Hong Kong is a British colony
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtHong Kong is a British territory, and Macau is Portuguese.
NowBritain handed Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997, and Portugal handed over Macau on 20 December 1999. Both are now Special Administrative Regions of China.
What actually happened
Britain acquired Hong Kong island in 1842 and leased the New Territories for 99 years in 1898. That lease expiring in 1997 is what forced the handover: the colony was not viable without the leased portion, so the whole thing went.
Both transfers were governed by "one country, two systems," which promised the territories a high degree of autonomy and their own legal systems for fifty years, until 2047 for Hong Kong and 2049 for Macau. Whether that promise has been kept is a live and contested question, particularly after Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 following the 2019 protests. The map fact is not in dispute: the last significant European colonial possessions in Asia ended within a thirty-month window, and if you graduated before 1997 your atlas showed a British Hong Kong.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 1997, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1999 learned the earlier version.