christof's blog

Hong Kong History

While cut off the digital world (see below), I finally found some time to read the highly recommendable "Modern History of Hong Kong" by Steve Tsang on our sunny roof terrace in the midst of crowded HK Central.
The book is very well structured, well written and does a great job of keeping the academic stuff in footnotes at the end of the book to not disrupt the reading pleasure.
Staying in this amazing city with such a short yet turbulent history while reading about it was a great experience. It is a wonderful case how knowledge totally shifts your frame of mind, how you suddenly see the same things and people around you with totally different eyes, starting from street names to the faces of Chinese inhabitants, e.g. when you start to guess in which wave of immigrations did a given person come to HK which was just a barren island of 6,000 fishermen 170 years ago?
Also, it is amazing to see how deliberate history is and how much of it is, while driven by the balance of power between Britain and China, totally incidental and fragile.
Many of the founding and constituting principles of this phenomenon resonate very well with my own: Rule of law, entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility, global outlook.
All this certainly made Hong Kong more attractive to me, both through identification with (some of) its values as well as through familarity.

posted by Christof Wittig @ 2:10 AM