China Revisited Book #4 – Harry Franck’s Roving Through Southern China – A Little Taste – Out December 2023

A little taste of our next China Revisited book (#4) from Blacksmith Books- Harry A Franck’s (billed by US newspapers at the time as “The Prince of Vagabonds” – Roving Through Southern China (1925)…(preorder here)

“Hong Kong loomed up through the mists of a late December morning during my second year in China; I was due to pass through it half a dozen times before I left the Orient. Like Shanghai, it had changed much since I first saw it, almost twenty years before. The same funicular cable-cars, however, still carry one to the Peak – so do automobiles also now – to look down upon a scene in a milder way almost as striking as Rio. From the compact narrow city below like the embroidery on the bottom of a skirt the eyes wander away across the deep-blue harbor scattered with scores of ships riding at anchor because the wharves on both sides of the bay are already crowded from end to end with others, merging into islands in the offing that seem likewise anchored in the blue sea, a harbor streaked by constantly arriving and departing steamers from everywhere and by the ferries to the various parts of the mainland suburb of Kowloon, beyond which one may even see hills that are still Chinese.

Two-storied street-cars, like those of Chile – though here classes are reversed and the haughty white man deigns to ride aloft – move from end to end of the narrow island town, through Happy Valley, promoted now from cemetery to race-track, Kennedy Town, and other sections of British nomenclature; and farther still motor-cars will carry those who can afford them up and over or clear around the steep little island. Motoring is cheaper across the bay, where motor-buses race in constant streams from the ferry-landing to every suburb, and there rickshaws have unlimited scope compared with the little level space in down-town Victoria, behind which the “Do Be Chairful Company” – English wit sieved through Chinese brains comes out in strange forms of facetiousness – provide many clean and comfortable conveyances that are not exactly chairs, though you may sit in them and be carried.”