Welcome to our latest quarterly round up.
This January we marked the tenth anniversary of the launch in January 2015 at the University of Hong Kong of our Hong Kong History Project, predecessor to the Hong Kong History Centre. On 16 January, we welcomed our founding donor to Bristol for an afternoon of events showcasing the initiative’s achievements, and continued potential, and we were also delighted to be joined by Prof John Carroll from The University of Hong Kong.
We kicked off our celebrations with a ‘History Showcase’ event, where our co-directors Prof Robert Bickers and Dr Vivian Kong, and John Carroll shared their personal journeys into the study of Hong Kong history with the History department’s undergraduate students. Drawing from their teaching and research experience, they discussed how they became historians of Hong Kong, why it’s important that we study its history.
After a tour to the Hong Kong Special Collections, we then had a 3-Minute Thesis Presentation session, where 4 of our PhD students, Phyllis Chan, Alex Cheung, Ryan Iu, and Tracy Leung gave short talks on their own research on Hong Kong history to our funders and colleagues within the University. This was then followed by a roundtable discussion on ‘History in the Public Sector’, for which we welcomed back two of our project PhD alumni, Dr. Chris Wemyss, now at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, and Dr. Gemma O’Neill, from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, together with Centre Research Director Professor Ray Yep, a public intellectual who has served on numerous government bodies in Hong Kong including the Central Policy Unit and civil society organisations. Chaired by Professor Josie McLellan (Co-Director of Research in the History Department), the panelists discussed how their research background informs their work in and/or with the government, and what might history, and historians, do for policymaking and more widely the public sector.
The day ended with a dinner hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, Prof Evelyn Welch.
Our guest Prof. John Carroll stayed on to present a talk at our first 2025 History Salon on ‘“The Metropolis of the East”: Tourism and Postwar Recovery in Hong Kong’ on 18 January. In the wake of World War II, nations and colonies struggled to rebuild their economies – including by promoting tourism. Apart from generating much-needed revenue, government and business planners hoped this “invisible export” would help build a new era of peace and understanding. Prof Carroll showed how Hong Kong became a major travel destination, with tourism eventually becoming one of its most important industries and its largest source of foreign-exchange revenue. He pointed out that, at least until the mid-1950s, this owed less to local efforts and more to changes beyond Hong Kong’s initiative or control: the postwar revival of passenger shipping and the global expansion of civil aviation, the reopening of Japan to tourism under the Allied occupation, and the Korean War.
On 5 February, Dr. Nora Yitong Qiu from University College London gave a seminar talk on ‘Payments Across Financial Sanctions: The Case of Shanghai Commercial Bank in Hong Kong 1949-65 ‘. She explored the intricate dynamics of cross-border payments and financial integration in East and Southeast Asia from 1949 to 1965, focusing on the role of Shanghai Commercial Bank in Hong Kong. This was also our first time experimenting hosting our Speakers Series in hybrid format, to enable colleagues across the world to join in our in-person talks.
On 15 February, our visiting scholar, Dr. Liza Kam (Department of East Asian Studies (Chinese Studies), University of Vienna), gave us a Cantonese History Salon talk on ‘Metropolitan and Gongwu (river and lake): Cultural Space in Postwar Hong Kong’. She discussed the writers Jing Yong (Louis Cha, 1924-2018) and Liu Yichang (1918-2018) both renowned for their novels, which influenced the Sinophone world of literature and cinema. Equally remarkable was the two novelists’ simultaneous contribution to journalism in the early postwar period. Cha founded the pivotal newspaper Ming Pao Daily in 1953, which served as his ideological battlefield where he engaged in years of ‘pen-fights’ with the Chinese Communist Party. Liu, editor-in-chief of supplements such as the Hong Kong Times: Repulse Bay and the Sing Tao Daily: City Hall in the 1950s, instrumentalized these supplements to project the metropolitan image of the liberal colony of Hong Kong in contrast to what was perceived as the economically backward mainland of China. Liza explored the fascinating cultural spaces that were created and accommodated in the postwar Hong Kong.
On 24 February, we were pleased to host Prof. David Clayton from the University of York at our Speakers Series. The event kicked off with a talk by Prof Clayton on his latest research, exploring Hong Kong’s place in modern global history. He surveyed how Hong Kong was slotted into debates about modernisation theory, an agenda that traced convergences and divergences in paths of development between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, how imperial historians placed Hong Kong within the patterns and puzzles of British decolonisation, and examined transnational linkages into and out of Hong Kong, with a particular focus on flows of ideas, including across the Pacific. The talk was then followed by a panel discussion featuring historians from the University of Bristol: our Centre Co-Director Prof. Robert Bickers, Prof. Su Lin Lewis and Prof. Simon Potter of the History Department.
On 7 March, Dr Liza Kam gave a Speaker’s series talk to our academic community on the topic ‘Learn to oppress: Intellectual trajectory in constructing the colonies in Hong Kong and Taiwan’. She focused on Japan’s learning from British colonialism in Hong Kong to understand how the early form of control got in shape. The modernization of metropolitan Tokyo was significantly influenced by the colonial experience in Hong Kong. These ideas, which were tested in Tokyo, were subsequently exported to colonial Taiwan. During the early Japanese colonial era in Taiwan, it functioned as a laboratory for Japanese colonial architects such as Ide Kaoru (1879-1944) and Moriyama Matsunosuke (1869-1949). She explored the intellectual trajectories involved in the (re)making of the infrastructural and socialization frameworks established since the two respective colonial eras, while identifying the legacies that persist as physical and ideological control in the everyday.
On 29 March, our visiting post graduate student Samuel Dic Sum Lai from Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London shared with us his passion on Caacaanteng (literal translation: tea restaurant; or known as Hong Kong style restaurant) in the History Salon. He gave us an engaging talk on ‘The Normalized Abnormal: Historical development of Hong Kong Caacaanteng‘ with his interesting research findings and first-hand experience of working in the Caacaanteng.
By the end of this March, the presentations from Hong Kong History Day 2024 have all been uploaded and you can view them on YouTube. It consists of four exciting panels: ‘Urban/Spatial History’ (English) ‘Connecting Hong Kong: Ideas and Space’ (Cantonese) ‘Medical History’ (English) ‘History education beyond classroom’ (Cantonese).
We’ve had a busy and productive three months, and a busy and productive ten years now. We have a lot to show for it: seven PhD graduates, several books, and more on the way, academic articles, films, exhibitions large and small, and no shortage of events reaching diverse audiences locally and internationally. We have more to come before the end of the year: keep watching this space!
Robert Bickers