Hong Kong by Jan Morris

Hong Kong Reviews

• 
  Chrissie

  Free for Audible-Plus members. Narrated by Wanda McCaddon / Nadia May.
  
  Don't miss this, if the history of Hong Kong as a British colony interests you. It takes you up to about a decade before 1997 when Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule.
  
  I learned much about Hong Kong's colonial history. I learned about the diversity of its residents and the atmosphere, the tone of life on the island, the peninsula and the territories starting from the 1830s. Above and beyond the straight history learned, I particularly enjoyed getting a sense of how life is lived, the tempo and mood of the inhabitants, a sense of their ambitions and dreams and what makes them tick. I appreciate imbibing the cultural atmosphere of the place and how this has changed with the passage of years.
  
  In my reading, I was often interrupted. Life is hectic at moment. My review, due to lack of time, is cursory. I want to have said that the book is well worth reading. History and culture are blended, and this is to my taste. I Ideas and thoughts are well formulated.
  
  The book does NOT cover the actual 1997 transition of power to China. I wish a chapter on the transition had been added to the later editions.
  
  The narration by Wanda McCaddon / Nadia May, with her strong British accent, suits the book perfectly. She speaks clearly. I like that she pauses a second or two after each sentence. This gives the reader tine to think and absorb and analyze what has been said. Four stars for the narration.
• 
  Tony

  My second book this year was Jan Morris's
  Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and I enjoyed that one so much that I vowed to read another of hers about some distant city each forthcoming year. But only one a year! I figured this would take me to the end of my days.
  
  And I almost made it to next year. But then I started reading about ongoing riots in Hong Kong and how even LeBron James had to scold an executive of a basketball team for not being "educated" about Hong Kong (the executive apparently voicing support for human rights). So I thought I would start to get educated. Conveniently, Jan Morris has written of Hong Kong; and, well, it is almost next year.
  
  This book was written in 1988, which is important because that is exactly nine years before Britain would turn over Hong Kong to China. So it's a very interesting perspective. There is the history (how Hong Kong got British in the first place) as well as a look around at the state of things before the lease expires. This allows Morris, then, to ask And now what? What issues will there be? And so we can read today's news as a tableau, better informed and almost educated.
  
  Morris explains all this very well, with recognizable wit and charm. Although it did almost get tedious. Here are some Morris insights and reflections:
  
  -- The later Victorians built Victorianly, regardless in their confident way of climate or precedent.
  
  -- The beauty is the beauty, like it or not, of the capitalist system. More than a usual share of the city's energies goes towards the making of money, and nobody has ever pretended otherwise.
  
  -- An old tale tells of the Chinese gentleman who, watching a pair of Englishmen sweating away at a game of tennis, inquired why they did not hire coolies to play it for them.
  
  -- An American airline pilot once told me that he never made the landing without a clenching of the stomach, so demanding is the flight path, and no passenger who has ever flown into modern Kai Tak, especially at night, is likely to forget the excitement of the experience, as the harbor unfolds itself around one's windows, as the myriad of lights glitter, as first the mountains, then the skyscrapers rush by, and one lands mysteriously on the runway among the waters, the deep blue of the seas on either side, the starry blue sky above, as in the middle of some fabulously illuminated bowl of glass.
  
  -- Many of the British themselves could not contemplate the existence of Hong Kong, however dazzlingly it spoke of British enterprise and even of British benevolence, without some tremor of vicarious shame. Most of them knew very little about Hong Kong, but they did know there was something disreputable about its possession. Wasn't it something to do with opium? Weren't the police supposed to be bent? Hadn't they read something in the Guardian about a disgraceful lack of democratic rights?
  
  -- The taste that Hong Kong leaves behind will be the last taste of the Pax Britannica.
  
  -- And if they fail, and the people of Hong Kong remain to the end powerless to govern their own affairs, vulnerable to anything that may come out of China? Then the British will leave behind them, if not a sense of betrayal, at least a sense of disappointment. They will have missed the chance to give Hong Kong the one quality it has always lacked--nobility, the balance of purpose and proportion that the geomancers strive for.
  
