Hong Kong, Jan Morris
Hong Kong, Jan Morris
List: $29.95 | Sale: $20.97
Club: $14.97

Hong Kong

Author: Jan Morris

Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Unabridged: 12 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/14/2014

Categories: Nonfiction, Travel, East Asia


Synopsis

Hong Kong is the worlds most exciting city, at once fascinating and exasperating, a tangle of contradictions. It is a dazzling amalgam of conspicuous consumption and primitive poverty, the most architecturally incongruous yet undeniably beautiful urban panorama of all. Through firsthand reportage, world-renowned travel writer Jan Morris takes us through the crowded streets of this enigmatic city, offering the most insightful and comprehensive study of Hong Kong thus far. She reviews Hong Kongs early days as a British opium port controlled by pirates, cutthroats, and scoundrel tycoons, and looks ahead to the citys future as part of the Peoples Republic of China.

About Jan Morris

Born in 1926, Jan Morris lived and wrote as James Morris until 1972. She resides with her partner, Elizabeth Morris, in northwest Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her many books include In My Mind's Eye, Coronation Everest, and the Pax Britannica Trilogy.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Chris on May 02, 2024

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

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on September 27, 2015

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

Goodreads review by Walter on January 08, 2025

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

Goodreads review by Matt on April 29, 2013

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

Goodreads review by Joshua on July 09, 2015

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