On the morning of Friday, Jan. 8, 1982, Herbert W. Armstrong was in the showroom of the Steuben crystal factory eagerly seeking the same Pillar of Griffin piece he had previously presented government officials and heads of state. To his disappointment, the piece had been discontinued and he was forced to make alternate selections. However, he was able to reference the factory list of items given to heads of state by other dignitaries. This enabled him to individually select unique pieces for officials he planned to meet in Japan, Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong during his next Southeast Asian trip.

After visits to surrounding countries, he wrote for the Feb. 1, 1982, Pastor General’s Report, “Sunday, the 24th, we flew on to Hong Kong, crossing the international dateline. Suddenly it was Monday. It was Chinese New Year in Hong Kong. All businesses and shops were closed. Wednesday evening I spoke about an hour and 20 minutes to about 200 readers of the Plain Truth.”

This message was videotaped by the television crew for The World Tomorrow. As he spoke to the audience about the gospel message which Christ Himself declared would be delivered in the end time, he referenced the Savior’s words from Matthew 24:14: “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”

“And God has sent me to preach this gospel,” he told the Hong Kong assembly. “The other ministers, the other churches are not preaching that gospel of Jesus Christ! They preach about Christ, but they don’t preach His message. They preach about the messenger, but they don’t preach the messenger’s message” (Behind the Work, 1985).

He referenced Matthew 24:3, which reads, “And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and the end of the world?”

“They asked Christ what would be the end of the world. The end of the world is when this gospel of the Kingdom is preached, and you are seeing it. You’re seeing me here. I’m preaching it,” he concluded.

Mr. Armstrong directed his media-purchasing staff to seek out air time on radio and television in an effort to not only preach the gospel message through those mediums, but also to grow the fledgling Church membership.

An option swiftly opened up in the form of a 10,000-watt independent broadcasting station for him to consider. By the end of that same year, The World Tomorrow broadcast over radio twice a week at 6:30 a.m. and 12 p.m.

In February 1983, Mr. Armstrong returned for another Plain Truth lecture for Hong Kong’s 850 subscribers. Television prospects opened up midway through 1983. “We are currently holding offers from Hong Kong television,” recorded the June 10 edition of the Pastor General’s Report, for “a 30-minute slot following the news on Sunday evening.”

He then approved an advertising campaign in Reader’s Digest, which by the middle of 1984 had brought in 1,707 responses. China had long desired to see Hong Kong return to the dragon’s fold, and Mr. Armstrong’s trips to the region had not gone unnoticed.

In China’s Great Hall at 10 a.m., Nov. 7, 1984, the world’s most populous nation’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, greeted the unofficial ambassador for world peace. After group photographs, the two sat together at the rear of the room and, as was Mr. Armstrong’s custom, Mr. Deng was presented with a piece of handcrafted crystal titled Winter Trees by the famed American artisans at Steuben.

By early 1985 results of the continued media campaign had returned staggering increase in Asian readership of the Plain Truth. “Throughout the year, 30,356 new subscribers were added to the file, bringing our Asian subscription list to 55,651—a 59.9 percent increase over the previous year,” recorded the February 1 Pastor General’s Report. “New subscribers came onto the Asian Plain Truth mailing list mainly from advertisements in Reader’s Digest in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka. In addition, about one fifth of the new subscribers were added as a result of ‘word of mouth.’”

A decade after the death of Mr. Armstrong, the geopolitical landscape had dramatically changed in the region, with the acquiescing of arguably one of the most notable sea gates on Earth.

“Without a struggle, the British gifted this South China Sea prize to Communist rule in 1997,” the Trumpet reported in our special publication He Was Right. “In Hong Kong, China not only inherited one of the world’s richest trade centers, it also took over the $380 million naval base built by the British. ‘Never before has so much, used by so many, gone for so little,’ declared a member of Britain’s Ministry of Defense. ‘With the end of British rule in Hong Kong,’ the Trumpet wrote, ‘we see the final act performed in the closure of an empire—a God-given empire—and the hastening of the fulfillment of the prophesied curses upon a spoiled and ungrateful nation, the British people’ (June 1997).”

The World Port Source reported that in 2010 alone, more than 211,800 vessels arrived at the port, including 30,300 cargo and 2,300 passenger crafts, and 91,000 river cargo and 88,100 passenger ships. The handover of Hong Kong as a sea gate and strategic military location firmly placed China as the dominant power of Southeast Asia and sank Britain into the deep waters of a geopolitical abyss.

Trumpet founder Gerald Flurry has followed Mr. Armstrong’s legacy of humanitarianism and the pursuit of peace according to God’s Word and prophecy. Realizing that God has a plan for the peoples of the Far East that will play out in high profile in the very near future, he has directed the publishing and distribution of the booklet holding the prophetic keys to the future of these divided peoples, along with similar media initiatives throughout the region prophesying again the good news of the coming Kingdom of God (Revelation 10:11; Matthew 24:14).

Request your free copies of Russia and China in Prophecy and The United States and Britain in Prophecy to understand what lies ahead for Hong Kong and the greater Asia region.