Tag: World War Two

Guest blog: Kwong Chi Man on the Battle of Hong Kong spatial history platform

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Dr. Kwong Chi Man is an associate professor in the history department of Hong Kong Baptist University. He specializes in the military and naval history of modern East Asia, particularly from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) to the 1970s. He has published Eastern Fortress: A Military History of Hong Kong, 1840–1970 (coauthored, Hong Kong Book Prize 2019) and War and Geopolitics in Interwar Manchuria. His works can also be found in Modern Asian Studies, War in History, and Journal of Military History. In this post Dr Kwong introduces the newly launched Battle of Hong Kong platform, whose development he has directed.

The Battle of Hong Kong (8-25 December 1941) was one of the first battles of the Pacific War and was the most significant military engagement between two regular armed forces that took place in Hong Kong in its modern history. The Japanese forces of around 35,000 strong faced a garrison of 13,500 consisting of British, Indian, Canadian, and local troops. In eighteen days, the two forces fought in the New Territories, Kowloon, and Hong Kong Island. The garrison suffered 3,445 casualties (KIA, WIA, and MIA) and the attacking force 2,218. Around 4,000 civilians were killed and wounded. Hong Kong then entered a period of Japanese rule that lasted for three years and eight months.

The spatial history project “Hong Kong 1941” uses geographic information systems (GIS) to build an interactive web map about the Battle of Hong Kong and a database of British military installations in Hong Kong during the Second World War. It offers an easy-to-use historical database for educators, tourists, and conservation professionals. I have been Principal Investigator of the project, working since 2011 with my research team, studying the Hong Kong battle since 2011, collecting first-hand data from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Australia, and other places. The interactive web map of the Battle of Hong Kong can be accessed here.

There have been numerous studies on the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941; in recent years, more primary sources are available in the form of the memoirs of those who had experienced it. However, it has been a challenge for researchers to show the spatial and temporal dimensions of the battle and their relationship with the events, the people’s experience, and the war ruins that still exist in Hong Kong. The spatial history project “Hong Kong 1941” tries to tackle such challenge and aims to bridge the gaps that existed between the British and Japanese accounts to offer a more clear view of the battle and to show the diverse experiences o the combatants and the civilians during the eighteen days of fighting. It also serves as a platform where stories often overlooked by war narratives are exhibited in conjunction with the major events.

The web map contains the following layers of data:

  1. Unit disposition: the map divides the Battle of Hong Kong campaign into 51 “time-steps”, each showing the positions and status of the units on both sides. The data granularity is down to platoon/squad/individual artillery pieces.
  2. The location of various military structures: including coastal defence batteries, anti-aircraft batteries, pillboxes, headquarters, shelters, medical posts, communication lines, demolition points, pre-arranged artillery targets, etc. The data granularity is up to individual buildings (such as individual pillboxes).
  3. Faces of War: the stories of those who had experienced the battle.
  4. Objects of War: objects and artefacts related to the battle, such as weapons, vehicles, military aircraft, vessels, personal equipment, and others.
  5. Images of War: photos taken during the period.
  6. Units: information about the units on both sides participating in the battle.
  7. A list of Hong Kong combatants: personal information on 1,600 Hong Kong residents from different ethnic groups and backgrounds who participated in the battle.

This is an on-going project and the research team will issue regular seasonal updates and irregular hotfixes. The mobile version, which will be fitted for screens of the mobile devices, will be available in weeks. We welcome any feedback (please contact our Facebook page, our Instagram, or email us) and would like to invite the viewers to share with us original historical materials and stories.

Contact details for the Battle of Hong Kong platform:

 

In Honour of Dan Waters, 1920-2016

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By Vaudine England

Since the death of Dan Waters, aged 95, in Hong Kong on 27 January this year, he has rightly been lauded for many things: charm and personality, astounding memory, karate black belt, marathons after 60, and of course being such an inspiration to anyone interested in Hong Kong’s earlier days. His own life was impressive, from being a ‘desert rat’ under Montgomery in World War Two to joining the colonial service in Hong Kong in 1954, in the Education Department. He wrote a best-selling manual to technical education and helped to found the Polytechnic (now University).

