An excerpt from Searching for Billie sheds light on the life of a World War II internee at Hong Kong’s Stanley camp – the author’s mother – in the chaotic days following the Japanese surrender.

Various local NGOs have come together to oppose construction projects in the Malaysian state, including three motorways, an undersea tunnel and three new islands

Writer and friend retrace the footsteps of a grandfather’s secret second wife and a loving mother whose lives were shaped in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin.

Thousands make the treacherous journey to Buscalan to be inked by 100-year-old Whang-od Oggay, the oldest living practitioner of her art.

The Hunan provincial capital bears its association with the nation’s most famous son proudly, and despite the introduction of modern industries, the city retains a feeling of yesteryear.

Once host to Scoop author Evelyn Waugh’s eccentric, eclectic cast of fictional characters, the Itegue Taitu Hotel may play down its literary history, but the ghost of William Boot lingers

T’ien Hsia magazine set out to be a platform for cross-cultural exchange until war intervened; managing it was this correspondent’s mother, who fled to Hong Kong, where she bought opium for Emily Hahn, and almost became personal aide to Madame Chiang

How a Chinese mother’s dream of an English education for her son placed him at the mercy of a tyrannical ‘discipline master’, who was accused of both physical and sexual abuse during his time at the Grace Dieu Manor House, in England

Ian Gill hadn’t even heard of Chefoo (now Yantai) until he started tracing his family’s roots and found out his great-grandparents had lived an enviable life there in the 19th century

‘You were two sons rolled into one,’ my mother told me the first time we visited my half-brother Brian’s grave in Stanley Military Cemetery, writes Ian Gill, who but for his death in 1944 might never have been conceived at the nearby internment camp

In 1916 in Hunan, Hong Kong-born Frank Newman took in an abandoned baby girl, much to the disapproval of his compatriots. Her son, Manila-based journalist Ian Gill, discovers that was just one of many surprises in the life of a most independent-minded man.