Our poor, long-suffering government is now being slapped about the face for not having organised anything to usher in the new millennium. Yes, there will be celebrations all over the world on the last day of next year. But what event will we really be marking? Actually, nothing at all, from a historian's point of view.
The year 2000 is identified as such by a calendar fixed by the researchers of Pope Gregory. This was a week and a half ahead of the previous calendar in use in Europe. When the system was adopted in Britain in 1752, there was rioting by peasants who thought their lives had been shortened by 11 days.
It was introduced as a revision of a system which counted time from the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, they got the wrong starting date.
Scholars now list the date of Christ's birth as '5 BC', which is ludicrous, since BC stands for Before Christ. It was also wrong spiritually, since the Christian era is theologically measured from his death, not his birth.
Still, Pope Gregory's calendar precisely fitted the movement of the sun and stars, so most of the world now uses it.
In this part of the world, Hong Kong adopted the system when the British arrived in 1841, and China adopted it in 1912.