Perhaps we can blame today’s political correctness for a refusal to talk about one of Dan’s most important commitments — that of a colonial service officer to a Chinese woman in the 1950s. Either people don’t like to talk about race in case they offend someone, or such an inter-racial liaison is now seen as so utterly normal as to be unworthy of comment. Yet what Dan and Vera did was pioneering.

Along with serving in the auxiliary police and coping with the Shek Kip Mei riots of 1956, Dan worked at the Morrison Hill Technical Institute. There he met Vera Chan, a mature student and also founder and director of Hong Kong’s first beauty and charm school. They married in 1960.

Dan knew this was important. He wrote Faces of Hong Kong in 1995, dedicating it to ‘all cross-cultural marriages and to Eurasians everywhere’. He wrote about it again in 2005 he came out with One Couple Two Cultures: 81 Western-Chinese Couples Talk About Love and Marriage. This is dedicated ‘to my Hong Kong-Chinese wife, Vera, and to all the cross-cultural couples who readily bared their souls and withstood my inquisitive probing…’ Apart from four books on technical English and education, cross-cultural ties were all he wrote about.

Let’s think about that. The 1950s was a time when Hong Kong had found it could recover from World War Two, from Japanese occupation, and from the fall of British empire elsewhere in the world. It had not yet found the excited money-making impulses of the 1970s, nor were skyscrapers blocking the view. This was a quieter, more ‘colonial’ time and one, importantly, when we are told cross-cultural marriages were banned by the banks, the hongs and the government. Yet clearly they were not forbidden. Whereas countries such as the USA and Canada passed laws to ban inter-racial marriage, neither Britain nor Hong Kong ever did so. Nor, as we see in Dan’s case, were they terminal to a career. Instead, they were just as likely to be a source of joy as any other liaisons.

The paradox strikes again: that where race is made important enough to be examined it turns out to be less important after all.

Dan Waters was an exceptional man in most of his fields of endeavour; he was wide open, inquisitive, fascinated. His ruminations in both books ranged from the picking of guavas in the Mai Po Marshes in the 1960s with his wife’s uncle, to the latter book’s detailed survey of how cross-cultural marriages work. He learned about the Man clan of the New Territories, and their migrations to the West (not only to England but whole villages which moved to the Netherlands and elsewhere), the rise of Chinese restaurants, why nouveau riche Chinese are so loud, and whether such migration ‘works’. Even when a transplanted Chinese marries another Chinese in their new home there are adjustment problems, he wrote, but when the marriage is cross-cultural, bigger worries emerge. There is the risk of the offspring never quite belonging anywhere, unhappily marginalised in Britain but out of place back in the New Territories village too. Writing before the handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, he wondered how many Man clan members would want to keep a footprint in Hong Kong.

Dan’s later book began with a traditional Chinese matchmaker’s saying — ‘Let wooden gates match wooden gates and bamboo doors match bamboo doors’. Such a damning indictment of cross-cultural marriage is soon disproved. In fact, as his interviews with 81 partners in mixed marriages attest, the responses of each side in the partnership varied immensely. Some Chinese women wanted a Western husband to escape the constrictions of patriarchal Chinese culture; some of their families were open to it but most were not. Men’s feelings varied too, from wonder at the chaos of it all, to frustration about never being accepted by their partner’s families. Generalising the experience remains nigh impossible.

Dan managed, as so many (male) writers do, to lay the blame for discrimination against Chinese women in mixed liaisons at the feet of Western women. He also notes that of course there were restraints of which he, as a man in love in the late 1950s, was all too well aware: ‘No decent Chinese girl will marry you. All you can expect is a whore or a bar girl,’ he quotes a clergyman saying in the 1950s. Dan’s own boss was clearly against Dan’s plans to marry Vera; Dan was accused of ‘letting the side down’. He recalled too, his friend Michael Wright (the third generation of his family in government service in Hong Kong, now aged 103 in London) having to sign a declaration when he joined the Crown Colony civil service in 1938, to pledge that he would not take a concubine. ‘Up until World War Two, overseas British Banks required their expatriate staff to obtain approval before they married, and everyone knew what that meant…’ (Waters, 2005, p. 51).

Aside from his own case, Dan found more exceptions to such ‘rules’, many of them revealed in this book. The over-riding message is surely one to last beyond Dan’s life — that cross-cultural connection can be a marvellous thing. He described this book as a starting point for what he believed was a sadly under-researched aspect of life and history in Hong Kong. He hoped much more study and publication could be done on this theme of cross-cultural links, and Eurasians in general.

