A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong

A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong PDF Author: G. B. Endacott
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9789622097421
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The biographical essays in this book - first published in 1962 - give a sharp and fascinating picture of some of the Europeans who helped establish the colony of Hong Kong and lived through its early years. These men (and one woman) worked and lived in times when Hong Kong was plagued by economic depression, piracy, crime and disease. Not surprisingly, in these frontier-like conditions, all kinds and manner of people came to Hong Kong and made their mark. George Endacott, one of colonial Hong Kong's foremost historians, introduces the whole gamut - from respectable diligent civil servants to drunkards, suspected pirates, the corrupt and the honest. Amongst the subjects are not only Charles Elliott and Henry Pottinger, first administrator and first Governor respectively, but also Charles Gutzlaff, missionary and interpreter for opium traders, William Caine, the first magistrate, known for his ruthless application of flogging to deal with lawlessness, John Davis, a governor apparently universally disliked, and Daniel Caldwell, official interpreter when few Europeans knew any Chinese, who was suspected of conniving with pirates. But there are also several men who became important scholars of Chinese, Thomas Wade of the Wade-Giles Romanisation system, and especially the great sinologist, James Legge. Hong Kong has always attracted its share of larger-than-life characters, but in this collection of biographies, we have vignettes of an especially varied cast of the worthy and the wicked.

A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong

A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong PDF Author: G. B. Endacott
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9789622097421
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
The biographical essays in this book - first published in 1962 - give a sharp and fascinating picture of some of the Europeans who helped establish the colony of Hong Kong and lived through its early years. These men (and one woman) worked and lived in times when Hong Kong was plagued by economic depression, piracy, crime and disease. Not surprisingly, in these frontier-like conditions, all kinds and manner of people came to Hong Kong and made their mark. George Endacott, one of colonial Hong Kong's foremost historians, introduces the whole gamut - from respectable diligent civil servants to drunkards, suspected pirates, the corrupt and the honest. Amongst the subjects are not only Charles Elliott and Henry Pottinger, first administrator and first Governor respectively, but also Charles Gutzlaff, missionary and interpreter for opium traders, William Caine, the first magistrate, known for his ruthless application of flogging to deal with lawlessness, John Davis, a governor apparently universally disliked, and Daniel Caldwell, official interpreter when few Europeans knew any Chinese, who was suspected of conniving with pirates. But there are also several men who became important scholars of Chinese, Thomas Wade of the Wade-Giles Romanisation system, and especially the great sinologist, James Legge. Hong Kong has always attracted its share of larger-than-life characters, but in this collection of biographies, we have vignettes of an especially varied cast of the worthy and the wicked.

A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong

A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong PDF Author: G. B. Endacott
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9622097421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The biographical essays in this book - first published in 1962 -- give a sharp and fascinating picture of some of the Europeans who helped establish the colony of Hong Kong and lived through its early years.

The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911

The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911 PDF Author: James Hayes
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

Policing in Hong Kong

Policing in Hong Kong PDF Author: Kam C. Wong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317079035
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This book is one of the first to document the challenges and opportunities facing the Hong Kong police force following the reversion of political authority from the UK to China in 1997. Thematically organized and oriented towards those issues of greatest concern to the public, such as police accountability, assaults on police, police deployment, surveillance powers, and policing across borders, it provides a detailed discussion of these and other contemporary issues. The opening chapter sets the work within historical context while the final chapter provides a comparison of policing in Hong Kong with public security in the PRC. The book will be of value to students and researchers working in the area of comparative policing, and comparative criminal justice, as well as police professionals, and policy-makers.

A Modern History of Hong Kong

A Modern History of Hong Kong PDF Author: Steve Tsang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857730835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
This major history of Hong Kong tells the remarkable story of how a cluster of remote fishing villages grew into an icon of capitalism. The story began in 1842 with the founding of the Crown Colony after the First Anglo-Chinese war - the original 'Opium War'. As premier power in Europe and an expansionist empire, Britain first created in Hong Kong a major naval station and the principal base to open the Celestial Chinese Empire to trade. Working in parallel with the locals, the British built it up to become a focus for investment in the region and an international centre with global shipping, banking and financial interests. Yet by far the most momentous change in the history of this prosperous, capitalist colony was its return in 1997 to 'Mother China', the most powerful Communist state in the world.

City Between Worlds

City Between Worlds PDF Author: Leo Ou-fan Lee
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674046897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Leo Ou-fan Lee offers an insiderÕs view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors. The search for an indigenous Hong Kong takes Lee to the wet markets and corner bookshops of congested Mong Kok, remote fishing villages and mountainside temples, teahouses and noodle stalls, Cantonese opera and Cantopop. But he also finds the ÒrealÓ Hong Kong in a maze of interconnected shopping malls, a jungle of high-rise residential towers, and the neon glow of Chinese-owned skyscrapers in the Central Business District, where land development, global trade, capital accumulation, consumerism, and free-market competition trump every valueÑexcept family. Lee illuminates the relationship between Hong KongÕs geography and its colonial experience, revisiting colonial life on the secluded Peak, in the opium-filled godowns along the harborfront, and in crowded, plague-infested tenements. He examines, with a criticÕs eye, the ÒHong Kong storyÓ in film and fiction: romance in the bars and brothels of Wan Chai, crime in the walled city of Kowloon, ennui on the eve of the 1997 handover. Whether viewed from Tsing Yi Bridge or the deck of the Star Ferry, from Victoria Peak or Lion Rock, Hong Kong sparkles here in all its multifaceted complexity, a city forever between worlds.

