City of Lights – Hong Kong’s neon heritage with images from the 1990s and 2000s.

Keith Macgregor’s City of Lights, published by Blue Lotus Editions, will showcase Hong Kong’s neon heritage with images from the 1990s and 2000s.

The blurb from Blue Lotus:

Blue Lotus Gallery presents City of Lights, an extensive archive by photographer Keith Macgregor documenting Hong Kong’s neon-drenched skyline of the 1990s and 2000s. The book, featuring hundreds of previously unseen images, and accompanying exhibition serve as both a record of the city’s iconic neon signage and a tribute to a bygone era: a time when these signs shaped the city’s visual identity.

“Like so many others, I took neon for granted when I was younger, viewing it as urban wallpaper rather than investigating the creativity, skill, engineering, and imagination needed to create these dynamic, superb works of art,” said Macgregor. Through hundreds of vivid, previously unseen images, he captures the restless energy of a city defined by its illuminated streets.

At its height in the 1980s, Hong Kong’s skyline shimmered with more than 100,000 neon signs. Today, fewer than 400 remain. City of Lights arrives at a pivotal moment, when the urgency to document and preserve this vanishing heritage has never been greater. A renewed fascination among Hong-Kongers is evident in the success of recent exhibitions at the Hong Kong Design Institute and Tai Kwun, presented in partnership with Tetra Neon Exchange (TNX), reflecting a collective desire to reconnect with and safeguard this defining chapter of the city’s visual history.

Beyond the photographs, the book draws on the human stories behind the glow. It features conversations with those fighting to keep the craft alive: the master benders who hand-bent the glass, the installers who braved the heights, and the conservationists and creators ensuring neon has a future in the city.

“Keith’s body of work constitutes one of the largest photographic archives of Hong Kong’s streets and neon signage,” said co-author Cardin Chan, former general manager of TNX and founder of the cultural heritage company, The Indispensible Hong Kong. “For those of us committed to preservation, it is an invaluable visual record.”

Yet the project’s significance extends beyond the signs themselves. As businesses close—such as the iconic Sammy’s Kitchen earlier this year—it becomes clear that even when a sign is saved, the city around it inevitably moves on. Families grow and storefronts evolve, making this archive all the more essential; it captures the fleeting moments and memories of a Hong Kong in constant flux.

Crucially, the narrative is one of evolution rather than just loss. While the era of massive commercial signage may be fading, neon is finding a new life. City of Lights highlights this transition, showcasing how a new generation of creators—such as the artist Jive Lau—is reimagining the medium for the modern age, ensuring the city’s neon spirit continues to shine in new, innovative forms.

About Keith Macgregor:

British photographer Keith Macgregor has spent decades documenting Hong Kong during a period of extraordinary transformation. Born in 1946 and raised between England and Asia, he settled in Hong Kong, where he ran a successful business specialising in Asian furniture until the late 1990s.

Alongside his business, photography became a serious and sustained pursuit. Macgregor began capturing the city’s streets, harbour, skyline and, above all, its neon-lit nights. His images resonated widely; postcards produced from his photographs sold in the millions during the 1980s, circulating his vision of Hong Kong across the world and helping to define how the city was perceived both locally and internationally.

In 1998, recognising that Hong Kong’s iconic neon signage was rapidly disappearing, he embarked on an ambitious effort to document as many signs as possible. Spending weeks photographing across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, he created an extensive archive of this vanishing streetscape. The project culminated in his seminal book Neon City: Hong Kong at Night (2002), now regarded as a vital record of a lost era.

As redevelopment, regulation and LED technology transformed the urban landscape, Macgregor’s photographs gained renewed significance. His work preserves not only the brilliance of the signs themselves, but also the craftsmanship and spirit that once illuminated the city.

Through dedication, timing and an instinct for Hong Kong’s defining visual moments, Keith Macgregor has secured his place as one of the pre-eminent chroniclers of its luminous past.

On the Whistler Retrospective at the Tate for the SCMP

I reviewed the new James McNeill Whistler retrospective at Tate Britain for the SCMP highlighting the influence of Japanese and Chinese art and crafts on his work. Blue-and-white ceramics, uchiwa fans and Lange Leizen all feature, along with a recreation of the stunning Peacock Room (1877). It’s well worth a visit. Click here to read

The Peking Bicycle Company and Humber Bikes of Nottinghamshire

This is an old photo well known to collectors and historians that seems to have suddenly started doing the rounds on social media the way things do these days…  it’s the Daqing bicycle shop in Peking (c.1900-1912).

There’s many reasons this is interesting – a great shot of a full shop frontage, text running in three directions, late Qing modernity etc etc. 

But also in this period we find ourselves in of a sudden gush of dubious China Experts offering their opinions on the complexities of the China Market and its many mysteries only they can solve, I love that Daqing were the China reps for Nottinghamshire’s Humber bikes. All these supposed China experts would charge you a fortune and claim you need specialist skills to establish a relationship like that now, but presumably Humber and Daqing did it all fine 125 years ago with a few letters, some cargo ships and perhaps a travelling salesman passing through Peking.

Macau Closer March-April 2026 – A Many Splendoured Thing (1952)

My latest column on Macao in popular culture for Macau Closer magazine. This issue it’s Han Suyin’s semi-autobiographical novel (with nods to the later movie – of which some stills below with William Holden and Jennifer Jones as Mark and Han) A Many Splendoured Thing from 1952. For Han Macao, an interesting side trip in the developing romance, is a place for transgression, to escape the social, racial and colonial rigidness and prudity of British Hong Kong for a weekend of gambling, eating, flirtation and lovemaking in the more louche and relaxed Portuguese enclave. Click to read here, or (if you’re in Macao) head to Livraria Portuguesa on rua de São Domingos to buy a hard copy of the magazine.

Midnight in Peking on VoiceMap

You don’t have to wait for me to turn up in Beijing to do the Midnight in Peking Walk (though it’s fun to do it that way) – it’s available on VoiceMap too if you just fancy heading out into the hutongs – click here

Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal​, and the Exchange of American & Japanese Civilians by Sea During W​o​rld War II

Evelyn Iritani’s Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal​, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During W​o​rld War II (Farrer, Strauss, Giraux)…..

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup― the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.

In Safe Passage, the award-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and repatriated Japanese citizens of Latin America, sometimes against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The result is a revelatory account of the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime.

August 2026 UK Non-Fiction Picks for The Bookseller magazine…

Caroline Sanderson’s August 2026 UK Non-Fiction Picks for The Bookseller magazine…

Hans Bahlke – “General Merchant” of Peking

Hans Bahlke – “General Merchant” – ran a stationary and general store on Hatamen Street (Chongwenmen) in the early 1900s. As you can see in the photo here there was also a depot attached to the store. He sold postcards (photographed, printed and sold by Bahlke under his own brand), maps and souvenirs of Peking and the surrounding area. He also stocked newspapers, journals and books, novels particularly, in English, French and German advertising “First Class Authors Only” – I wonder who didn’t make the cut!! Bahlke also had a store in Tianjin and both sold German coffee, cigars, liqueurs and clothing items (see the ad below for a full list!)

In 1909 he published “Guide to Peking and Neighbourhood” which was published by the German newspaper in Tianjin Tageblatt für Nord-China. The usual guide to hotels, restaurants and sights with ads for newspapers, shops and hotels.