TITLE OF TALK
Hong Kong: The Tropical Mixing That Made It
SPEAKER
Vaudine England
MODERATOR
Gareth Richards
DATE & TIME
Monday 27 October 2025
8.00–9.30pm
VENUE
PI conference hall, Penang Institute
10 Jalan Brown
10350 George Town
Pulau Pinang
CO-ORGANISED WITH GERAKBUDAYA BOOKSHOP
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BIOS OF SPEAKERS AND MODERATOR
Vaudine England was a journalist for three decades in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong for the BBC, Reuters, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and several London newspapers. Then she discovered the joys of history, and has made a specialty of investigative work into the past with the help of archives, oral history, and a nose for a good story. She has authored several books about individuals, institutions, and family companies in Hong Kong. Her history of Hong Kong’s formative first century, focused on the multiple peoples who came to build Asia’s last port city – Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – was published in 2023. She is now based in Amsterdam.
Gareth Richards is a writer, editor, and bookseller. His most recent book (as co-editor) is Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives (Springer, 2021).
ABSTRACT OF BOOK/BOOK TALK
Has Hong Kong ‘always been a Chinese city’? Was it a model British colony? Or was Hong Kong something else – a Eurasian city with its own distinct history and flavour? Do the answers to these questions help explain Hong Kong’s current issues? These and other questions – about the no less controversial topics of race, sex, and empire – are the subject of Vaudine England’s Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong. This is the product of many years of research – in archives, in attics and in new interviews with descendants of some of Hong Kong’s very first families. These offer a close-up look at who lubricated the intersections between the many different ethnic, cultural, and trading worlds of early Hong Kong.