He ended with a quote from an American women who married a Chinese man: ‘Being in a cross-cultural marriage has mostly been a wonderful adventure, and I would do it all again in a second’.

SOURCES:

Waters, Dan, Faces of Hong Kong: An Old Hand’s Reflections (Singapore, 1995).

Waters, Dan, One Couple Two Cultures: 81 Western-Chinese Couples Talk About Love and Marriage (Hong Kong, 2005).

Introducing Vivian Kong

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Born and raised in Hong Kong, Vivian Kong moved to Bristol to take up the Hong Kong History Project Doctoral Studentship in 2015. After the completion of her BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Hong Kong, she embarked on her PhD study of the pre-war British community of Hong Kong at the University of Bristol under Professor Robert Bickers.

Her interests in studying the Britons there originate from her MPhil research on the evacuation of British families from Hong Kong in 1940. While examining the public response towards the compulsory policy, Vivian noticed that many Britons there had already developed a local identity in Hong Kong, which contributed to their nostalgic comments about their lives there and reluctance to leave the city despite the threat of a Japanese invasion. She became interested in how they identified themselves and how their experience living there affected the way they perceived Britishness, and how they viewed British subjects of Asian descent in Hong Kong.

By reconstructing the lives of Britons in pre-war Hong Kong and their interactions with other communities there, Vivian’s doctoral research aims to explore the relationship between colonialism and Britishness. She is eager to examine how Hong Kong Britons’ colonial experience shaped their view of imperialism and Britishness. She is also interested to see how Britishness was defined by different communities in the colony, and what Britishnesss meant for them. While using a variety of written sources such as official documents, newspapers and memoirs, Vivian also employs oral histories in her research. She is currently recruiting former residents of Hong Kong who spent their childhood in pre-war Hong Kong to participate in her research.

Combining her research with public engagement has always been an important aspect of Vivian’s work. She has a blog hk1940evacuation.wordpress.com where she shares the findings of her MPhil research, and in the future, her PhD research. The blog has put her in touch with not only surviving former residents of Hong Kong who were willing to bring in their insights and stories, and readers who wish to find out more about their family histories, but also interested readers hoping to learn more about an untold aspect of Hong Kong history.

On Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’

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By Vaudine England

Just two serious articles were published on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong in the 20th century. A bold claim – and one on which I’d be delighted to be proven wrong!

The first came in 1920, from the Hon. Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster, OBE, Member of the Legislative Council. This China-born former British Consul in China was the interpreter who accompanied Ye Mingchen throughout most of his imprisonment and exile by the British. A lawyer, he moved to Hong Kong where he was Acting Attorney General no less than four times before achieving the full post in 1931 until 1946. He was also acting Chief Justice in 1937. ‘In 1942 he was one of the three senior government officials who instructed Robert Kotewall to cooperate with the Japanese occupying forces in order to protect Hong Kong residents.’ A survivor of the Stanley Internment Camp during World War Two (perhaps thanks to the sunglasses he wore perpetually), ‘his meticulous and allegedly rather bureaucratic personality [meant] he was not universally admired.’ (Source: DHKB pp1-2.)

Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’, warning of the onset of a race problem in the wake of China’s republican revolution, has long outlived the sunglasses. Published in the (albeit now defunct) Eugenics Review, he expressed surprise at the lack of any laws ‘bearing upon the problem of race mixture, certain laws declaring marriage between certain races invalid or a punishable offence, or at least certain decisions as to the degree of blood making a particular person a member of one race or of another.’ There were laws granting privileges to or discriminating against Chinese, regarding will validation, and registration of persons, and even laws requiring the Registrar of Companies to decide what might properly be described as a Chinese or non-Chinese business partnership. But nothing about Eurasians.

‘If a reason is sought for the absence of any such legislation, it will probably be found in the fact that until as recently as 1911 the Eurasian problem did not exist; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that before that year classification could be effected easily without too close an inquiry into a person’s pedigree.’

What he meant became clearer as he described Eurasians of Hong Kong before 1911 as falling into roughly three groups – Portuguese, Chinese or British. After 1911, he believed, rising Chinese nationalism and the greater education of more Chinese in Hong Kong would change definitions radically, faster.