Lam Woo

Lam Woo PDF Author: Moira M W Chan-Yeung
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9629967847
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book focuses on Lam Woo, a wellknown, highly successful Chinese building contractor whose company was based in Hong Kong at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also about the marginal group of people he exemplifies, those who joined the Chinese diaspora because of poverty and political turmoil and were later driven back home because of discrimination and other difficulties. An important contribution to Hong Kong Studies, this book provides a window onto the sociopolitical conditions in Hong Kong leading up to and following the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China and the following two decades. In studying Lam Woo's life and family, we catch a glimpse of the lives of a unique segment of the Hong Kong Chinese community—namely, the educated, westernized Chinese, mainly Christians, some of whom supported the revolution to overthrow the Qing dynasty and helped to establish Hong Kong's influential YMCA. Professor Chan, who has written several books on Hong Kong History, draws on rich archival sources, and historical photographs to illustrate the life of a man who was a pioneer builder of majestic heritage buildings throughout Hong Kong such as St. Paul's Church, St. Paul's Coeducational College, the Diocesan Boys' School, and St. Stephen's College, all of which remain in use today. This book is a significant historical study that rediscovers an important but less studied part of Hong Kong's development during the early twentieth century. For instance, the book details Lam Woo's efforts in rebuilding the port facilities and docks that helped the colony's transformation into a glamorous, international port. The author also discusses how Lam Woo's contributions to the building of the roads encircling the New Territories and the bridges linked different parts of the territory with mainland China, where water and food supplies would later come from. In the later part of the book, the author highlights how Lam Woo, a devout Anglican, contributed to the expansion of the Chinese Anglican Church community. As one of the founders of St. Paul's Church, he promoted the establishment of the Hong Kong YMCA, with its emphasis on character training in "the development of body, mind, and spirit" for young people. The book emphasizes that his most lasting legacy for Hong Kong and his native Guangzhou was through his philanthropist activities in education. Lam Woo supported education for girls and founded St. Paul's Girls' School, the forerunner of the notable St. Paul's Coeducational College, founded a primary and a secondary school in his native village, and donated extensively to Lingnan University.

Form Follows Fever

Form Follows Fever PDF Author: Christopher Cowell
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9882372902
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. Caught in a frenzy to rebuild the city in the devastating aftermath, this book charts the complex interplay between a cast of figures, from military surveyors, naval doctors, Indian sepoys, and corrupt and paranoid officials to opium traders, arsonists, Chinese contractors, and sojourner architects and artists. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. Architecture, cartography, epidemiology, and urban infrastructure offer a critical forensic lens through which to examine the shifting ideologies of public health and space, race and place-making, and commerce and politics, all set against the radical alteration of the settlement—from shore-hugging to climbing city—in response to miasma theory, a pre-bacteriological belief in gaseous emanations from a sickly environment. This kaleidoscopic study draws upon many unpublished textual sources, including medical reports, personal diaries and letters, government records, journal accounts, newspaper articles, and advertisements. As this history is set a decade before the introduction of photography to the colony, the book relies upon a variety of alternate visual evidence—from previously lost watercolour illustrations of the city to maps, plans, and drawings— that individually and in combination provide trace material enabling the reconstruction of this strange and rapidly evolving society. Form Follows Fever sheds new light on a period often considered the colonial Dark Ages in the territory’s history. ------------------------------------------------------------- Christopher Cowell’s account of British Hong Kong offers the most detailed account yet of the crucial first decade of the colony’s existence. His engagement with the medley of actors, from across the globe, that contributed to the colony’s ultimate success is both intriguing and revealing. It is a brilliant miniature of colonial urban development in action. —Alex Bremner, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh This is a beautifully written book. Cowell offers fresh perspectives on how malaria played a decisive role in shaping the forms of the colonial built environment and the future course of the city. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Hong Kong history and urbanism. —Cecilia L. Chu, School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong A wonderfully rich and detailed architectural history of Hong Kong’s first decade as a British colony that sheds new light on the consequential effects of disease and climate on what was built, by whom, and why. —Cole Roskam, Department of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong Form Follows Fever shows how Hong Kong’s path from a so-called ‘barren island’ to a thriving port city was often a perilous one. It is a wonderfully original and insightful study that weaves together an unlikely melange of urban history, military engineering, and medical history. —John M. Carroll, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong

Pacific Crossing

Pacific Crossing PDF Author: Elizabeth Sinn
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century tens of thousands of Chinese men and women crossed the Pacific to work, trade, and settle in California. Drawn initially by the gold rush, they took with them skills and goods and a view of the world which, though still Chinese, was transformed by their long journeys back and forth. They in turn transformed Hong Kong, their main point of embarkation, from a struggling infant colony into a prosperous international port and the cultural center of a far-ranging Chinese diaspora. Making use of extensive research in archives around the world, Pacific Crossing charts the rise of Chinese Gold Mountain firms engaged in all kinds of transpacific trade, especially the lucrative export of prepared opium and other luxury goods. Challenging the traditional view that the migration was primarily a "coolie trade," Elizabeth Sinn uncovers leadership and agency among the many Chinese who made the crossing. In presenting Hong Kong as an "in-between place" of repeated journeys and continuous movement, Sinn also offers a fresh view of the British colony and a new paradigm for migration studies.

A Medical History of Hong Kong

A Medical History of Hong Kong PDF Author: Moira M W Chan-Yeung
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 9882370780
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This book tells the fascinating story of the development of medical and sanitation services in Hong Kong during the first century of British rule and how changing political values and directions of the colonial administration and the socio-economic status of the Hong Kong affected the policies of development in these areas. It also recounts how the bubonic plague of 1894 changed the government's laissez-faire attitude towards sanitation and public health and began sanitary reforms and developed public health infrastructure.