Category: Introducing PGRs/ECRs

We are delighted have Amelia Allsop as our guest writer this week. The Research Manager of the Hong Kong Heritage Project 香港社會發展回顧項目, Amelia is doing her PhD at King’s College, London. Here she tells us her way into Hong Kong history, and her fascinating doctoral research about Jewish refugees in Hong Kong. 

I completed my History BA at King’s College London in 2005 and in the same year I embarked on an International Relations MA, also at King’s, while working for my local Labour MP. At the end of the course I was offered a position in Hong Kong to help set-up an archive for the Kadoorie family and their business and charitable entities, which include China Light and Power and The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels. I worked closely with the Archivist to secure acquisitions across various businesses, describe the collection and promote access for researchers based in Hong Kong and overseas. It was an immensely enjoyable, challenging and rewarding experience, and provided a practical introduction to the world of archives – a discipline with a vital role to play in preserving Hong Kong’s memory. Over the next few years I recorded over 200 English language oral history interviews (and counting!) with public figures and ‘everyday’ historians and worked with colleagues to showcase the archive via publications and on our website. Today, the Hong Kong Heritage Project (HKHP), as the archive is known, regularly hosts exhibitions and works in partnership with youth organisations to encourage an interest in local history. In 2015 I moved back to London and embarked on a PhD on the topic of Jewish refugees in Hong Kong – again at King’s. I continue to work for HKHP as Research Manager and regularly return to Hong Kong.

My thesis is titled ‘A Borrowed Place: Jewish Refugees in Hong Kong, 1938 – 1956’. The idea of Hong Kong as a ‘borrowed place’ is perhaps a bit of a tired cliché, but the epithet captures contested themes of transience and disappearance so central to literature on Hong Kong’s history and culture, which has been shaped by successive waves of refugees. It also speaks to the alienation experienced by many Jewish refugees when they passed through Hong Kong on their way to or from Shanghai, many of whom were poorly treated by the colonial authorities. I became interested in this topic in 2010, when HKHP collaborated with the Hong Kong Jewish Historical Society to curate an exhibition on the Jews of China. I started to consider the viability of the topic as a PhD subject when, on further reading, I discovered that Jewish refugees in Hong Kong were absent from refugee literature, from wider Holocaust writing (specifically, Shanghai as a ‘Port of Last Resort’), and finally, from explorations of Hong Kong’s Jewish community, which tended to focus on the Baghdadi diaspora. It’s a little-known topic but one that I feel will contribute to debates tackling Jewish flight, refuge and rescue, particularly within the British Empire. As part of this study I hope to compare colonial responses to Jewish refugees with other refugee groups in Hong Kong, namely stateless Russian refugees, at times viewed with suspicion as Soviet spies, and Chinese refugees, who, for reasons of economic and political expediency were labelled ‘squatters’ by the Hong Kong government.

Existing historiography on Hong Kong’s Jews, mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s, has fixated on Baghdadis and their role as the founding fathers of Hong Kong’s Jewish community. Families such as the Sassoons are central to this literature. Although I examine the humanitarian role of Baghdadis vis-à-vis the refugees, my aim is to uncover hidden histories of refugee groups – their escape from Nazi occupied Europe, their experiential perspectives of Hong Kong, Shanghai and the China Coast, and the politicised response of the colonial government towards this persecuted group as ‘aliens’ rather than refugees. As with all historians, I believe in the value of my work and I’m passionate about my research topic. But beyond my own interest, the importance of this research lies not in Hong Kong’s status as a ‘refuge’, but in its ability to draw wider parallels on the Jewish refugee experience in the western and non-western worlds. It is a microcosm of displacement and internment, so familiar to the refugee encounter, within a uniquely British imperial and Chinese setting that links together the local, regional and global. My research hopes to fill gaps in Sino-Judaic literature whilst enriching studies of empire, identity and minority groups in Hong Kong. It seeks to fill a lacuna in Shanghai’s refugee historiography by looking to the exodus of Jewish refugees and their transit through Hong Kong, and in tandem, hopes to complement existing studies on refugees in the former colony, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Finally, I seek to reveal, for the first time, Jewish refugee memory of Hong Kong.

I’d be delighted to hear from other researchers with an interest in this subject, and especially from former refugees and their relatives. I can be contacted at: https://hongkongrefuge.wordpress.com/connect/

Finally, more information on the Hong Kong Heritage Project can be found on our website: www.hongkongheritage.org and further details of my research can be found on my blog: https://hongkongrefuge.wordpress.com/.