Generalising Eurasians in Hong Kong

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Continuing their espousal of the Eurasian ‘problem’, two authors writing in 1955, Thompson & Adloff, lament the small size of Eurasian communities and their lack of cohesion which leaves them in a weak bargaining position; despite being stable and smart, unity and strength has remained elusive to the group as a whole. The only answer available to these Eurasians is to integrate locally as quickly as possible, they wrote.

Thompson & Adloff then take a closer look at the legal, educational, professional and social position of Eurasians in South East Asia.

For example, laws of 1854 and 1892 in the Dutch East Indies allowed all descendants of Europeans on the father’s side to be legally classified as Europeans. This opened up educational prospects and thus access to higher levels of economic and social achievement. Before World War Two, the heads of four of the eight government departments and the commander in chief of the army were all Indo-Europeans. In 1912 an Indo-European League was formed. The Hague Agreement of August 1949 gave Eurasians (estimated to number about 100,000) two years in which to make up their mind about whether to stay in now independent Indonesia or go to the Netherlands. A government survey commissioned by the Netherlands in 1952 concluded, among other points, that it was inadvisable to bring uneducated, poorer Eurasians out of Indonesia; however, the Dutch government would provide aid to this majority of people advised to stay put.

Brief surveys follow, of Eurasians in Malaya, Burma/Myanmar, the Arakan States (of now Burma/Myanmar), the Malays of South Thailand, and the Ambonese (of Indonesia). In Malaya, despite widespread prejudice, some Eurasians became distinguished lawyers, engineers and journalists; many of the late 19th century Queen’s Scholarships went to Eurasians. Between the two world wars, Eurasians were present on Singapore’s Legislative Council (as they were in Hong Kong). ‘Their social status, however, did not show an analogous improvement, though the Eurasians clung to their British names, spoke English as their mother tongue, and were practically all Christians’.

The point for students of Hong Kong history is — how did the situation for Eurasians in Hong Kong compare?

No parallel to the Dutch laws of 1854 and 1892 are apparent in Hong Kong. It seems there was no clear delineation in law regarding educational, medical and other legal rights for Eurasians in Hong Kong, despite a range of social limitations, prejudices and practices. (Any corrections to this statement would be gratefully received!)

A detailed legal survey simply of this question would be a large contribution to scholarship on Eurasians in Hong Kong. A second step would be a detailed survey of the colonial papers (CO129) for any reference to Eurasians, any studies or social surveys or commissions related to their existence.

Other topics for comparison would include military service: Thompson & Adloff note how Eurasians constantly joined volunteer military detachments, in Malaya, in Singapore, (and, as we know, in Hong Kong). But in Singapore the Eurasian company was disbanded in 1909 (after only eight years) and permission to re-form was a long time coming. After World War Two, Eurasians in Singapore and Malaya agitated to join the British Army and, once in, found they were paid less than their European counterparts. Points of comparison are obvious there. Random memoirs and specific war histories have paid well-deserved tribute to particular groups of Eurasians who identified so strongly with then-British Hong Kong that they laid down their lives to defend it. A systematic comparison with their formation, their actions and their standing in Hong Kong compared to other British colonies would however be illuminating.

Another topic is efforts by Eurasians to organise themselves. Recreational groups were plentiful, but a Eurasian Review, started in Penang in the 1930s lasted only about a decade. That is a decade more than anything comparable in Hong Kong however. There was even an All-Malayan Eurasian Conference held in 1940. Individual Eurasians continued to achieve prominence and public responsibility after World War Two. But Thompson & Adloff’s primary point throughout is that as a community, the Eurasians of South East Asia had to assimilate locally or be doomed.

That seems like another good subject for comparison with Hong Kong, and an interesting assumption of the 1950s to test against the realities of today.

REFERENCE:
Thompson, Virginia, and Adloff, Richard. Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955.  (Chapter 3: Indigenous Minorities – The Eurasians.)

Generalising Eurasians in Asia

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By Vaudine England

Looking at how other colonies’ histories have tackled the topic of Eurasians gives useful clues to how researchers might tackle Hong Kong’s Eurasians.

