Noël Coward would be amused to know that they still fire off a noonday gun on the harbour front near the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. With precision timing, a stiffly uniformed man from Jardine’s, the most famous of the territory’s old hongs, or trading houses, proudly drops the shot into the barrel at the appointed time each day and, as the tourists muffle their ears, the harbour rings for an instant to a solitary echo of Britain’s imperial past.

Most of the other vestiges of Hong Kong’s colonial heritage have been removed. The last time I was here was a few months before the sun set on Britannia’s last Chinese outpost. In those recessional days of empire the letter boxes were still bright red, you paid for your tea with bank notes that carried pictures of the Queen, and a small detachment of Royal Marines ran the Union Flag up and down the flagpole each day in front of the Prince of Wales Building.

A decade on, the letter boxes have been painted green and purple; the bank notes feature the geometric shapes of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, and the Prince of Wales Building announces itself, behind the fluttering five-starred flag of Red China, as the Hong Kong Building of the Forces of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

In three months the former colony will mark the tenth anniversary of its happy reversion to the motherland, as it calls it, with a big Chinese birthday party. For many British, the date will be an opportunity for different emotions — for regret, perhaps, or even shame. It was the only time Britain had handed a colony over not to its people but to a totalitarian power. Most scoffed at the idea that Beijing would make good on its treaty promise of 1984 that Hong Kong’s vibrant capitalist way of life and cherished political freedoms would be protected by Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” formula for 50 years.

As we know, thanks to the unplanned publication of his diaries a couple of years ago, the Prince of Wales himself had little faith in the “appalling old waxworks” into whose hands the future of six million hapless souls was being entrusted. But here’s a strange thing. Ten years on, Hong Kong has not only survived but is thriving again as a defiant outpost of freedom inside a communist state. And it is not just its expanding GDP that measures its success. The values and principles that were the foundation of its prosperity — freedom and tolerance and the rule of law — reign on here.

This weekend the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic, as it is now called, will hold its first contested election for its head of government. It’s easy to laugh at this little spectacle of Potemkin democracy. Its centrepiece is a carefully rigged poll, in which just 800 of the territory’s now nearly seven million citizens will vote, that will dutifully rubber-stamp Beijing’s selection a couple of years ago of Sir Donald Tsang as chief executive.

But the unpredictable process has turned out to be more important than the orchestrated outcome. Alan Leong, a Cambridge-educated barrister, has fought a spirited campaign that will not unseat Sir Donald but has surely done something much bigger. Two live televised debates this month produced a remarkable political spectacle: a dedicated functionary, handpicked by Beijing to run an important part of China, being publicly flayed by a clever lawyer for failing to bring democracy to his people. Almost half the Hong Kong population watched the events, as did uncounted numbers across the border in Guangzhou province.

Hong Kong had a disastrous few years straight after 1997: financial crisis; a property crash; severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and political crises. It seemed to superstitious locals as though some evil feng shui had unleashed a dragon to devour the place.

But it is back now, perhaps stronger than ever. You can be cynical about this success. China has wisely decided it doesn’t want to kill the goose that lays its golden eggs of international finance. Journalists rightly worry about self-censorship by media owners eager to mollify Beijing. But China is changing too, not just in its economic character. It is quite feasible now that at the end of the 50-year period China will have moved much closer to Hong Kong’s system than Hong Kong will have shifted to China’s.

There’s an important lesson here. It is still, essentially, British values that make the little miracle of Hong Kong what it is. Its survival these past ten years owes principally to the energy and courage of its citizens, who have forced Beijing to accept their rights grudgingly. But it is another powerful example of the civilising heritage of Britain. Improbable as it may seem, I would bet that, long after the symbols of British civilisation are mere museum pieces, it will be the values bequeathed to Hong Kong’s few million people that will outlast the rusting ideology that rules the one quarter of the world’s population next door.

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