Tamara Cooper is a PhD Candidate in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong in Australia. 

Her research focus is on the British Women’s Missionary Movement and its involvement in debates on the trafficking in women and children in China and Hong Kong during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Her wider research interests include histories of imperialism, empire, religion, and women’s history.

I stumbled into the study of missionaries during my honours year. Previously I had completed a small research project on the connections between globalisation, orientalism, and imperialism during the Opium Wars as part of my undergraduate degree. I was wanting to expand on these themes in my honours research but was interested in adding the element of gender. I was primarily interested in examining ways in which the different cultures of the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ interacted with each other in the 19^th Century. In my quest to add the element of gender to my research I stumbled upon a book called ‘Pagoda Shadows’. It was written by an American Baptist missionary called Adele Fielde. Upon my discovery of this book, my honours thesis became an examination of Fielde’s work in China and how this was part of a larger cultural imperial project.

My PhD thesis continues this theme of examining the work of missionaries, except this time it jumps between China and Hong Kong. In this thesis, I examine how the British women’s missionary movement intervened in and interacted with the trafficking debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the central questions of the thesis is to what extent did the missionaries intervene and what was the nature of this intervention. By examining the work of a number of women missionaries from various missionary societies I have found that missionaries were less inclined to join formal protests led by advocates in the British metropole, and instead relied upon evangelisation and conversion as a means of intervention.

The late nineteenth century is an interesting time for the women’s missionary movement, particularly in China and Hong Kong. It was at this time that missionary societies started actively recruiting women, specifically single women, into the movement. Due to the gender segregation of Chinese society and culture, the missionary movement was not able to succeed without the contribution of women. Single women were of a particular value as they were without the responsibilities of the married woman missionary, whose duties within the family often left her without enough time for evangelisation, or so the argument went. This active recruitment of single women into the missionary movement had another effect: it professionalised and legitimised the single woman missionary. The turn of the twentieth century saw the numbers of women missionaries equal that of male missionaries.

I chose to include Hong Kong as a case study in my thesis primarily because of the mui tsai controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. Briefly, the controversy was a dispute over the employment of young girls as domestic servants called mui tsai. Those against the employment of mui tsai argued that it was akin to slavery, while others argued that it was an act of charity that saved the young girls from a life of neglect. My research is not focused so much on which side was right but rather what the missionaries were doing during this debate.

In the Church Missionary Society (CMS) archives, held at the University of Birmingham, I came across the papers of the Victoria Home and Orphanage, a rescue centre that had been established in Hong Kong by CMS missionaries. The home, or school, was founded in 1888 by Mrs Mary Ost and her husband Reverend John Ost, who had been sent to Hong Kong in 1881 to take up the post of vicar in the church of St Stephens. In the home’s first annual report, Reverend Ost reported that one of the primary functions of the home was to facilitate the rescue of young girls who he believed would otherwise be forced into a “life of immorality”. The Osts only ran the home until 1892, when they were transferred to the society’s mission in Pakhoi (Beihai). Following the departure of the Osts, the home was run by Miss Agnes Hamper, a single woman missionary who was sent to the home at the end of 1888. From 1892 onwards the home was run by missionaries who were single women.

While the home operated as a school, its intended function was as a rescue centre for young girls. Some of the stories of the girls who were rescued by the home were featured in the home’s annual report; however, the most telling record of the girls who were rescued and brought to the Victoria Home comes from a list of inmates, or students, for 1898. The handwritten list contains details such as each girl’s name, her age, who brought her to the home, when she was brought to the home, and who admitted her. It also contained details about why girls were brought to the home; which in turn revealed information about how missionaries intervened in trafficking beyond just running rescue homes. While a fair number of the girls were brought to the home on behalf of the Registrar General, there were a number who were brought to the home by missionaries, including members of the Church Missionary Society.

There are two stories of young girls included in this list that I found particularly interesting, the stories of Wong Mui and Wong Kui. In June 1897, Miss Hamper admitted Wong Mui, aged twenty, to the home. Wong Mui had been described as a slave girl who worked in Pakhoi and had been rescued by missionaries of the CMS before being brought to the home. In April of the following year, Hamper admitted Wong Kui, aged seventeen, to the home. Wong Kui had been sold to San Francisco where she had been rescued by Presbyterian missionaries who returned her to Hong Kong. Wong Kui only stayed at the home until she was married.