An early effort looking at South East Asia was Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff’s Minority Problems in Southeast Asia, of 1955. This states baldly that all Eurasians under colonial rule ‘have faced the same handicaps, reacted to them in identical fashion, and displayed similar communal characteristics’ (p. 135). Can such a sweeping statement be true? It goes on to say that all Eurasians are city dwellers and white-collar workers. As a group, they have been ‘snubbed’ ‘and only a handful among them has been able to surmount the obstacles which the color bar has placed in their way’ (p. 135). The authors place the ‘irresponsibility of their European fathers’ alongside the barriers erected by the European community as a whole  as the major impediments to Eurasian advancement. Those barriers were real, with some jobs, residential areas, schools, clubs, even hotels closed to them.

Of course these authors were writing in 1955, the year that the Non-Aligned Movement first met in Bandung, Indonesia, when the issues of post-colonisation were of pressing daily importance across South East Asia. As is often the case in scholarship about Eurasians, the focus is largely on the sprawling Dutch East Indies, and on the impact of the diaspora from a crumbling China. Those major historical forces, with ramifications around us to this day, have their echo in Hong Kong of course, but can also be useful to highlight what makes the Hong Kong situation unique.

Still, in Thompson & Adloff, here are too many generalisations. Another one on offer is the allegedly striking contrast between the product of an (Overseas) Chinese father and a native Malay/Indonesia/Burmese, which they judge as most likely to be successful, and the product of a European and native mother which they judge to be invariably less successful. Apparently the injection of Chinese other-ness brought a physical stamina and pride in heritage to the mix, unavailable to offspring of European fathers!

Overall, Thompson & Adloff paint a somewhat tragic picture of a people forever stuck in between. Above them in social and financial status are the Europeans with whom they identify; below them are the ‘native’ Asians whom they allegedly despise: ‘While they have received less from the Europeans than they feel is their due, they have enjoyed in Asian eyes a privileged position as regards employment and standard of living’ (p. 136).

However, the survey marks key changes affecting Eurasian communities of South East Asia. Prior to World War Two they retained a privileged role as often the only (half) native people who had become proficient in the European colonialist’s language (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French). They could thus take higher positions in the colonial bureaucracies and business worlds. They mostly identified as Europeans and were strongly loyal to the European power even though they knew they would never have equality with wholly European friends and colleagues. During the war, those Eurasians identifying or identified as European suffered disproportionately at the hands of the Japanese across South East Asia.

As empires fell, through war and decolonisation, the privileged position enjoyed pre-war now evaporated. Unless they had worked to maintain fluency in local languages and norms, they lost out in the brave new post-colonial tropical world. They then faced invidious choices – to stay or go; and if to go, then where? Often the dream was the European ‘homeland’ which they had never seen; only the Netherlands offered any kind of assistance to their Eurasians, the Indos, with many others left in limbo. Wrote Thompson & Adloff: ‘the Eurasians are a rootless, frustrated, and divided minority — foreigners in the land of their birth, yet unable to move elsewhere’ (p. 136).

Reference is made to the idea of a homeland for Eurasians, such as the Jews found in Israel. This may sound very odd to a modern ear, but an attempt was made by Indonesian Eurasians (or ‘Indos’) to settle in New Guinea, on the far eastern edge of Indonesia. This apparently failed due to lack of agricultural skills and finance. Others thought of migrating to Brazil.

How much do these generalisations, experiences and ideas apply to the specific experience of the Eurasians of Hong Kong?

REFERENCE:
Thompson, Virginia, and Adloff, Richard. Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955.  See: Chapter 3 – ‘Indigenous Minorities – The Eurasians’.

Race Memory Puzzles in China, Japan War Histories

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By Vaudine England

This week (on 3 September) the Chinese government has decreed a special one-off public holiday (and vast military parade) to mark what it calls China’s victory over Japan 70 years ago. As with all anniversaries, a plethora of frantic re-writings of history is now underway to mark this moment. One can debate if it really was China or the impact of Hiroshima that defeated Japan, and the argument over whether it was China’s communists or nationalists who fought most, suffered more, are most responsible for the victory, will rumble on.

This blog looks back at a supposed racial impact of the war, specifically of the ignominious defeat of the British followed by Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong. Both then, and more recently, the view has been expressed that Japan’s appeal to the Asian populace for the overthrow of Western imperialism was attractive, and encouraged versions of collaboration among particularly Eurasian as well as Chinese Hong Kongers.

