world: hong kong | From the Heart of Europe

Why do I count Hong Kong separately here? I’m using the population estimates from the Worldometer website, which are presumably based on some international standard or other. They separate out a number of non-sovereign territories; we’ve already had Taiwan, and in due course we’ll get to Macau (and before that Réunion). I don’t dispute Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong or Macau (or French sovereignty over Réunion for that matter). I could have restricted myself to countries that are full members of the UN, but that would have lost some granularity and also excluded a couple of pretty clear cases of countries recognised by a majority of UN states which are not yet members (Palestine and Kosovo).

Hong Kong was a small but strategically placed settlement on an island off the coast of southern China when it was ceded to the British “in perpetuity” in 1842. A neighbouring part of the mainland was similarly transferred in 1860, and then, as the city expanded dramatically, a large chunk of territory was leased to the British for 99 years starting in 1898. By the 1970s it was clear that it would not be viable for the British to hang on to the earlier acquisitions while handing back the later lease, and in 1984 the British pledged to hand over the whole territory in 1997, while China guaranteed that it would retain its different economic and political systems, and the transfer duly took place.

Since 2014 or so, the Chinese authorities have steadily eroded free speech and democratic openness in Hong Kong, while the rest of China has surged – in 1997, Hong Kong’s GDP was about 18% of the mainland’s, now it is is more like 2%. However the story does not end there. In Beijing last year, I had a discussion with two Western diplomats and a Western journalist who assured me that Hong Kong is still the happening place in terms of economic activity and centre of gravity in South-East Asia. One of them wondered, “Is this the model that they will offer to Taiwan?” Another replied, “Is it the model they might offer the whole of China?” The happy ending of Zen Cho’s 2005 London-set romance Behind Frenemy Lines is that the protagonists decide to move to Hong Kong together, rather than stay in London.

I have never been there myself, but the brides at the last two weddings I attended had both grown up in Hong Kong. This humble blog gets more hits from Hong Kong-based IP addresses than from any other country apart from the UK and the USA. (Mainland China is fourth, Belgium fifth, and Singapore sixth. I suspect that the VPNs from mainland China to Hong Kong and Singapore are pretty busy.) All of the countries I wrote about here are places of fascination for me, but Hong Kong is particularly interesting.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Hong Kong.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Exciting Times	Naoise Dolan	76,833	704	23,517
Tai-Pan	James Clavell	60,179	4235	2,753
The Honourable Schoolboy	John le Carré	26,934	4514	2,271
Noble House	James Clavell	42,949	3251	1,352
The Piano Teacher	Janice Y.K. Lee	24,135	2382	1,997
The Expatriates	Janice Y.K. Lee	16,635	505	1,884
Love in a Fallen City	Eileen Chang	4,811	795	970
Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha	Dorothy Gilman	6,373	909	624

This week’s winner, Exciting Times, is a romance involving an Irishwoman and her lovers, an Englishman and a Chinese woman. It has an incredibly high score on StoryGraph and a pretty high score on Goodreads, but has clearly failed to chime with LibraryThing users. I note that reviews of it are distinctly mixed; it must have benefited from smart marketing.

Tai-Pan and Noble House are the second and fourth of James Clavell’s six-volume sequence of Asian-set novels. They are set in 1841 and 1963 respectively.

The Honourable Schoolboy is the sixth of John le Carré’s novels about George Smiley and the British Secret Service. Not all of it is set in Hong Kong – there is a framing narrative in London and excursions to Thailand and Cambodia – but I think enough is for it to count for my purposes.

Janice Y.K. Lee is the top writer actually from Hong Kong on this week’s list (her family is Korean but she was born and brought up in Hong Kong). The Piano Teacher is set in the 1940s and 1950s; The Expatriates (filmed as the mini-series Expats starring Nicole Kidman) has a contemporary setting.

Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City (傾城之戀) was first published in Chinese in 1943, shortly after the setting of the story, which is about a woman in Shanghai and her lover in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese invasion. As far as I can tell it is set more in the latter than the former. Chang herself was from Shanghai, but studied in Hong Kong.

Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha sees the CIA’s least likely agent sent on a mission to Hong Kong, with excursions to the mainland. It is reportedly somewhat darker than most books in the series.

Integrating the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained Love in a Fallen City and lost Women of the Threads by Gail Tsukiyama.

I disqualified a few books given the ‘hong-kong’ tag by users of LibraryThing and Goodreads which are not actually set there, notably the trilogy by Kevin Kwan that starts with Crazy Rich Asians and is mostly set in Singapore. The one that caused me the most head-scratching was The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, but only three of its seven chapters are set in Hong Kong. Jane Gardam’s novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat feature Hong Kong as one of several settings in the narrative.

There are a few books on my own shelves set in Hong Kong: the Doctor Who novel Bullet Time, by David McIntee, featuring the Seventh Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith; the Lovejoy novel Jade Woman, by Jonathan Gash; and The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by future foreign secretary Douglas Hurd and Private Eye co-founder Andrew Osmond, set in the mid-1970s (the near future, at the time of writing) with China threatening to invade Hong Kong and deterred only by British nuclear bluff.

Next up are a pair of Latin American countries, Nicaragua and Paraguay, and then back to Europe for Bulgaria and Serbia.

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The best known books set in each country: Hong Kong