Vaudine England’s Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong (Little, Brown) is an absolutely excellent history of the city and much recommended. Vaudine accentuates the multicultural ascpect of Hong Kong, right from the start – English, Portuguese, Parsi etc etc and, of course, Chinese from all over too – Fortune’s Bazaar returns Hong Kong to us as what it essentially is and always has been – a port city. Urging you to pick this one up if you’re at all interested in Hong Kong.
The Port of Hong Kong, Unknown Artist, 19th Century
Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party who continues to threaten its democracy and put its rich legacy at risk. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong’s complex history and its people-diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan-who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today.
Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, Fortune’s Bazaar is the first thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong. While British traders and Asian merchants had long been busy in the Indian and South East Asian seas, there were many from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who arrived in Hong Kong, met and married-despite all taboos-and created a distinct community. Many of Hong Kong’s most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese-they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian-or simply, Hong Kongers. England describes those overlooked in history including the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches, ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants, property tycoons, and more. Here, too, is the visionary who plumbed Hong Kong’s harbor depths to spur reclamation, the half-Dutch Chinese gentleman with two wives who was knighted by Queen Victoria, and the landscape gardeners who settled Kowloon and became millionaires.
A story of empire, race, and sex, Fortune’s Bazaar combines deep archival research and oral history to present a vivid history of a special place-a unique city made by diverse people of the world, whose part in its creation has never been properly told until now.
A brilliant polymath and part of the ‘first wave’ of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world. While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. Manning’s extraordinary story sheds a new light on English Romanticism.
My Crime and the City column for crimereads.com bounces all over the globe but occasionally to places readers of China Rhyming might find especially interesting – this go round, it’s Kabul…click here
Some time ago I did a story for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on Bertram Sheldrake, a UK Muslim convert offered the job of King of the short-lived Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (known as ETR – & now in what is Xinjiang) in 1933. Nobody in the region was best pleased! You can read that here.
Then rather wonderfully Sharon O’Connor, a local historiain in East Dulwich, looked into Sheldrake’s backgroud in East Dulwich, London SE19 & was a winner in the UK National Archives 20sStreets local history writing competition. So a little more on Khalid Sheldrake and his South East London life here…
I’ve posted about half a dozen other silversmiths in Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before (just put ‘silversmith’ in the search box to see). Here’s a smaller and less well known silversmith that moved from Canton to Shanghai sometime around the late nineteenth century as the trade moved up the coast…Lianchang (or sometimes spelt Lainchang). They were in business roughly c.1890-1925
Book #18 on my Ultimate China Bookshelf for The China Project is Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Posters…click here to read…
“A lavishly illustrated study traces the development of the style and content of the Chinese propaganda poster in the decade of reform, from its traditional origins to its use as a tool for political and economic purposes.” —Routledge
