Historic Hong Kong
History & Heritage
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Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been a place of ever-changing contours and skylines as well as home to a great variety of people. Here we present columns, photo galleries and stories about people who've lived in and helped shape Hong Kong, buildings preserved and long vanished, historical events, the city's changing culture and how the past shapes the present.
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Amateur dramatics helped alleviate the boredom of prisoners of war during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and creating the costumes involved every inch of innovation the inmates could muster.
Pearl of the Orient, a city of myriad lights – Hong Kong was promoted to 1930s visitors by China’s Nationalist government much as it would be for decades afterwards. No sedan chair rides these days, though.
Tourists to Hong Kong have long been fed rote-learned clichés about its history by uninspiring and uninspired guides. In today’s new normal, who would dare risk offering them anything different?
Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue: names given to the tunnels of Hong Kong’s Shing Mun Redoubt. Yet their occupants in 1941 were Scots for whom London was in a foreign land.
Chiang Mai’s foreign cemetery not only contains Hong Kong-made tombstones, but also bear testament to the educational ties that once bound northern Thailand to Hong Kong.
After World War II, Henri Vetch built a publishing career in China before being jailed for plotting to assassinate Mao Zedong and later taking the helm of the freshly minted Hong Kong University press.
Gimmicks like fireworks and drone shows that all but the most backward Chinese cities look down upon are not the answer to Hong Kong tourism’s problems. Tourists want authentic experiences.
For many Hong Kong POWs, the abundance of time the Japanese occupation afforded allowed latent artistic talents to blossom.
Hong Kong residents have been chuckling away at amusing T-shirt slogans since the 1980s, but only the foolish or careless are laughing now.
Humble roadside food stalls introduced hungry Hongkongers to spicy but affordable South Asian delicacies that originated in the British Army garrisons stationed across the New Territories.
An eccentric Hong Kong University English teacher in the late 1930s, Adrian Paterson absorbed Chinese culture with an enthusiasm that left its mark on his students long after his earthly tenure ended.
The 1.5 million refugees from China’s civil war who flooded post-war Hong Kong were practical folks. The fruit trees and bushes they planted are a legacy of the squatter settlements they once inhabited.
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