Pete Spurrier's Blog

This session of Tai Kwun Conversations accompanies the opening of a new permanent heritage exhibition at F Hall, which makes reference to the historical function of Victoria Prison as a place of detention for Vietnamese boat people and undocumented immigrants from different places. It brings together two speakers from diverse backgrounds to share personal and collective experiences of the Vietnamese refugee history.

The dialogue between a Vietnamese refugee-turned-scholar and a former Hong Kong ...

Riding Out Typhoon Rose
by Iain Ward

Typhoon Rose was one of the worst storms to hit Hong Kong in the last fifty years. Winds gusted between 130 knots (150 mph) and 150 knots (172 mph) and some 12 inches of rain fell during the storm. Over 150 people were killed (no one knows the exact number) and nearly 6,000 rendered homeless. Thirty-seven ocean-going ships were wrecked and 300 fishing vessels either sunk or irreparably damaged.

In this extract from the anthology Stories from the Royal Hong Ko...

The photo is from Kowloon’s Kai Tak Stadium tonight, as Liverpool FC play AC Milan: stadium CEO John Sharkey presents Liverpool legend Sir Kenny Dalglish with a copy of When ‘Jesus’ Came to Hong Kong, Derek Currie’s book about being the first European football star to play in Asia.

   Currie came to the city in 1970 to play for Hong Kong side Rangers, but before he left Scotland he had played for Cumbernauld United — “alongside a youngster called Kenny Dalglish”, he says. 

   Currie picks up the...

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s wall exhibition this month has featured the photography of Melville Jacoby — an American freelance journalist, United Press stringer, and foreign correspondent for TIME and LIFE magazines who covered WWII in China, French Indochina (present-day Vietnam) and the Philippines.

This photo collection of wartime Chungking (Chongqing) was inspired by the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War by Bill Lascher and was curated by FCC member C...

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) is a well-known gathering spot in Hong Kong. It has a surprisingly tumultuous history. Founded in Japanese-occupied China in 1941, the Club’s first base was in Chongqing (Chungking), a city controlled by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As the Chinese civil war intensified, the club moved with the action, first to Nanjing, then to Shanghai. It moved to Hong Kong in 1949.

A photo exhibition at the FCC throughout April uses wartime photographs taken by Ame...

On Sunday March 30th (that’s tomorrow!) at 3pm, Paul French will launch his new book Destination Macao in the city itself.

The book is a collection of true stories about fascinating people who have visited or lived there — poets and pirates, rebels and writers, innkeepers and adventurers among them. Some you will have heard of, and some you won’t.

Paul will be launching his other new book Her Lotus Year too, about the time Wallis Simpson spent in China.

Join us at this event which is part of the...

In 1924, Wallis Simpson — the American future wife of Britain’s king — journeyed across China, witnessing a nation in turmoil. Join prolific old China author Paul French to learn about ‘Her Lotus Year’, his new essays in Destination Macao, and stories from his bestsellers Midnight in Peking and City of Devils.

Date: Thursday, 13 March 2025

Time: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Location: Bookazine Social, Shops 03-07, G/F, Parade Ground, Tai Kwun, (Formerly) Central Police Station, 10 Hollywood Road, Central...

Ian Gill’s first visit to Hong Kong in 1975 takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth ...

Taking place on Tuesday March 4 at the Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong.

Author Ian Gill talks about the main characters of his Anglo-Chinese family, who lived in China and Hong Kong from the mid-19th century until modern times.

The story starts when his great-grandmother married Ted Newman, a Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company steward, in Hong Kong in 1869. They founded the Family Hotel in Chefoo, turning it into one of the best-known hotels on the China coast.

Later, Fran...

This is an excerpt from Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878/1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming, a Victorian traveller and artist who arrived in Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878. It’s introduced and annotated by Paul French as part of his China Revisited series.

Merry Christmas, one and all, 145 years later!

Care of Mrs Snowden, City of Victoria
Isle of Hong-Kong,
Christmas-Day, 1878.

Certainly fortune has favoured me, for we reached this most lovely city...