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Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been a place of ever-changing contours and skylines as well as home to a great variety of people. Here we present columns, photo galleries and stories about people who've lived in and helped shape Hong Kong, buildings preserved and long vanished, historical events, the city's changing culture and how the past shapes the present.
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Tourists to Hong Kong have long been fed rote-learned clichés about its history by uninspiring and uninspired guides. In today’s new normal, who would dare risk offering them anything different?
Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue: names given to the tunnels of Hong Kong’s Shing Mun Redoubt. Yet their occupants in 1941 were Scots for whom London was in a foreign land.
Chiang Mai’s foreign cemetery not only contains Hong Kong-made tombstones, but also bear testament to the educational ties that once bound northern Thailand to Hong Kong.
After World War II, Henri Vetch built a publishing career in China before being jailed for plotting to assassinate Mao Zedong and later taking the helm of the freshly minted Hong Kong University press.
Gimmicks like fireworks and drone shows that all but the most backward Chinese cities look down upon are not the answer to Hong Kong tourism’s problems. Tourists want authentic experiences.
For many Hong Kong POWs, the abundance of time the Japanese occupation afforded allowed latent artistic talents to blossom.
Hong Kong residents have been chuckling away at amusing T-shirt slogans since the 1980s, but only the foolish or careless are laughing now.
Humble roadside food stalls introduced hungry Hongkongers to spicy but affordable South Asian delicacies that originated in the British Army garrisons stationed across the New Territories.
An eccentric Hong Kong University English teacher in the late 1930s, Adrian Paterson absorbed Chinese culture with an enthusiasm that left its mark on his students long after his earthly tenure ended.
The 1.5 million refugees from China’s civil war who flooded post-war Hong Kong were practical folks. The fruit trees and bushes they planted are a legacy of the squatter settlements they once inhabited.
Healthy and full of protein, soybeans have been a popular foodstuff in China for centuries. Here’s how they’re processed, made into products like soy sauce – and used in Cantonese to refer to lesbians.
They are a staple in many a home throughout Hong Kong during Lunar New Year, but not all golden citrus fruits are born equal.
Cheap but pungent, fermented bean curd has been adding flavour to Chinese rice and congee dishes for generations. Even stinky tofu can become highly addictive to those who come to enjoy it.
Direct flights now take people and goods between Hong Kong and other cities around China and Southeast Asia, but in decades past, small coastal vessels connected the region at a much slower pace.
It makes no difference whether one uses cow or bull dung on the plants in one’s garden – it will still grow. Perhaps the same applies to Hong Kong District Council election candidates.
The Friday market in Shek Kong, Hong Kong, was a favourite of British service wives living in married quarters near the then remote village. Now long gone, it is reduced to mere memory.
Jason Wordie remembers his enduring friendship with Irene Smirnoff, whose father, George Vitalievich Smirnoff, painted his famous scenes of Macau in World War II with his young child by his side.
Hong Kong missed an opportunity to promote itself as tolerant and outward-looking when it hosted the Gay Games 2023, all thanks to a self-appointed cabal of guardians of ‘traditional family life’.
Ubiquitous throughout Hong Kong on both public and private buildings, glazed ceramic tiles were popularised through their use to prolong the life of poorly constructed buildings.
Hong Kong has always been relatively short on historical relics but in Sung Wong Toi, a rare quiet spot in the hubbub of Kowloon City, one of our most ancient antiquities looks silently on.
By combining history, technology and entertainment, ‘time travel’ tourism could rejuvenate Hong Kong’s travel industry by attracting a range of visitors seeking unique and immersive experiences.
SCMP ColumnistLuisa Tam
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