Any reviews of our books on Amazon are most welcome, but especially when they are as detailed as these ones. The Mercenary Mandarin (Amazon link here) tells the story of William Mesny, a Jersey boy who ran off to sea and arrived in Shanghai in 1860 when he was just 18. Amid the chaos of civil war in 19th-century China, [...]
Share If you cannot view this email, please Click Here to view an online version. Unsubscribe/Update Profile | Share With Friends | Subscribe Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong NewsletterMarch 2018 New book: The Peak: An Illustrated History of Hong Kong’s Top District The Peak: An Illustrated History of Hong Kong’s Top Districtby Richard J. GarrettPart of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong [...]
Come to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum at 4.00pm on Saturday February 24 and hear Patricia O'Sullivan tell the little-known story of the Hong Kong Naval Dockyard Police Force. The history of the force doesn’t suffer so much from lost documentation as from the lack of any in the first place. At some point in the 1850s it emerged by [...]
Glenn Leibowitz is the host of Write With Impact. In his latest podcast he interviews former American diplomat Syd Goldsmith, author of Hong Kong on the Brink, a memoir of Hong Kong's brush with the Cultural Revolution in 1967. Glenn says: In our conversation, which we conducted in person in Taipei, Syd shares how, despite never considering himself a writer [...]
The Gresson Street gunfight happened in Wan Chai 100 years ago this week. Why has it been forgotten for so long? Patricia O'Sullivan has spent a decade digging out the full story for her book, Policing Hong Kong – An Irish History. Now, Stuart Heaver has written a feature about the event. A running gunfight was now played out in [...]
In 1976, Peter Mann left England for Hong Kong. As a police inspector, he commanded a sub-unit and led a district vice squad in Kowloon before joining the colonial government. He then served as district officer for Wan Chai. From raids on gambling dens to organising governors’ visits, his work involved him in all levels of Hong Kong society. Come [...]
Share If you cannot view this email, please Click Here to view an online version. Unsubscribe/Update Profile | Share With Friends | Subscribe Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong Newsletter October 2017 Chinese Ghosts Revisited Chinese Ghosts Revisited: A Study of Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences by Charles Emmons Do the Hong Kong Chinese experience ghosts, hauntings, spirit mediumship, ESP and other paranormal [...]
Press release PEN HONG KONG PUBLISHES BOOK TO MARK 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF HANDOVER — BRINGS TOGETHER CITY’S WRITERS AND ARTISTS TO DEFEND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a borrowed place (Blacksmith Books, July 2017) HONG KONG — To mark the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China, PEN Hong Kong presents [...]
I was pleased to be interviewed about local book publishing by Elaine Yau of the South China Morning Post. We held the interview in the Blacksmith office in Fo Tan and then went to the roof of the industrial building next door for a fun photo shoot by Xiaomei Chen (who has some great photo essays on her website). "Hong [...]
Guidebook writer David Leffman is heading back to remote parts of Guizhou province on Tuesday, to pick up the trail of William Mesny - the British-born "Mercenary Mandarin" who became a general in the Chinese army. But before he goes, he will be giving an illustrated talk about Mesny to the Royal Asiatic Society in the Centre for Visual Arts, [...]
Share If you cannot view this email,please Click Here to view an online version. Unsubscribe/Update Profile | Share With Friends | Subscribe Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong Newsletter December 2015 Hong Kong art: Sketches of the Southside Sketches of the Southside: Aberdeen Harbour and Repulse Bay to Stanley Market and Shek O by Lorette RobertsHong Kong’s Southside – the glimmering stretch [...]
I met up with Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong-based historian (left), and Shun Chi Ming, director of the Hong Kong Observatory (centre), to talk about the wartime diary of Graham Heywood. Over tea at the Observatory, a beautiful Victorian building hidden away on a forested hill in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Geoff and CM explained how Heywood's diary [...]
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