The two leaders sat several feet apart at a long table covered in green silk. Between them, a tiny twin flagpole bore the standards of the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China. The crowd behind applauded as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang signed large red-bound documents with black fountain pens and then shook hands. With that, on December 19, 1984, the end of more than 150 years of British rule over Hong Kong was sealed and a timeline put in place for China to assume sovereignty over the city on July 1, 1997.
