• A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War

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    Photographs by Melville Jacoby / Text by Bill Lascher / Foreword by Paul French

    A Danger Shared: A Journalist's Glimpses of a Continent at War provides a searing visual history of Asia during World War II as seen by foreign correspondent Melville Jacoby.

    In this meticulously curated collection of never-before-seen images, readers experience glamorous Macau soirées, visit Guangxi farms, and witness wartime Chongqing’s wreckage and resilience. Along the way, Jacoby treats Filipino fishermen and Hanoi flower-sellers with the same care as the Soong sisters, Chiang Kai-Shek, and other icons.

    Through scenes of everyday friendship, toil, and commerce alongside bombed classrooms, anxious refugees, and exhausted soldiers, A Danger Shared documents humanity’s persistence at a cataclysmic historical moment.

    Look inside this book:
    Introduction

  • The Girl Who Dreamed: A Hong Kong Memoir of Triumph Against the Odds

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    At the age of 14, Sonia Leung was raped by her ping-pong coach.
     
    She had moved from China two-and-a-half years earlier to join her family in Hong Kong, but she could not fit in. The family of six lived in a cramped subdivided hut in a Kowloon squatter village but rarely communicated with each other. The difficulties of adjusting to colonial Hong Kong heightened the tensions between her parents. Feeling trapped and unloved, Sonia was too afraid to tell anyone about the rape. She saved money by working part-time at McDonald's and, a year later, she bought a one-way plane ticket to Taipei and ran away from home.
     
    The Girl Who Dreamed is a memoir of her childhood in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan – and how, through work and further education, she found her way to an independent life away from the family and world from which she needed to free herself.
  • The Ink Trail: Hong Kong

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    For years, Andreas von Buddenbrock – also known as “The Ink Trail” – has been filling sketchbook after sketchbook with ink drawings that all aim to capture the places and people he comes across; from market stalls and their vendors to high rises and dilapidated buildings to lush, winding nature trails.
     
    The Ink Trail: Hong Kong offers a selection of his best drawings, from the start of his journey in 2017 to the end of 2023. Step into the world of an ink-pen artist as he guides you around the diverse locations of Hong Kong, offering personal anecdotes, thoughts behind his creative process and more.
  • The Good War of Consul Reeves

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    Months before the start of the Pacific War in 1941, John Reeves – his career and marriage failing – is posted as British consul to the tiny Portuguese colony of Macao in southern China.

    The Japanese soon declare war on the West with their attacks on Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong. But because Portugal is neutral, Macao is left alone and becomes a tiny island of neutrality, an Asian Casablanca surrounded by Japanese-occupied China.

    Reeves, a lonely and awkward man, finds himself the only senior representative of the Allies within a radius of thousands of miles. He runs spy rings, collects intelligence, smuggles people to freedom, takes care of refugees and is threatened with assassination – and The Good War of Consul Reeves tells his story.

  • Hong Kong Slang

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    The classic, the comical, and plenty of rude ones too

    By Lindsay Varty and Iris Yim, illustrated by Amber Tsang

    Ever feel like a chicken talking to a duck? Ever ask a girl out, only to be forced to eat lemons? Maybe you've been told that you're a peanut guy? Or perhaps someone has warned you that you're wearing a green hat?

    No need to be confused! This little dictionary of Cantonese slang will supply you with all the appropriate knowledge to get by in Hong Kong and make you cool at office parties. With illustrations and translations, as well as English slang alternatives, both Cantonese and English speakers can learn and laugh at the joys (and vulgarities) of Hong Kong slang in a celebration of local culture.

  • Volume 5: Old Hong Kong Photos and The Tales They Tell

    HK$168.00
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    Not your typical photo book!

    Meet the people of old Hong Kong through these rare photos, dating from the 1950s right back to the 1880s. There are cobblers, conjurors, compradores, croquet players, soldiers, sailors, Scottish golfers, hawkers, a Hungarian motorcyclist, and more! Who among them called Hong Kong ‘home’? Join David Bellis to find out, as he uncovers clues in the photos’ details that reveal each person’s story.

