Earlier in the day, photographers had shown Patten at an open-air ceremony with rain running down his cheeks — or was it tears? It was a bittersweet question over which we pondered briefly in the newsroom of the South China Morning Post — “Tears of Empire” would have been a good headline — where we were busy putting out what must have been the biggest edition of a newspaper ever, 248 advertising-stuffed broadsheet pages.