• No City for Slow Men: Hong Kong’s quirks and quandaries laid bare

    HK$128.00
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    • EUR: €15.08
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    • JPY: ¥2,575

    with illustrations by Lee Po Ng

    Author and blogger Jason Y. Ng has a knack for making the familiar both fascinating and funny. Three years after his bestselling début HONG KONG State of Mind, the razor-sharp observer returns with a sequel that is bigger and every bit as poignant.

    No City for Slow Men is a collection of 36 essays that examine some of the pressing social, cultural and existential issues facing Hong Kong. It takes us from the gravity-defying property market to the plunging depths of old age poverty, from the storied streets of Sheung Wan to the beckoning island of Cheung Chau, from the culture-shocked Western expat to the misunderstood Mainland Chinese and the disenfranchised foreign domestic worker. The result is a treatise on Hong Kong life that is thought-provoking, touching and immensely entertaining.

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    Introduction   Horo-Logic   The Storm Cometh

  • HONG KONG State of Mind: 37 views of a city that doesn’t blink

    HK$118.00
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    • EUR: €13.91
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    • JPY: ¥2,374

    with illustrations by Lee Po Ng

    Hong Kong is a mixed bag of a city. It is where Mercedes outnumber taxi cabs, partygoers count down to Christmas every December 24, and larger-than-life billboards of fortune tellers and cram school tutors compete with breathtaking skylines.

    HONG KONG State of Mind is a collection of essays by a popular blogger who zeroes in on the city’s idiosyncrasies with deadpan precision. At once an outsider looking in and an insider looking out, Ng has created something for everyone: a travel journal for the passing visitor, a user’s manual for the wide-eyed expat, and an open diary for the native Hong Konger looking for moments of reflection.

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    Kowloon Complex

  • Destination Macao

    HK$138.00
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    • CNY: CN¥127.93
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    • AUD: AU$26.55
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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.

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    Contents and Introduction 

  • My Private China

    HK$128.00
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    What do normal people in China look forward to when they get up in the morning? What is the mentor of Lang Lang like? What about the personal friend of Chairman Mao – and how does his granddaughter relate to him after the murderous Cultural Revolution? What do the numerous evangelical Americans really think of the Chinese? How does the One Country, Two Systems paradigm work for Hong Kong?

    For the last 73 years, American Book Award winner Alex Kuo has travelled back-and-forth between America and China. These letters and essays portray the private China, and provide indispensable cultural information for anyone interested in the People’s Republic in the 21st century.

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    Introduction   Counting   The Re-Taking of Hong Kong

  • Beijing: Portrait of a City

    HK$218.00
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    • JPY: ¥4,385

    and Lucy Cavender

    Beijing: Portrait of a City is the shared work of some of the city's finest writers who lead us through ‘hutong’ alleys, antique markets, artists' communities, gay bars, parks and the nostalgic streets of memory. They beguile with poems, amuse with camel anecdotes and thrill with two murder stories one a genuine antique, the other a fictional contemporary. They take us back to the often-ignored Mongolian roots of the city and project forward to ask whether spectacular modern architecture will suffice to return Beijing to what it sees as its ancient place at the centre of the world.

    The book interweaves its written work with a collection of wry and telling photographs of different aspects of the city, creating a compelling portrait of Beijing.

    The contributors including Zhu Wen, Adam Williams, Roy Kesey, Ma Jian, Alfreda Murck, Tim Clissold, Catherine Sampson, Peter Hessler, Karen Smith, Paul French, Michael Aldrich, Hong Ying and Rob Gifford, all published authors and experts in their field have spent many years living in Beijing and know it from the inside. Their individual contributions combine to leave a highly original and unforgettable impression of one of the world’s oldest and most fascinating cities.

  • Paul French’s Destination series: a book bundle

    HK$328.00
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    • CNY: CN¥304.06
    • GBP: £32.88
    • EUR: €38.65
    • AUD: AU$63.11
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    • JPY: ¥6,598

    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