Episodes
Season 1
The images below were creative interpretations of the episodes using AI image generation and do not represent historically accurate characters or events.
Beginnings
We make a stab at answering ‘how come Hong Kong’, paying close if occasionally erratic attention to modern Hong Kong’s origins in British trade with China…
What happened next
The story wanders on through Hong Kong’s patchy early years, when clever drafting by the Chinese side in the 1843 Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, left the newly founded port of Hong Kong looking at thin pickings…
Steamy disasters
In the fourth episode Stephen takes us through the turn of the 20th century up until World War 1…
World War 1
In this episode Stephen and DJ discuss the period leading up to the First World War, what happened in Hong Hong during the war and the period after…
Season 2
After the war
In the first episode of a new series Dr Stephen Davies discusses post war Hong Kong and the challenges it faced….
Ship breaking to container port
In episode eight Stephen explains how after the Second World War Hong Kong became a global powerhouse in ship breaking and then how that slowly transformed into one of the world largest container ports…
Troubled times
In this episode Stephen discusses the social unrest in Hong Kong during the 1960s & 70s and follows with a look at how the issues were resolved during the 1970s…
Season 3
Historians and Hong Kong: A most colonial ‘Colonial’
Over around a century and a half Hong Kong’s story has been told by professional and amateur historians. A few names became scores following the explosion in Hong Kong studies after the 1970s. Today there are as many and more netizens and bloggers…
How names can tell us a story, Part 1: Kwok Acheong
Almost wherever you are there will be streets named after town worthies, or national eminences, or significant entities and events. Sometimes, particularly in larger towns, the names can reveal additional historical detail. What the main trades were and where they concentrated, for example…
The small details: Edgar Goodman RMLI
The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are not movers and shakers. Yet it is those lives, humdrum and invisible though they often are, that actually make moving and shaking possible…
Going sailing: The crew of the Kitten
Imperialist Britain spread modern-style, rules governed, organized sport – very much the creation of a newly leisured, comparatively affluent early Victorian world – all over the world. One of those sports, though never up there in popularity and participation like football and cricket, was sailing…
How names tell us a story, Part 2: Ships with Hong Kong in the name
There are various ways of choosing to look at the past. Some of them are not very intuitive and can seem almost arbitrary. You wouldn’t imagine it, for example, but looking at all the known ships that have had ‘Hong Kong’ in their names (about 127 of them) offers interesting perspectives on Hong Kong’s maritime story….
Junk dreams
Shanghai and Hong Kong have been the starting point for more ‘sail a Chinese built junk across the seas’ than anywhere else. Hans van Tillburg has identified sixteen 19th century junks reported arriving on the west coast of North America. I’ve tallied thirty three reported on from around 1900 to c.1990…
Hardly cricket: the wreck of the Bokhara
Wrecks were pretty commonplace in 1892 and were at best usually a nine days wonder. However, the loss of the P&O Company’s SS Bokhara was something else. News stories ran all over the world for almost two years. A presentation silver plate was sent by Queen Victoria to the head of the rescuers of the few survivors…
How names tell us a story, Part 3: Ap Lei Pai is the wrong name
Bare text can only tell us so much. How many of us have ground our teeth when we’re reading a book that cries out for a map…and doesn’t have one? But, assisted by a bit of fossicking in archives, maps can also tell stories all by themselves. Maps of Hong Kong tells lots of them…
A ferry story
You would think, given the evolution of Hong Kong’s road network – slow, slow, slow – and Hong Kong’s intricate coastline and 263 islands, that ferries would have been a constant in Hong Kong’s story. They were and they weren’t. They were if all one means by ‘ferry’ is something that floats that carries any A to any B…
This sporting life
In previous episodes we’ve touched on cricket and sailing, in short, a peripheral mention of the arrival of modern, rule based organized sport in China. The treaty ports played a big role in this, which we could argue had a sort of happy ending in the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and China striding large on the world sporting stage…