Echoes: Classics of Hong Kong Culture and History

· · · · · · · · · · ·
Latest release: November 1, 2014
Series
12
Books
Power and Charity: A Chinese Merchant Elite in Colonial Hong Kong (with a new preface)
Book 1·Oct 2003
0.0
·
$20.00
Through the history of a charitable institution, the Tung Wah Hospital, Elizabeth Sinn reshapes and greatly deepens our understanding of the evolving interactions between the Chinese community in Hong Kong and the colonial rulers. She traces the rise to power of the Chinese merchants who organized and operated the Hospital and the complex relationships that the Hospital developed with the colonial regime, Mainland Chinese officials and the Chinese people of Hong Kong.


As the first organized merchant elite recognized by the colonial government, the Tung Wah Hospital Committee played a crucial political role in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, mediating between ordinary Chinese and the colonial administration. Elizabeth Sinn’s classic and pioneering study shows the great extent to which the Hospital’s history is the history of Hong Kong itself.


The author highlights the problems encountered by the Hong Kong government in managing a foreign population and the role of the Chinese local elite in a colonial situation, while also exploring the complex but fascinating relations between the Chinese residents in Hong Kong and Chinese officials on the Mainland, and between Hong Kong and other Chinese communities.


Based on primary source materials, this is an original and refreshing contribution to the study of Hong Kong and modern Chinese history which reveals and discusses many fundamental issues that are entirely relevant today.


In a new preface to this paperback edition, Dr. Sinn reconsiders her work in the light of subsequent research on Hong Kong’s history and connects it to recent developments in international scholarly work especially with respect to the study of philanthropy and to ideas of world history.


“An excellent blend of history and ethnography. Power and Charity is one of the best books available on the everyday practice of colonialism in British Hong Kong. Sinn provides unique insights into a system that is fast becoming a distant memory. This book is required reading for anyone interested in colonialism, medical history, or urban anthropology.” —James L. Watson, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University


“Dr. Sinn’s book . . . is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Hong Kong society and politics in the nineteenth century.” —Ian Scott, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society


“(Dr. Sinn’s) book is a fascinating and awesomely researched account of the (Chinese) community’s efforts to hold its own in a foreign-dominated enclave.” —Philip Snow, Far Eastern Economic Review

Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong
Book 3·May 2005
0.0
·
$15.37
Every so often a work of history appears that radically changes our understanding of people, place and period. Chinese Christian is such a work. This book asks questions about Hong Kong that have never been asked before. It shows that the leaders of Chinese society had a far greater role in shaping early Hong Kong history than earlier historians had believed. It also demonstrates, for the first time, that Chinese society in early Hong Kong had coherence and continuity.


This book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Hong Kong’s history. In its focus on ordinary people and their lives, it is equally enjoyable and interesting for the lay reader, and its original approach of building from raw data on individuals provides a model of broader relevance for historians.


Chinese Christians explores the lives of some 200 men and women who came into contact with Christian missionaries and who used their connections to achieve wealth and status. By bringing them together in this book, Carl Smith has made a singular contribution to Hong Kong history. He has, perhaps more than anyone else, turned the field of Hong Kong history on its head.


“This classic work in Hong Kong historiography is still indispensable to for scholars. It is fascinating reading for the general public also.” —Jung-fang Tsai, University of Charleston


“‘Where are the Chinese?’ was a common reaction to earlier works on Hong Kong history that tended to focus on governors and the colonial administration. Carl Smith, by putting the Chinese of all classes, women and men, ordinary and extraordinary, back into the picture, transcends old boundaries to construct a more complex, finely-textured and exceptionally insightful historical narrative. The essays in Chinese Christians, based on years of vigorous research into a wide range of primary sources, many previously untapped by any historian, point to the infinite possibilities of the historiography of Hong Kong. General readers will find the book informative and delightful; for the historian, it will guide, inspire and liberate them in their pursuit of new frontiers.” —Elizabeth Sinn, University of Hong Kong

Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880
Book 5·Dec 2008
0.0
·
$24.00
For its earliest promoters, Hong Kong was an island 'bespread with palaces, a beautifully and well ordered city, a miracle of British enterprise and dormant power' at the edge of a crumbling Chinese Empire. This 'capital of Anglo-China', as some of them called it, was a place where Chinese and Europeans could freely exchange goods and ideas under a benevolent and progressive British rule. Nineteenth-century Hong Kong was all of that. But it was also a struggling frontier settlement, troubled by crime and war, divided by race, and periodically rocked by controversy. Through a succession of experiments in government, early British officials sought ways of managing a politically complex Chinese population, who, though essential to Hong Kong's economic success, seemed intractable to traditional colonial methods. The uneasy solutions that emerged combined heavy policing of the lower classes and shaky collaboration with a burgeoning Chinese merchant elite. Anglo-China traces the development of colonial rule in early British Hong Kong. Drawing on a variety of hitherto neglected sources, the book also explores how the daily practice of government affected the lives of people in the region – and how they in turn sought to shape colonial rule.
Macao and the British, 1637–1842: Prelude to Hong Kong
Book 7·Jul 2009
0.0
·
$21.60
The story of the British acquisition of Hong Kong is intricately related to that of the Portuguese enclave of Macao. The British acquired Hong Kong in 1841, following 200 years of European endeavours to induce China to engage in foreign trade. As a residential base of European trade, Portuguese Macao enabled the West to maintain continuous relations with China from 1557 onwards. 

Opening with a vivid description of the first English voyage to China in 1637. Macao and the Britishtraces the ensuing course of Anglo-Chinese relations, during which time Macao skillfully – and without fortifications – escaped domination by the British and Chinese. The account covers the opening of regular trade by the East India Company in 1770, including the 'country' trade between India and China and Britain's first embassies to Peking, and relates the bedeviling effect of the opium trade. The story culminates in the resulting war from which Britain won, as part of its concessions, the obscure island of Hong Kong. Among those who feature in this lucid and lively account are the merchant princes Jardine and Matheson, the missionary Robert Morrison, the artist George Chinnery, and Captain Charles Elliot, Hong Kong’s maligned founder. 

Austin Coates (1922–97), a former senior British civil servant in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Sarawak, left government service at age forty to pursue a professional writing career. Widely regarded as the most distinguished English-language author in Hong Kong, Coates remained a long-time Hong Kong resident, later dividing his time between Hong Kong and Portugal, where he died. Macao and the British is a companion to his other two books on Macao, A Macao Narrative and the historical novel City of Broken Promises. Both these books and his other novel, The Road, are also available in the Echoes series from Hong Kong University Press. 

"Macao history at its most readable. It … should be immediately snapped up by anyone who has been unlucky enough to have missed it up to now." – South China Morning Post

"This study vividly introduces the general reader to historic Macau, once 'the outpost of all Europe in China' and foothold to East India Company officials and private merchants trading in Canton." – Clive Willis, Emeritus Professor of Portuguese Studies, University of Manchester and author of China and Macau 