The Victoria Home ran until 1935 when it merged with the neighbouring Fairlea School also run by the CMS. The Fairlea school had previously been run by the Female Education Society. In 1899 the Female Education Society was disbanded. Upon its disbandment, all of its properties and missionaries were absorbed into the CMS. This move ensured a continued relationship between the two schools. When the Victoria Home and Fairlea School merged, they became the Heep Yunn School, an Anglican Day and Boarding School for girls. The Heep Yunn School still operates as an Anglican school in Hong Kong.

While the Victoria Home undoubtedly had a lasting impact, on the lives of the girls it took in, I believe that its most intriguing legacy is that of the colony’s missionary women. Throughout the home’s history, it was run almost entirely by women. These women maintained control over the home in the face of the overwhelming male leadership of the CMS. The home’s interactions with other rescue organisations in Hong Kong reveals a network of female leadership within the wider missionary community. A network that was, I believe, symptomatic of the increasing influence and power that women were coming into within the missionary movement.

Loretta Lou is a sociocultural anthropologist with an interest in environment, health, and science, technology & society (STS) studies. She has recently received her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she now works as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Forum on Health, Environment and Development (FORHEAD) at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. In this post Loretta tells us about her research on Hong Kong’s green living movement and how she became interested in the history of the ‘Clean Hong Kong Campaign’ during her study of green living.

I have been following the development of ‘green living’ in Hong Kong for almost 10 years now. My interest in the subject dates back to 2008 when I was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh. The master’s programme I enrolled in is a research programme that prepares students for PhD study. Although I wasn’t sure about doing a PhD at that time, my time in Edinburgh did get me thinking about ‘green living’ as a potential research topic. After completing my master’s degree, I went on to work as a public health researcher for the NHS before accepting the offer to do a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

In Hong Kong, ‘green living’ is promoted as a kind of ‘good living’ that is beneficial to both human and the Earth. It is a grassroots movement that encourages people to take personal responsibility for themselves, the environment, and the community they live in. Green living first caught my attention when I noticed that there is an increasing demand for ‘green’, ‘natural’ and organic commodities in Hong Kong. But as I investigated further, I realised that consumption is only a very superficial aspect of ‘green living’. Admittedly, the spectrum of ‘green’ in Hong Kong is very broad. While for some people green living means a visit to the farmer’s market every Sunday, for others it’s a way of life of social, political, and spiritual significance. Knowing that there is more to the story, I decided to study the implications of green living for self-nature relationship, social dynamics, and political mobilisation through ethnography.

During fieldwork, I was intrigued by the fact that people who practise green living in their lives don’t fit neatly into the ‘well-off middle class’ box. They seem to have different priorities than the Greens’ in the West. In fact, the Greens in Hong Kong come from all walks of life. The one characteristic that they share is they are looking for change, more precisely, hope. Unlike previous studies that focus predominately on the mobilisation strategies and lobbying tactics of environmental NGOs, my research focuses on the personal story of individuals. What motivates people to ‘go green’? Why are some people more committed to environmentally friendly practices than others?

Of course everyone has their own story. But I am particularly fascinated by the life history of (Simon) Chau Siu-Cheung, a leading figure of Hong Kong’s green living movement. Originally an Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University (1989-2005), Chau chose to retire early so that he could focus 100% on the promotion of green living. Since he came back to Hong Kong after obtaining his PhD in Scotland in 1984, he’s been an ardent advocate for recycling, organic farming, alternative medicine, and what he calls ‘spiritual renaissance’. In the past 30 years, Chau has founded many influential green groups, including Green Power, Produce Green (the first organic farm in the city), The Vegetarian Society (first of its kind), Club O (a.k.a. Green Living Education Foundation), and most recently, Greenwoods.

Although Chau is the ‘trend-setter’ of Hong Kong’s green living movement, he wouldn’t have founded all these groups without the help and support of other people, mainly the intelligentsia at that time. Until the green living movement gained momentum in the early 2000s, many of Hong Kong’s green groups were run by the expats. For instance, both Friends of the Earth and the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) were established by Western businessmen and the upper-middle colonial class. The Chinese used to call these environmental NGOs ‘gweilo club’ because they were so isolated from the Chinese community. In view of this, Green Power (est. 1988) is really an exception as it was founded by local people who were born and bred in Hong Kong. It was the first environmental organisation that had made serious efforts to localise global environmental discourses for the Hong Kong Chinese. Under Chau’s leadership, Green Power also managed to mobilise more local people to participate in the green movement, even though the majority of them were overseas educated middle class people.