    David runs Gwulo.com, the award-winning local history website with over 30,000 photos of old Hong Kong.

    Part of a five-volume series; to see the other books, click here.

  • Backstage in Hong Kong: A life with the Philharmonic, Broadway musicals and classical superstars

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    After 50 momentous years, little is remembered of the chaos the Hong Kong Philharmonic faced in its early days as a professional outfit. John Duffus arrived in Hong Kong in 1979 as its fifth general manager in as many years. In this entertaining memoir he highlights those problems and illustrates how, with typical Scottish grit and determination, he helped get the orchestra on the road as an international ensemble.

    John’s subsequent concerts as a Hong Kong impresario with superstars Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Leslie Cheung, Kiri Te Kanawa, Yo-Yo Ma and many others, including pop icons Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John, make for fascinating and occasionally shocking stories, as do the almost unbelievable backstage dramas he reveals – some complete in all their back-stabbing detail – while managing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Asian companies and bringing CATS and Phantom of the Opera to Hong Kong.

  • Hong Kong Shifts: Stories from the streets of Hong Kong

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    Words by Cynthia Cheng
    Photographs by Maxime Vanhollebeke

    From sampan ladies and bamboo scaffolders to street cleaners, fishermen, security guards and market vendors – these workers form the backbone of the fast-paced metropolis of Hong Kong, yet they are often overlooked or taken for granted. Looking beyond the glamorous harbourfront, neon-lit shopping districts and dramatic skyline, Hong Kong Shifts explores the back alleys to meet and learn from the individuals who work tirelessly to keep the city ticking. These are stories and portraits of resilience, wisdom, positivity and strength from the streets of Hong Kong.

    Hong Kong Shifts is a social impact storytelling platform with a mission to promote kindness, empathy and connection in our living and working environments. At the core of our project is the belief that storytelling is a powerful tool to engage, move and inspire – and, ultimately, to build bridges between diverse communities in the city that we call home.

  • Pickle the Porcupine and the Wild Hong Kong Adventure

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    Illustrated by Catherine Choi

    Pickle the Porcupine lives high in the hills of Hong Kong, where he loves to nibble on tree trunks. But one day he finds himself lost in the busy streets of the city. How can he find his way home to the forest?

    This poetic and fun tale of a loveable local creature will introduce you to all sorts of Hong Kong transport: ferries, buses, trams and more. See how many kinds of transport you have travelled on!

     

  • Destination Macao

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    A weed from Catholic Europe, it took root
    Between some yellow mountains and a sea,
    Its gay stone houses an exotic fruit,
    A Portugal-cum-China oddity.

    Rococo images of Saint and Saviour
    Promise her gamblers fortunes when they die;
    Churches beside the brothels testify
    That faith can pardon natural behaviour.

    This city of indulgence need not fear…

    — WH Auden, Macao: A Sonnet

    For the third in his acclaimed Destination series, Paul French journeys to the former Portuguese enclave of Macao, for him as much a place of the imagination as of reality. Constantly portrayed as the louche, sinful sister of Hong Kong, it was also a key trading post and early melting pot on the South China Sea.

    From the Macao of artists George Chinnery and George Smirnoff, the writers Deolinda da Conceição and Maurice Dekobra, to the pulp fiction fantasies and cinematic fever dreams of Josef von Sternberg and Jean Delannoy; from those like Dr Pedro Lobo and Ian Fleming who came to Macao to chase gold, as well as those who sought refuge from war and the combatants who sought secret passage through ‘neutral' Macao; from the earliest days of the China coast trade and its assorted cast of innkeepers and adventurers to the bizarre tales the changing times in the colony created. Did Japan really try to buy Macao in 1934? Who really sailed with Macao's pirate queen Lai Choi San? Who were the Portuguese rebels who sought to declare Macao a republic in the 1920s?

    Following the format of Destination Shanghai and Destination Peking, Destination Macao tells the true stories of fascinating people who lived in or visited Macao in the 19th and 20th centuries.