  It's just a start in my education. It's always so. I learned that Hong Kong and "the new territories" were just a bunch of rocks. But people built there, first to sell opium, and later to sell bonds. It flourished so that countries and religions and governments would wink away the niceties of contradictions. As will champions today, who have something to sell.
• 
  John

  I started this book as I truly appreciate travel narrative genre, but would classify the material strongly as history here, although Morris does give an incredibly strong sense of place in terms of setting and description. We get a look at the early (western) settlers first, a surprisingly American lot as it turned out, as well as the boom years of the early 20th century, and a good feel for the Japanese occupation. Naturally, for a story written between the 1984 agreement and the actual 1997 transfer, the author focuses on what Hong Kong "means" in terms of British history, as well as the thorny issue of whether the city is more Chinese or western (similar to whether Turkey is Asian or European)? Conclusion contains a warning (prediction) about freedom-of-speech restrictions, including a reminder of the provisions in the treaty giving Britain the status of "interested party" until 2047 in terms of creating issues with China over that, if they feel it necessary (though unlikely).
  
  Five stars for brilliant writing (no surprise there) as well as the perfect audio narration that definitely enhanced the text. Highly recommended as addressing the question: "Who are Hong Kong people (including long-term westerners)?"
  
  
• 
  侯 二六

  作為旅行文學（旅行文學不等於旅遊書），這是本好看的書。從原作者嘲諷的筆調，明白她有意擺脫英國人的偏見，對於臺海乃至東亞地區的局勢亦相當明瞭。但可惜她不諳中文，沒辦法參考什麼中文資料，有些談到華人的地方要打個問號，否則會更有意思。比如談到一九二五年罷工潮到香港，卻沒提到當年六月二十一日廣州沙基慘案，才使粵港澳的罷工到達最高潮（第八章）。另外講中國的民間信仰也受到辛亥革命、共產社會、文革那三波的浪潮影響，也包括台灣？台灣大約是日治時期的壓制吧，往後國府也是要靠那些拉攏地方勢力的。（頁153）而觀察渡輪乘客手裡拿的書（頁119）以及她所引用那些以香港為背景的文學作品（詳參考附錄），也顯現出侷限性。
  
  不過這方面的局限，倒也剛好符合副標題「大英帝國殖民時代的終結」（原文似是"Epilogue to an Empire"，帝國的尾聲）；展現的是「英國人看香港」的視角（畢竟她不是漢學家）。近年香港研究其實有不少中文專著，或許華語圈大家都很熟悉了；這部還是很西方的香港專論，可能對於華人的意義要比對於西方人還大（如果要介紹「香港」給西方，懂漢語、熟悉中國文化的人，不知是不是能給他們比較不一樣的東西）。
  
  而譯者刻意還原香港用詞、仔細考訂也很用心。但有幾個問題，其一是意譯遣詞恰當與否：
  
  P.286 「英國生番」？廣東人稱呼洋人是「番鬼」居多吧？
  
  其二是因作者拼音有誤未能譯出的詩作，由網路資訊推斷，可能是：
  
  p.366 1840年代，何紹基〈乘火輪船遊澳門與香港作〉：「一層坡嶺一層屋，街石磨平瑩如玉。初更月出門盡閉，止許夷車奔馳逐。層樓疊閣金碧麗，服飾全非中土製……」 1870年，黃遵憲〈香港感懷〉（節錄）:「沸地笙歌海，排山酒肉林。」 王韜:「上環高處為太平山，兩旁屋宇參差如雁翅……」
  
  其三是誤植：
  
  P.328地圖標示「一九一四年日軍進攻香港路線」，應為一九四一年。
• 
  Jeffrey

  This book is a mix of history and some contemporary portraits of colonial Hong Kong. The book focuses almost exclusively on British personages and mundane colonial details and really never gets around to exploring the Chineseness. I was really disappointed by this. The book is also dated, curiously fixates on arcane and somewhat random details and quotes and does not shed much light on the actual people of Hong Kong (aside from the aristocracy and business elites). Barely got through it on my trip to Hong Kong and was constantly wishing I had a different book. A more balanced and nuanced history would make for a better travel read.
• 
  Matt Seidholz

  Jan Morris called Britain's handling of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong "sufficiently stylish". I think that's meant to be faint praise.
  
