Kwong Chi Man is an assistant professor in the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University.
Tsoi Yiu Lun teaches history and liberal studies at Mu Kuang English School, Hong Kong.
“Armed with a range of declassified archives—many of them unpublished—Kwong and Tsoi expertly weave together military, political, social, and economic history to show how Hong Kong played a strategic role in East Asia and the British Empire from the early 1840s to the 1970s. Eastern Fortress is a must-read for anyone interested in Hong Kong and its history.”
—John Carroll, author of A Concise History of Hong Kong and Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong
“This careful and well-written study does a difficult balancing act very well indeed. It connects the military history of Hong Kong to both the general Hong Kong experience and the wider military history of the region and beyond. Weaving its way with confidence from archive to library, from grand strategy to battlefield, this volume provides what we have long needed. Hong Kong’s experience was unique, but at the same time it was integrally connected to the wider circles of empire, region, and Asia. Nothing brings that trajectory out more strongly than the military dimension, and by ranging from the Opium War to the Cold War, with a critical eye, this volume does that story justice. It is the capstone that brings together a generation of good scholarship on the military history of Hong Kong.”
—Brian Farrell, author of The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940–1943: Was There a Plan? and co-author of Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal
Kwong Chi Man is an assistant professor in the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University.
Tsoi Yiu Lun teaches history and liberal studies at Mu Kuang English School, Hong Kong.