    Look inside this book
    Click on the following link to read pages from Destination Macao.

    Contents and Introduction 

  • Paul French’s Destination series: a book bundle

    HK$328.00
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    Bestselling author Paul French travels to the most storied cities in China to tell the true tales of fascinating people who visited or lived in these places in the 19th and 20th centuries.

    With a special focus on the glamorous years between the two world wars, the Destination series describes the local and international assortment of adventurers, writers, spies, artists, socialites and scoundrels who inhabited Macao, Peking and Shanghai during that golden age.

    Save 20% by buying this bundle which includes the following items in the series. Please click on their titles below to see full details and read excerpts from each book.

    1 x Destination Macao

    1 x Destination Peking

    1 x Destination Shanghai

     

     
  • The Mystic Flowery Land: A Curious Imperial Maritime Customs Officer’s Roamings in Hong Kong and Canton in Southern China’s Plague Year

    HK$90.00
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    By Charles JH Halcombe, introduced and annotated by Paul French
     
    No. 5 in the China Revisited series
     
    Charles Halcombe served for much of the 1880s and 1890s with China’s Imperial Maritime Customs Service. His career included sojourns in both Canton and Hong Kong. Halcombe long harboured dreams of becoming a journalist. Unusually he married a Chinese woman, Liang Ah Ghan, the daughter of a Chefoo merchant during his stay. His seven-year career in China, his writing ambitions and his marriage all strongly inform his impressions and the retelling of his experiences.
     
    In these excerpts from The Mystic Flowery Land we join Halcombe arriving by sampan at Hong Kong’s old Pedder’s Wharf before accompanying him on an extended literary stroll along Queen’s Road. With him we enter the “rum-mills” and Chinese theatres, meet the Sing-Song girls, indigent Europeans, and inveterate gamblers of the colony. On Hollywood Road Halcombe explores the fascinating Man-Mo Temple.

    In Canton Halcombe investigates the riverine life of the city - the infamous “flower boats”, the working river and coastal steamers, the numerous temples to the sea Gods.

    But it is perhaps Halcombe’s description of the terrible bubonic plague that hit Hong Kong in 1894 that stands out to the reader today as both shocking in its tragedy and pertinent to our own times.

  • China Revisited: a series bundle

    HK$360.00
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    China Revisited is a series of extracted reprints of mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century Western impressions of Hong Kong, Macao and China. The series comprises excerpts from travelogues or memoirs written by missionaries, diplomats, military personnel, journalists, tourists and temporary sojourners.

    They came to China from Europe or the United States, some to work or to serve the interests of their country, others out of curiosity. Each excerpt is fully annotated by Paul French to best provide relevant explications of Hong Kong, Macao and China at the time, to illuminate encounters with historically interesting characters or notable events.

    Save 20% by buying this bundle which includes the following items in the series. Please click on their titles below to read full details.

    1 x Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macao and Canton Sojourns

    1 x Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878/1879

    1 x LING-NAM: Hong Kong, Canton and Hainan Island in the 1880s

    1 x Roving Through Southern China: An American’s Explorations of Hong Kong, Macao and Canton in the early 1920s

    1 x The Mystic Flowery Land: A Curious Imperial Maritime Customs Officer’s Roamings in Hong Kong and Canton in Southern China’s Plague Year 

  • 中国早期高尔夫 1870-1950 — 现代高尔夫运动如何从苏格兰传入中国

    HK$388.00
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    起源于苏格兰的现代高尔夫运动从 19 世纪中叶逐渐传播到全球,首先是亚洲,然后是欧洲、北美、大洋洲和非洲。它已成为一项流行的户外运动、国内和国际竞技比赛以及奥运会项目。