  Funnily enough, that's the exact phrase I'd use to describe her book. But my praise isn't faint.
  
  Morris has a lot of love for word-play and a lot of love for Hong Kong. The prose is luxurious and the history enlightening.
  
  A powerful strain of colonial nostalgia pervades the book. Morris never lets us forget, though, Britain's exploitative history with China, and that's definitely to her credit.
  
  Reading it now, this attitude of the British expatriate in Hong Kong seems impossibly distant. Almost unrelatable. In 2013, with Shenzhen looming large in the north, it's hard to imagine Hong Kong as a European outpost. For me, though, that was part of the fun of this book -- it's an interesting relic.
  
  I recommend "Hong Kong" for people who live there. It will definitely strengthen your sense of place, and will help you appreciate the historical moment that you find yourself in one of the world's great, complicated cities.
  
• 
  Joshua Rigsby

  Morris interposes descriptions of Hong Kong's founding with the status of Hong Kong in its waning years as a colony in the late 1980s. Many of the descriptions and speculations are necessarily dated, but the early wrok examining the origins of the colony (my reason for reading the book) were still quite good.
• 
  Hazel

  From a historical perspective, an absolutely fascinating read, detailing life on Hong Kong from the moment the British struck down their flags to the anticipation of their departure in 1997 (this book was written a few years before). A comprehensive history of how Hong Kong has survived and gone beyond its status as a colony. From an anthropological perspective, a little stereotypical in terms of descriptions of people:
  
  ‘A couple of local toughs bear themselves like characters from a kung fu drama, long-haired, sit-eyed, heavily muscled around the shoulders'
  
  So I’d definitely take Morris’ ethnographic descriptions with a pinch of salt. The audience is, as you might expect given the book is written in English, the white European—so the narrative is heavily focalised onto the imperial point of view and sort of segregates that of the Chinese.
• 
  Alex Ripley

  More relevant than ever before.
• 
  Jamie Elgie

  Beautifully written. Easy to get through. Liked it a lot.
• 
  Odette

  Greatly enjoyed this book especially since I read this right before a trip to HK.
• 
  Saša Tomislav Mataić

  Pretty good book summing up the history and development of Hong Kong since it's establishment up to year 1997. From it's start, it's been a business oriented place, shameful as it were, from the despicable practice of British Empire's opium trade to the modern financial centre, it's always been a special place, distinct from any other British colonies, while seen as a unjust theft by the China.
  
  While a really good writeup on development of Hong Kong, objectively examining the causes of it's change and growth, the lack of follow up after the year 1997 made me give it four stars. The style is also a bit difficult, sometimes with long, winding sentences.
  
  Some selected quotes:
  

  Almost nothing seems built to last. It is said that no city in history has grown so fast as has Hong Kong in the past thirty years, and the place has little time for posterity.

  
  
  

  Everyone is trying to move on – to bigger apartments, to better-paid jobs, to classier districts, often enough out of the territory altogether. The national flower of Hong Kong is the Bauhinia, a sterile hybrid which produces no seed.

  
  
  

  It is an abnormal city. Until our own times it has been predominantly a city of refugees, with all the hallmarks of a refugee society – the single-minded obsession with the making of money, amounting almost to neurosis, and the perpetual sense of underlying insecurity, which makes everything more tense and more nervous.

  
  
  

  Great Seal of the colony, designed in 1844 by the Queen’s own medallist-in-chief, depicted beneath the royal crest a waterfront piled profitably with what might have been tea-boxes, but were generally assumed to be opium chests. In 1844 the Governor himself declared that almost anyone with any capital in the colony was either in the Government service, or else in the drug trade.

  
  
  

  Yet all too often Hong Kong depressed its visitors – ‘like a beautiful woman with a bad temper’, thought Lawrence Oliphant, who went there in the next decade. Was it just the climate? Was it the cramped and improvised environment? Was it the lack of any higher purpose or ideology, such as inspired the imperialists in other parts of their Empire – Raffles of Singapore, for instance, who hoped the British would leave a message for posterity ‘written in characters of light’? Or were the colonists of Hong Kong even then, consciously or subconsciously, overawed by the presence of China beyond the harbour, so enervated and contemptible in the 1840s, but surely so certain, one day, to come mightily into its own?

