The Hong Kong History Podcast

Sep 09 2024 21 ep. 52 mins 22

The Hong Kong History Podcast artwork

Weekly discussions on subjects related to the history of Hong Kong.

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This sporting life

Sep 09 2024 64 mins

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. The story of the arrival of those sports in Hong K

A ferry story

Jun 28 2024 64 mins

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. But if one means what we’re all familiar with

How names tell us a story, Part 3: Ap Lei Pai is the wrong name

Jun 22 2024 64 mins

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. Like the way the small island everyone these days knows as Ap Lei Pai came to have that name…and

Hardly cricket: the wreck of the Bokhara

Jun 02 2024 57 mins

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. There was involvement by the Governor of Hong Kong, a visit b

Junk dreams

May 15 2024 65 mins

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. In Hong Kong the story starts with the Keying in 1846 and ends – maybe

How names tell us a story, Part 2: Ships with Hong Kong in the name

Apr 10 2024 51 mins

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. Who called their ships after our home city? Not the big

Going sailing: The crew of the Kitten

Apr 02 2024 53 mins

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. Hong Kong was a home for recreational sailing almost as soon as the British gra

The small details: Edgar Goodman RMLI

Mar 24 2024 59 mins

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. In being moved and shaken, it’s we nobodies who actually do the moving and shaking.

How names can tell us a story, Part 1: Kwok Acheong

Mar 17 2024 46 mins

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. In Hong Kong over one hundred street names reveal details of Hong Kong’s maritime story, p

Historians and Hong Kong: A most colonial ‘Colonial’

Mar 07 2024 62 mins

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. We don’t often know much detail about any of the handful of colonialist pioneers of the 1890-1960 period. They’re just authors’