The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) is a well-known gathering spot in Hong Kong. It has a surprisingly tumultuous history. Founded in Japanese-occupied China in 1941, the Club’s first base was in Chongqing (Chungking), a city controlled by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As the Chinese civil war intensified, the club moved with the action, first to Nanjing, then to Shanghai. It [...]
Taking place on Tuesday March 4 at the Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong. Author Ian Gill talks about the main characters of his Anglo-Chinese family, who lived in China and Hong Kong from the mid-19th century until modern times. The story starts when his great-grandmother married Ted Newman, a Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company steward, in Hong Kong [...]
There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Morning Post about Wang Jingwei, the wartime Chinese leader who collaborated with the Japanese to set up a puppet government in Nanjing, and who has been reviled by Chinese ever since as a traitor. Indeed, his very name carries the same derogatory associations as ‘Quisling’ in the West. It seems that Wang’s calligraphy [...]
Scandal and corruption, drugs and pirates, triads and flower boats; the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the Communist takeover of Canton. Peter Hui was there. He knew everybody and saw everything. This is the real story of Hong Kong, told with the rich flavours of the street. If Peter had been only a little bit different he could have [...]