Twenty years ago, just after midnight on July 1, 1997, Chris Patten and his family boarded the Royal Yacht Britannia in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour and sailed off into the night. Not long before, the British flag, which had flown over Hong Kong since 1841, had been lowered and replaced with the red banner of China; Patten had been the last of 28 colonial governors to preside over dynamic territory, and one of the most popular. He left on a tide of uncertainty: a fear that the return of a freewheeling entrepot to Chinese rule would mean a trampling of its democratic freedoms and way of life.