  
  
  

  Bear in mind that just across the bay, on Stanley Beach in 1943, thirty-three British, Indian and Chinese citizens were beheaded for alleged High Treason against the Japanese occupying Power! The Japanese association with Hong Kong has been ambiguous indeed. On the one hand their armies were the only armies ever to invade the colony, on the other for many years their foreign trade was largely financed by the colony’s banks. On the one shore the children merrily bathing, on the other the bloodied heads falling on the sand.

  
  
  

  True feng shui had nothing to do with magic, although in the old China it used to be given an esoteric mystery by magicians in yellow robes. It was a matter of harmony between man and nature, and was concerned with location, with colour, with proportion. As he scribbled some illustrative diagrams in my notebook, and considered the question of whether feng shui was an art or a science (a philosophy, he rather thought), he told me that he was never short of geomantic business.

  
  
  

  They are extremely lively, extremely neat, extremely polite and engaging young people. Talking loudly, laughing a lot, with their bright blue rucksacks, their sneakers and their Walkman radios they look thoroughly modern, and if you engage them in conversation you will find that they are liberated in their emotions too. They may seem to think more practically, calculate more exactly than their counterparts in the west. They are still, as a rule, far more devoted to their families. But they are certainly not interested only, as the old Hong Kong canard has it, in money, and they are noticeably not respectful to the old Confucianist ideas of a rigid social order. They are just as idealistic, no more, no less, than young Europeans or Americans, just as concerned with a proper balance of life, between the necessary making of money and enjoyable ways of using it. Some are power-hungry, some drop-outs, some honest plodders, some dreamers. All in all, they are as likeable and normal a generation as you will find anywhere in the world, freed at last from the burdens and inhibitions of the Chinese condition.

  
  
  

  The proximity of Portuguese Macao, neutral in time of war, jolly with food, wine and gambling halls in peace, has always been an inescapable fact of Hong Kong life. Sometimes it has been politically convenient to go there, sometimes it has been economically handy. Villains have fled to refuge, unmarried couples have found solace, escaped prisoners have been succoured, and in the early years of Hong Kong rich merchants still possessed pleasure-houses in Macao, as they had in the day of the Guangzhou hongs. Even during the Second World War the Macao ferries still sailed.

  
  
  

  ...by the 1970s Hong Kong industry was relatively respectable, and the colony was no longer an underdeveloped country with a sophisticated entrepreneurial superstructure, but one of the world’s great productive Powers. The 418 registered factories of 1939, the 1,266 of 1948, had become by 1986 148,623. It was the most phenomenally rapid of all the world’s industrial revolutions. Now Hong Kong stands, they say, sixteenth among them all, exporting, with its 6.4 million population, more than India’s 880 million. Its average wages are second only to Japan’s in Asia. Critics say it is still too improvisatory or even amateurish of method, too dependent upon cheap labour and traditional management, and that there is a growing shortage of sufficiently advanced technicians. Nevertheless the territory shows no signs of falling back.

  
  
  

  Hong Kong is the world’s largest exporter of textiles, toys and watches. It prints books in every language, and makes more films for the cinema than anywhere else except India.

  
  
  

  The chief strength of this economy has always been its flexibility. Because it has been relatively free from Government interference, it has been able to switch easily from idea to idea, method to method, emphasis to emphasis. If it is frighteningly changeable sometimes, it has proved resilient too, swiftly recovering its poise after wars, revolutions, riots, share collapses and even treaties about its future.

  
  
  

  Hong Kong enjoys absolute freedom of speech and opportunity, but no freedom at all to choose its rulers.

  
  
  

  In 1966, at a time when Triad infiltration of his force was rampant, Hong Kong’s Commissioner of Police admitted that there was corruption in virtually every walk of life, but added cheerfully that ‘in terms of money the police force is probably not the worst’.

  
  
  

  The Hong Kong Tramway Company is the only surviving builder of wooden double-deck streetcars (though it does not exactly build them, but rather maintains them as palimpsests, constantly replacing parts, adding improvements, so that none of its 160 vehicles are exactly the same, and none can really be dated).

