This free online talk is hosted by the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong. While women were filling the magistrates courts and prisons of the British Isles during the 19th century, a female criminal in Hong Kong was a rarity. Yet, often in response to the privations of grinding poverty, some did find themselves on the wrong side of the law. [...]
Kwan Lai-chun was sick of being made to feel second-class by her husband’s concubine; sick of her mother-in-law’s endless carping about the money she spent; sick of the whole family. Late one sticky, humid night, something snapped in her – and she grabbed the meat chopper. Within minutes, three people were dead: the concubine with over 70 gashes, many of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Under-resourced and ill-prepared, three constables at the squalid Police Station on Cheung Chau stood no chance against a ruthless pirate gang in 1912. Five more policemen lost their lives in a bloodbath in Wan Chai that might have been averted. But travel forward just a little and the outcome at a hold-up in Canton Road is very different. These three [...]