Week 1: Orientation

I. Why Hong Kong?

• Claims to uniqueness
• Claims to commonality/generality
• Sources of questions

I. Why History?

• History as the past
• History as a way of thinking
• The “life-cycle” of thinking with History
  • Texts/Contexts
  • Claims/Arguments/Narratives
  • Questions/Problems (how/why)
  • Data/Sources
  • Analysis/Interpretation
  • New claims/arguments/narratives
  • New questions/problems
• History in the Age of the Anthropocene

IV. By the end of the course, students should be able to . . .

• construct evidence-based accounts of the changes, continuities, and challenges that have shaped Hong Kong society since the mid-nineteenth century;
• read and interpret primary sources—firsthand documents, images, and other traces of the past—with confidence;
• assess the strengths and weaknesses of competing historical claims and interpretations;
• situate Hong Kong’s transformations within broader regional and global patterns of historical change.

V. Course Structure

• Canvas/Course Blog
• Attendance/Participation
• Schedule/Readings
• Quizzes
• Discussion Posts
• Newspaper Column
• Midterm Checkup
• Annotated Bibliography
• Final Exercise
• Virtual Exhibition (in lieu of Book Review/Final Project)
• Office hours

V. Approaches to Hong Kong History

• G. B. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong (1958)
• Richard Hughes, Borrowed Place–Borrowed Time (1968) / Frank Welsh, A Borrowed Place (1993)
• Steve Tsang, Modern History of Hong Kong (2003)
• Leo Ou-fan Lee, City Between Worlds (2008)
• 十九世紀的香港 [Hong Kong in the nineteenth century] (1993) / 20世纪的香港 [Hong Kong in the twentieth century] (1995)
• 香港史新編 [Hong Kong history: new perspectives] (1997)
• 香港人之香港史 [The Hong Kong people’s history of Hong Kong] (2001)
• 鬱躁的城邦 : 香港民族源流史 [A national history of Hong Kong] (2015)
• Hong Kong Chronicles (2020–)

VI. The Settings

• Periodization
• Geography—80 miles from Canton (Guangzhou), Hong Kong Island (~30 sq mi), Kowloon Peninsula (1860; ~ 8 sq mi), New Territories (1898, ~365 sq mi) . . . cf. Greater Vancouver (~1,100 sq mi)
• Population (“guesstimates”)— 7,450 (1841) . . . 24,000 (1848) . . . 123,511 (1862) . . . 221,441 (1891) . . . 283,978 (1901) . . . 7,536,000 (2023)
• GDP/capita (2023): USD 50,696.59 (Canada: 53,371.70)

VII. Fragments of Imagination

• Visual
• Archaeological
• Textual

Exercise

1. Check out some of these resources:
   • UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative
   • Research Guide: Hong Kong
   • Old HK Newspapers (Hong Kong Public Libraries)
2. Why are you interested in taking a course on Hong Kong?
3. Fill in the blank: "The Story of Hong Kong: . . . ."

Maps

External Links to Maps:

Early Maps | Hong Kong(1860)

 

Images

External Links to Images:

John Thomson