"Macao and the British 1637–1842: Prelude to Hong Kong (1988), published originally in 1964 as Prelude to Hong Kong, was the first work on Macau by Austin Coates (1922–1997). It is the first comprehensive survey ever to be written on the English presence, the Anglo-Chinese-Portuguese relations in Macau, and the Portuguese settlement's strategic importance for the British China Trade." – Rogerio Puga, Assistant Professor of History, University of Macau
A Macao Narrative
Book 8·Jul 2009
0.0
·
$17.60
Macao, 40 miles west of Hong Kong, became a place of Portuguese residence between 1555–57. In this short, lively and affectionate book, Austin Coates explains how and why the Portuguese came to the Far East, and how they peacefully settled in Macao with tacit Chinese goodwill. Macao's golden age, from 1557 to the disastrous collapse of 1641, is vividly reconstructed. There follows the cuckoo-in-the-nest situation of the late eighteenth century when the British in Macao were a law unto themselves, until the foundation of Hong Kong and the opening of Shanghai gave wider scope for their energies. Portugal’s subsequent struggle to obtain full sovereignty in Macao, and the extraordinary outcome in 1975, brings this account to a close. Special tribute is paid to the risks Macao gallantly undertook in harbouring Hong Kong's starving and destitute during World War II.
The Road
Book 9·Jul 2009
0.0
·
$25.00
Set in 1950s Hong Kong, The Road paints an evocative picture of comfortable colonial life, while at the same time presenting the local people with the shrewd understanding that the author had acquired as a District Officer in rural Hong Kong. Perhaps the central character is the road itself, now easily recognized as the very real Lantau coast road. But in this novel, the road was an idea tossed off by the Acting Governor between cocktails in the course of a launch picnic. To Richard, the District Officer, the road was a challenge, something of his own to be achieved; an achievement, furthermore, that would spell progress for the Chinese villagers. To Richard's wife Sylvia, an intelligent woman notorious for an ancient affair which she had publicized in a best-selling novel, the road was a new threat to a marriage already riven with complexities. To the island's villagers, who did not want the road or the changes it would bring, it was the end of a way of life and further evidence that the foreign devils were quite mad. And to the villagers' more worldly kin, the road was a god-sent invitation to graft.
The Taking of Hong Kong: Charles and Clara Elliot in China Waters
Book 10·Oct 2009
0.0
·
$22.40
Relations between Britain and China have, for over 150 years, been inextricably bound up with the taking of Hong Kong on 26 January 1841. The man responsible – Britain's Plenipotentiary Captain Charles Elliot – was recalled by his government in disgrace and has also been vilified ever since by China.

This book tells a different story. Describing the taking of Hong Kong from Elliot's point of view – through the personal letters of himself and his wife Clara – it shows a man of intelligence, conscience and humanitarian instincts. On three occasions, for example, Elliot insisted on negotiating with the Chinese as British forces were poised to take the large and prosperous city of Canton. These revelations about Elliot's role, intentions and analysis are significant and could make an important difference to our understanding of the dynamics of Sino-British relations.

On a different level, the book explores how Charles, the private man, with his wife by his side, experienced events, rather than how Elliot the public figure reported them to the British Government.