    现代高尔夫运动的传播是大英帝国称霸全球的副产品。早在 1829 年,印度就建造了高尔夫球场和俱乐部,远早于它们出现在欧洲大陆。


    随着大英殖民帝国向中国扩张,苏格兰和英格兰人以海军军官、领事和海关官员、工程师、医生、建筑师、商人、银行家和会计师的身份抵达中国,并在中国开放的贸易口岸定居。苏格兰宣教士进入中国内陆,为主寻找新的归信者。


    当他们成为中国贸易港口的居民时,他们带来了他们的国民运动——高尔夫。几乎无一例外,早期的中国高尔夫球场和俱乐部首先出现在贸易港口。球场和俱乐部背后的人绝大多数是苏格兰人,其中一些直接来自现代高尔夫的发源地,如圣安德鲁斯和卡诺斯蒂。


    据我们研究,中国最早的高尔夫球场1870年出现在汉口(Hankou),最早的高尔夫球会是汉口高尔夫俱乐部,成立于1878年。这说明除印度和法国外,中国是高尔夫运动从英国传向全球的第三个国家。接着,中国其他港口的球场和俱乐部相继出现:1889 年的香港、1890 年的烟台(芝罘)、1894 年的上海和 1895 年的天津(天津),等等。

    汉口高尔夫俱乐部的先驱是苏格兰人詹姆斯·费利尔。他的父亲是卡诺斯蒂高尔夫球场的创始人和队长。詹姆斯从小就打球,在 1860 年代后期抵达中国前,已经将自己的高尔夫球技巧磨练到零差点的水平。作为招商局轮船公司的一名轮机工程师,费利尔经常往来于武汉和上海之间。1870年,他与几位苏格兰朋友一起,在汉口建造了中国第一个只有几个洞的简易高尔夫球场,并开始打皇家古老游戏。费利尔 1871 年又在上海赛马场内,建造了只有几个洞的高尔夫球场。


    本书借助大量的插图,讲述了中国高尔夫运动最初80年的故事。

  • Early Golf in China, 1870-1950: How Modern Golf Spread from Scotland to China

    HK$388.00
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    The modern game of golf, which originated in Scotland, gradually spread across the globe from the mid-19th century, first to Asia and then to Europe, North America, Oceania and Africa. It has become a popular outdoor sport, a national and international competitive game, and an Olympic event.

    The spread of the modern game of golf was a by-product of the British Empire. Golf courses were constructed and clubs established as early as 1829 in India, long before they appeared in mainland Europe. As the British colonial empire expanded into China, Scots arrived in the country as naval officers, consular and customs officials, engineers, doctors, architects, merchants, bankers and accountants, and settled in China’s opening trading ports. Scottish missionaries reached into the Chinese interior to seek new converts for the Lord.

    As they became residents in China’s trading ports, they brought along their national game. Almost without exception, early Chinese golf courses and clubs appeared first at the trading ports. Those behind the courses and clubs were overwhelmingly Scots, with some coming directly from the birthplaces of modern golf such as St. Andrews and Carnoustie.

    According to our research, the earliest golf course in China appeared in Hankou (Hankow) in 1870 and the earliest golf club was the Hankow Golf Club, incorporated in 1878. This indicates that China was the third country, after only India and France, where the game of golf spread outside the UK. Later, courses and clubs appeared in other Chinese ports: Hong Kong in 1889, Yantai (Chefoo) in 1890, Shanghai in 1894 and Tianjin (Tientsin) in 1895, followed by many others.

    The pioneer of the Hankow Golf Club was a Scotsman, James Ferrier. His father had been the founder and captain of the Carnoustie Golf Links. James played from an early age and had honed his golfing skills to the level of a zero handicapper when he arrived in China in the late 1860s. As a marine engineer employed by the China Merchants Steamship Company, Ferrier travelled with his ship up and down the Yangtze River between Wuhan and Shanghai. In 1870, together with a few Scottish friends, he built China’s first rudimentary golf course with only a couple of holes in Hankou and started playing the Royal & Ancient game. Ferrier also built Shanghai’s first golf links of a few holes inside the Shanghai Race Course in 1871.

    With the aid of plentiful illustrations, this book tells the story of the first 80 years of golf in China.