A gentle look at the first point comes in Asia for the Asiatics, by Robert Ward, published by the University of Chicago Press just before the war ended. Ward had been a consular officer for the United States, stationed in Hong Kong, and was interned for six months before being repatriated. He witnessed the early efforts of the Japanese to establish an empire in Asia ‘for the Asiatics’.

This was, according to Ward, a calculated, brutal and systematic process, of which the initial outbursts of rampant disorder, rape and looting was an integral part. Ward claims this had the effect (and so Ward assumes the intention) of forcing the local Hong Kong elite into submission. Leading figures such as Shouson Chow and Robert Kotewall, members of the Li (Bank of East Asia) family, and others did consent to take roles in committees set up by the occupying Japanese powers. No doubt they did so for self-preservation but it is also on record that departing British senior civil servants had specifically asked Chow and Kotewall to deal with the Japanese to help feed the people.

Ward’s primary concern was to consider what the post-war landscape will be in East Asia, after this idea of Asia for Asians has taken hold. Writing in 1945, he doubted that the brutality and subjection imposed by the Japanese would entirely neutralise the power of the pro-Asia ideal.

The overwhelming fact for many writers, then and since, has been the shaming collapse of the white man, of white power, seen in Japan’s rapid takeover not just of Hong Kong, but other British colonies such as Malaya, Singapore and Burma. These defeats would leave a residue, the impact of which would change post-war Asia forever.

All this was true, of course, but it is interesting to examine now the extent to which the collapse of British military power in the East did Not mean an end to British rule in Hong Kong, nor to Western impact and roles in East Asia’s post-war development. It is also interesting to note that, according to many Hong Kong people’s recollections, the brutality of Japanese rule did in fact fatally damage that ideal of Japan-led Asia for the Asians.

Perhaps race was simply less of a defining characteristic for people struggling to survive than some theorists would accept.

A more dramatic version of the view that colonial racism met its nemesis with the Japanese can be found in Gerald Horne’s Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, published in 2005 by New York University Press. Amusingly, reviews from the United States academic community laud this book as a radical retelling of the war, an unflinching survey of race and empire, and a fabulous study which shows where global history can go. At the same time, a detailed, calm and considered blog by a member of the community of people apparently so oppressed by Horne’s British colonialists — the Eurasian historian Brian Edgar — shows how full of holes the Horne thesis is.

According to Horne, the Japanese were appreciated, admired, and supported by the majority of Hong Kong’s population, at least at first, for Japan’s overturning of white supremacy. Several ideas seem to be involved here — that the British empire was founded (solely) on racism and thus that Hong Kong was too, and that British assumptions of racial superiority produced a vast and violent discriminatory universe of abuse and exploitation of the ‘non-pure’. On such ground, a fertile appeal of Japanese inversions of white rule could be imagined.

But as Brian Edgar points out, the detailed realities of daily life made Horne’s thesis ‘dead in the water’. Yes, Eurasians faced discrimination, but from the Chinese as well as from the British. Yes, some Eurasians were discriminated against at work but others were among the colony’s richest people. Edgar goes on to point out various pockets of Hong Kong life which were ‘relatively race-free’, some intellectual and some in sports; I would add most of business was multi-cultural too. But of course white racism existed — the argument is over whether this made Eurasians (and some Hong Kong Chinese) vulnerable to Japanese ideology and rule. As Edgar notes, Horne fails to cite one single Hong Kong Eurasian who was not part Japanese who can be proven to have joined the Japanese after Christmas Day 1941. On the contrary, people like the young (Eurasian) women, Phyllis Bliss and Irene Fincher escaped and Irene even married the race enemy, a British policeman who was working with the Chinese resistance. One fascinating case, Laurence Kentwell, is the subject of research by Baptist University’s Catherine Ladds, and he is an exception to every theory.

Edgar then tackles the case of Sir Robert Kotewall and laments that Horne has clearly failed to take note of British exonerations of the Executive Council member’s work under the Japanese. According to Edgar, Kotewall did shout ‘Banzai’ several times at public meetings but otherwise did little but ‘hedge’ while trying to help poor Chinese get fed. Tony Banham, author of the excellent http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/, regards Kotewall as ‘selfless’ and the charges of collaboration unfounded.

As Edgar notes, one has to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Amid the hoopla of a Chinese Communist Party-organised exercise in creating nationalism today, it is even more interesting to discover where the historical record makes clear not a nationalist narrative, but the nuance.