There is no doubt that the intelligentsia at that time was aware of the global appeal for sustainability. But was this awareness alone enough to get the Hong Kong Chinese to go green? This explanation assumes a simple theory of cultural diffusion, which has been proved problematic by many anthropologists and historians through different case studies. In searching for a different explanation of how green living has taken roots in Hong Kong, I decided to look farther back into history by tracing the genealogy of the green living movement through two distinct endeavours to promote ‘modern living’ in Hong Kong. The first one being the government’s efforts to transform Hong Kong into a clean cosmopolitan of modern hygienic standards. I borrow Ruth Rogaski’s concept of ‘hygienic modernity’ (2004) to demonstrate how cleanliness and weisheng have become key notions through which Hong Kong established herself in the 20th century Asia. Focusing on the ‘Clean Hong Kong’ campaign in the 1970s, I discuss how this campaign has successfully forged a sense of community while instilling a rudimentary understanding of waanbao (protecting the environment) into the minds of Hong Kong citizens.

What I found most interesting is that the idea of ‘protecting the environment’ (保護環境) is constantly changing. For example, protecting the environment in the early 1980s simply meant ‘keeping Hong Kong clean’ because Hong Kong is your home. To protect Hong Kong’s environment, you put everything in the bin. But by the late 1980s, the intelligentsia was no longer satisfied with the kind of environmental protection that only aimed at creating a hygienic urban environment. In the wake of a growing sense of community, Green Power wanted to introduce Hong Kong people to the idea of sustainability—a difficult concept for a city that was known as ‘a borrowed place living on borrowed time.’

When I presented this sub-project at the University of Bristol, I was very surprised when Professor Robert Bickers told me that my presentation had brought back his childhood memories in Hong Kong. Three months later when I presented the same paper at the University of Brighton, Dr. Harriet Atkinson said the same thing to me. It’s amazing to know that the Clean Hong Kong Campaign is not only the collective memory of the Hong Kong people, but also many expats who have once called this city their home.

This week we have Nathan Kwan, who’s in his second year of PhD study with the University of Hong Kong and King’s College, London. Nathan’s telling us in this post how he became interested in Hong Kong history, and giving us a trailer of his fascinating research on the cooperation of the Qing and the British officials in combating piracy along the South China coast.

I am connected to Hong Kong through my parents, both of whom were born there. Though they have since emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States, my many happy (and hot) summers spent in Hong Kong left an indelible impression. Serendipitously, recollection of childhood summers helped me find a middle ground during my undergraduate studies between the classical China I hoped to study and my interest in the British Empire, piqued by the British Studies programme at the University of Texas at Austin. Thus, during my MA in Regional Studies – East Asia at Harvard University, my research focused on British and Qing negotiations of sovereignty and jurisdiction over Chinese criminals in Hong Kong.
During my research on Chinese criminals one subset, pirates, particularly interested me and now forms the focus of my PhD research currently undertaken jointly in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong and the War Studies Department at King’s College London. The European experience of piracy produced a conceptualisation of maritime depredation within a system of international law that was largely unknown to the Qing. However, the prevalence of piracy along the southern coast of China often forced Qing officials into cooperation with the British for its suppression.

Utilising Chinese and English materials in the National Archives in London (including the Guangdong provincial archives captured during the Second Opium War), the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, the Hong Kong Public Records Office, and elsewhere, my research hopes to supplement the narrative of the British suppression of piracy in China by including the Chinese perspective. By focusing on the Hong Kong-headquartered Royal Navy (I am in the Department of War Studies after all) and its interactions with the Chinese in suppressing piracy, I hope to present a new perspective on Anglo-Qing relations in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. In addition to challenging the traditional narrative of gunboat diplomacy by focusing on cooperation rather than confrontation between British warships and Chinese officials, I will discuss Qing reactions to British anti-piracy activity off the China coast. In doing so, I hope to assess Qing engagement with and understanding of international law vis-à-vis the suppression of piracy.

Are you also an ECR/postgraduate hoping to let the wider community know about your work on Hong Kong history? If you’re interested in contributing, please write to Vivian Kong (vivian.kong@bristol.ac.uk) for more details!