The “barren rock” in question is Hong Kong and the tales aspire to give a portrait of the territory through the eyes of some long-term residents. When visiting abroad, people from Hong Kong are often asked, “How have things changed since the Chinese took over?” These tales don’t address that question directly, but they span the period of the Chinese takeover in 1997 and very successfully evoke the life of one section of the population before and after. For anyone who has lived there and left they will appeal as evocative reminiscences.

Harry Franck died in 1962. This latest edition of his work consists of a few excerpts from his original Roving Through Southern China published in 1925. The original much larger book described two years of roving that took Franck as far as Yunnan, but these excerpts focus on the few months he and his family spent living in Canton in the winter of 1924. The excerpts are supplemented with some very useful footnotes from Paul French explaining some of the things Franck mentions that are no longer familiar to the modern reader.

What does Mongolia bring to mind? Maybe Genghis Khan. It’s in central Asia somewhere, isn’t it? Unless you’re a fan of sumo wrestling, that’s likely to be about the extent of your associations. Johan Nylander sets out to correct that, at least with respect to Mongolia’s economy, with his The Wolf Economy Awakens. It’s a cruise through Mongolia’s economic situation, and especially its economic future.

At last someone has found a practical application for virtual reality. Brian Kwok teaches design at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and he has been studying Hong Kong’s neon signs and the culture that surrounds them. It has convinced him that they should be preserved. But how? Kwok has a really difficult row to hoe, and he knows it full well.

Here is the most comprehensive account you are ever likely to find of the building of the western section of America’s transcontinental railway. Gordon Chang has certainly set himself a difficult task, as he seeks to document the daily life of the roughly 20,000 Chinese who contributed to building the Central Pacific section of American’s first transcontinental line in the late 1860s.

A tiger hunt! In No Beast so Fierce, Dane Huckelbridge tells the exciting true story of the extirpation of a man-eating tiger in colonial India in 1907. This was no safari with a fleet of elephants and an army of bearers. It was one Irishman with a rifle and three cartridges on foot against a tiger that had killed and eaten about 440 persons over a span of about a decade. The numbers are inexact because deaths of rural women collecting firewood weren’t carefully recorded in those years.

Academic integrity sometimes requires revising theoretical perspectives as a situation changes and new evidence comes to light. Mobo Gao, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide, finds himself in that position. In 1998 he wrote Gao Village, an anthropological study of life in a very poor Chinese village during the latter half of the 20th century. He was thoroughly qualified to do so, because he was born and raised there in abject poverty. He frankly recounts how qualifying for a university education from such a background, in addition to intellectual gifts, required a combination of luck, guanxi and a bit of cheating.