  
  
  

  Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is in effect the Central Bank of Hong Kong, one of the very few non-Governmental concerns to fulfil such a role in the modern world. It holds the colony’s reserves, and together with the Bank of China and the Chartered Bank, which is part of a London-based conglomerate, it issues all the colony’s notes in denominations of ten dollars and above; they are ornamented with pictures of the Bank’s offices, and signed by the Chief Accountant.
  
• 
  Adrienna

  I got this book because I thought it was a travel book, but it reads more like an in-depth history book. It gives the history of Hong Kong from the start of British colonial rule to the near end of Britain's 150 years of control. The book was written in 1987 giving unique insight into what at least one expat (Jan Morris) wondered about the future of Hong Kong as it was a mere 10 years till the city would be returned to China. It is a look into a history as it looked into the future. This historical wondering about a Chinese Hong Kong is only reflected on in the last chapter. Earlier chapters delve into Hong Kong rich and wild history. It's very detailed and gives some insight into how Britain viewed it's colonies. Jan gives her native country some praise, but also offers criticism and discusses Britians often cruel and dismissive treatment of the Chinese people who lived in Hong Kong.
• 
  The Bamboo Traveler

  Jan Morris is one of the best travel writers that has ever lived. She knows how to make you feel like you're in the place she is writing about. With Hong Kong, I could feel myself being transported back to Hong Kong before 1997. I used to visit Hong Kong very often when I lived in China and reading her book reminded me of Hong Kong back then--taking the train to Lo Wu, getting off and then walking across the border to Hong Kong before getting on the train or bus to Tsim Sha Tsui. The diapaidangs, the amazing English newspapers, breakfast at McDonalds after living in China for months, English language bookstores, double-decker buses, the best subway system I've ever been on, the skyline of Hong Kong Island, the Star Ferry.
• 
  Patrick Cook

  I meant to read this on a flight from DFW to Hong Kong in November, but I unfortunately forgot to pack it and only just got around to reading it now. Jan Morris is a writer and person I admire very much (she easily tops my list of living people with whom I'd most like to have dinner). Amongst many other things, she has been one of the most readable (if not the most scholarly) historians of the British Empire and a fantastic travel writer. She wrote this just before the Handover in 1997. Now, I fear that I'm reading it at the end of a truly autonomous Hong Kong, which adds an inescapable sadness to it all.
• 
  Amy

  In preparing for my move to Hong Kong, I looked for book recommendations, both fiction and non-fiction, and this book by Jan Morris came up on every list. I listened to the audiobook, which was expertly narrated. It was a great history lesson, made more interesting (though perhaps also somewhat biased) by its narrator. I look forward to reading the book again after we have settled in Hong Kong and I have more context for understanding the places and history she references.
• 
  Chils27

  It is just Ok. It scratchs the surface but offers not much insight. Besides, the Hk she wrote about pretty much changed.But she is right to say, HK people never truely choose their destiny. It was in the hands of Uk, the Japs and now the Community China. But I think compare to mainland China, Hk is lucky to have chance to get close to western civilisation.And Hk people have wider choice than most of Mainlanders. God bless HK.
• 
  Kerry

  Read this when I first went to Hong Kong to live. Loved the writing style and it was my first effort to find out more about the history of my new home. Enjoyed it immensely and would recommend it highly.
• 
  K.

  Especially given my recent seven-day visit there, coupled with the protests as the 22nd anniversary of the handover approached, playing out in the shadow of China's ever-tightening grip, this was a worthwhile read, providing essential history on how Hong Kong came to be.
• 
  Lee

  Jan Morris' weird book exoticizes the ethnic Chinese living in Hong Kong while spending most of her time talking about the British in Hong Kong. I was stunned that she ignored most of the people who live in Hong Kong while writing a book about the city. I was stunned that, as late as the 1990's, people were getting away with writing this kind of orientalist nonsense.
  
  This is a fairly shitty book that offers little, though Morris occassionally does a good job of dealing with history.
  
  Made it 25% of the way through before I had to give up.
• 
  Pat

  Odd travelogue of former British Hong Kong. With literal faded watercolors, also odd.
• 
  Bryson

  Exciting city. Boring book. (And outdated)