History buffs, literary fans, nostalgia junkies and hopeless romantics should be grateful to Barbara-Sue White. The writer and musician, who has been partly based in the territory since 1968, has just completed an anthology of writings that is a means to remember Hong Kong by.
Within the 300-odd pages of Hong Kong: Somewhere Between Heaven And Earth, White chronicles the memories, delusions, reports and rantings of people who have been associated with the territory stretching back centuries.
Through a distilled series of the finest, most evocative writings she could find, White portrays the evolution of Hong Kong as seen through the eyes of celebrated writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Anton Chekov as well as ordinary folk - clergymen, doctors, soldiers and sailers.
They all experienced Hong Kong at some point in its extraordinary history, White said, and put their impressions to paper in the form of poems, letters, postcards, journals, reports and biographies.
The material, some of it unpublished, is the fruit of White's rummaging through library shelves and antique shops in Hong Kong, London and Princeton.
In dust-covered books and boxes of old letters, she stumbled across so much material that there could easily be a volume two. For the present anthology, she had to whittle her selections down to 60, each highlighting a different perspective of the territory, at a different time in its history.
