Ruth Mandujano López starts her book Steamships across the Pacific with, as seems almost de rigueur now for almost any book about Latin American-Asian relations, with the history of the Manila Galleon, but for her, this is a point of comparison and departure.
Hong Kong
A letter from a nephew to his uncle who died before he was born. It serves as a window into parts of a Eurasian child’s life which his family can never know, documenting his attempt to navigate racial confusion, religious trauma, the meaning of friendship, and the struggle for self-discovery in a shifting culture on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.
Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager—its fifth in as many years—he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.
Horace Yang, a downtrodden office worker haunted by failure, betrayal, and brutal imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, has finally found a way to settle the score. Obsessed with revenge, he presses on to a confrontation that can only end in death.
Opera Hong Kong’s Turandot, the classic story of a Chinese ice princess melted by implacable love, debuted in a new atmospheric production by well-known Chinese Director Jia Ding at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on 10 October 2024.
On January 16, 1945, dozens of US Navy aircraft took off for China’s southern coast, including the occupied British colony of Hong Kong. It was part of Operation Gratitude, an exercise to target airfields, ports, and convoys throughout the South China Sea. US pilots bombed targets in Hong Kong and, controversially, in neutral Macau as they strove to cut off Japan’s supply chains. They encountered fierce resistance: Japan said it shot down ten planes, four pilots were captured.
Electrification is likely not the first thing that comes to mind when reflecting, as it were, on Hong Kong. But in Let There Be Light, a history of China Light & Power (CLP), Mark Clifford convincingly makes the case for the centrality of electricity in the Hong Kong story. Electricity not only made Hong Kong’s success possible, but it also serves as an illuminating prism through which to look at and rethink much conventional wisdom about Hong Kong. Intertwined with this narrative of political and economic development is the larger-than-life persona of Lawrence Kadoorie, who headed CLP for five decades.