This book is both for students and scholars of East Asian history and for the general reader. It also has appeal for readers of biography and letters, of naval history, of women’s place in history and Victorian politics and mores.
Thistle and Bamboo: The Life and Times of Sir James Stewart Lockhart
Book 11·Oct 2010
2.0
·
$28.00
Colonial civil servant, Confucian scholar, and collector of Chinese art, Sir James Stewart Lockhart spent more than forty years in Hong Kong and Weihaiwei — the former British leased territory in northern China. His career reflects tension and upheaval in the emerging colony of Hong Kong and in a China rapidly giving way to civil war. In her vivid biography of Stewart Lockhart, Shiona Airlie presents a portrait of an imperial official who fought against racism, strove to preserve the Chinese way of life, and was treated by Chinese mandarins as one of their own. Sir James Stewart Lockhart (1858–1937) was a Scot who served for more than 40 years as a colonial official in Hong Kong and Weihaiwei — Britain’s leased territory in northern China. In Hong Kong (1879– 1902) he rose to the highest levels and brought a refreshingly different approach to colonial rule. He immersed himself in Chinese culture, made friends with local leaders, strengthened Chinese institutions, and fought against racism. When the colony was extended in 1898 he was given the important task of delineating the boundaries of the New Territories and organising its administration. As Britain's first Civil Commissioner (1902–21) in remote Weihaiwei, he brought a unique approach to administration — a combination of Scottish laird and Confucian mandarin — and maintained peace and order during troubled times. A fine Chinese scholar, he amassed a large collection of Chinese coins, art and artefacts. Shiona Airlie's lively account of Stewart Lockhart's life and times makes use of his private papers and extensive archival research. This classic study provides valuable insight into the character, career and friends of an imperial official of rare talent and achievement.
Via Ports: From Hong Kong to Hong Kong
Book 12·Jan 2012
4.0
·
$20.00
Sir Alexander Grantham was Governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, one of the most dramatic decades in the city’s history. This was a time of rapid reconstruction after World War II and growing prosperity. But civil war and revolution in China posed new challenges to the precarious British colony and tested Grantham's skills as a diplomat. In this lively memoir, first published in 1965, Grantham describes his thirty-five years in the British colonial service, which began in Hong Kong with a government cadetship in the 1920s and ended here in 1957. A new introduction by Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, Governor of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992, reflects on Grantham's contributions to Hong Kong. Sir Alexander Grantham became Governor of Hong Kong in 1947 and served until 1957. His term of office saw rapid reconstruction and growing prosperity after World War II. Civil war and revolution in China drove hundreds of thousands of refugees into the British colony, while tense relations between Britain and the new People's Republic gave rise to difficult and potentially explosive incidents in Hong Kong. Plans for democratic reform were quietly dropped as Grantham instead crafted an authoritarian form of government that combined strong leadership with gradual social reform – a system that lasted almost to the end of colonial rule. In this elegant memoir, first published by the Hong Kong University Press in 1965, Grantham describes his thirty-five years in the British colonial service, which began in Hong Kong in 1922 and ended here in 1957; he also held senior positions in Bermuda, Jamaica, Nigeria and the South Pacific. Only a few of Hong Kong's former governors have published anything about their terms of office here, but Grantham's stands out as the most interesting and substantial. Via Ports is an important first-hand account of the workings of Britain's colonial system. It also contains vivid, often amusing anecdotes about life behind the scenes in Government House during the long twilight of the British Empire. Sir Alexander Grantham began his career in the British colonial service as a cadet in Hong Kong in 1922. He served in Bermuda, Jamaica and Nigeria, and as Governor of Fiji before returning to Hong Kong as Governor in 1947 until his retirement in 1957. Lord Wilson of Tillyorn was Governor of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992.
The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911: Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside
Book 13·May 2012
3.0
·
$20.00
First published in 1977, The Hong Kong Region is a historical reconstruction of long-settled vil­lage and township society in Hong Kong's New Territories between 1850 and 1911. The book's central argument is that the gentry and bureau­cracy played almost no role in these commu­nities, which were run by local peasants and shopkeepers who had to deal virtually unaided with routine administration and with every form of disaster, natural or man-made. A sub­stantial new introduction reviews the research and its wider implications for our understand­ing of traditional Chinese society in the light of later scholarly studies.
City at the End of Time 形象香港: Poems by Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞詩選
Book 14·Jun 2012
5.0
·
$24.00
Written by Leung Ping-kwan in the 1980s and 1990s, this volume of poetry evokes the complexity of Hong Kong city life in the critical moments preceding the 1997 handover. The poet muses upon the problems of cultural identity and the passing of time, and explores the relationship between poetry and other genres and media within a cross-cultural and cross-border context. An introduction by Ackbar Abbas in the original edition relates Leung’s writing to the cultural and political space of Hong Kong in the 1990s. This expanded bilingual version adds a new essay by Esther Cheung, and also a recent conversation between Leung and three critics, which provides insights on how Leung’s poetry still resonates powerfully after two decades. The book invites readers to look afresh at Leung’s meditative poetry and probe into the contradictory realities of this changing postcolonial city.
The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844
Book 15·Nov 2014
0.0
·
$40.00
Before the opening of the treaty ports in the 1840s, Canton was the only Chinese port where foreign merchants were allowed to trade. The Golden Ghetto takes us into the world of one of this city’s most important foreign communities—the Americans—during the decades between the American Revolution of 1776 and the signing of the Sino-US Treaty of Wanghia in 1844. American merchants lived in isolation from Chinese society in sybaritic, albeit usually celibate luxury. Making use of exhaustive research, Downs provides an especially clear explanation of the Canton commercial setting generally and of the role of American merchants. Many of these men made fortunes and returned home to become important figures in the rapidly developing United States. The book devotes particular attention to the biographical details of the principal American traders, the leading American firms, and their operations in Canton and the United States. Opium smuggling receives especial emphasis, as does the important topic of early diplomatic relations between the United States and China.

Since its first publication in 1997, The Golden Ghettohas been recognized as the leading work on Americans trading at Canton. Long out of print, this new edition makes this key work again available, both to scholars and a wider readership.

 “The fullest exposition on the subject thus far and as the final word on extant, previously untapped, English-language sources.”
— Eileen Scully, in The China Quarterly