Hong Kong

Even though the cover of the edition I have sports the subtitle ‘Epilogue to an Empire’, the correct subtitle to Jan Morris’ Hong Kong is ‘The End of an Empire’, more accurate in that even this 1990 updating still long preceded the handing over of the colony to mainland China in 1997, a truer encaps......more

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......more

I found this book somewhere in Bedstuy near our first apartment 4 years ago. Someone talked me out of reading it but I always kept it in my room, even as we moved two more times. Who knows, maybe I was supposed to read it right now for some reason but I really liked this book. I realized I knew litt......more

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 Kon......more

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 q......more