Fortune's Bazaar

A timely, well-researched, and vibrant new history of Hong Kong that reveals the untold stories of the diverse peoples who have made it a multicultural world metropolis - and whose lives are evolving today.

Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong's complex history and its people - diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan-who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today.

Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, Fortune's Bazaar is the first thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong. While British traders and Asian merchants had long been busy in the Indian and South East Asian seas, there were many from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who arrived in Hong Kong, met and married-despite all taboos - and created a distinct community.

Many of Hong Kong's most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese - they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian - or simply, Hong Kongers. England describes those overlooked in history including the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches, ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants, property tycoons, and more. Here, too, is the visionary who plumbed Hong Kong's harbor depths to spur reclamation, the half-Dutch Chinese gentleman with two wives who was knighted by Queen Victoria, and the landscape gardeners who settled Kowloon and became millionaires.

As a history of Hongkong, not just as a British colony, or an exotic Chinese enclave, but as a cosmopolitan city of many creeds and races, Asian and European, Vaudine England's book is unsurpassed. Her take on the so-called Eurasians, who have played such a large part in Hongkong's history, is fresh and essential to a better understanding of this unique place -- Ian Buruma
At last: a lively and carefully researched page turner about the individuals and social forces that have made Hong Kong the dynamic (and quirky) place it is -- Adi Ignatius, former Wall Street Journal Bureau Chief in Beijing
Vivid, atmospheric, packed with brilliant story-telling, Vaudine England brings to life the boiling pot of race, culture and ambition that made Hong Kong one of the world's great cities. Within its compelling read, Fortune's Bazaar boldly explodes the myth that Hong Kong is 'just another Chinese city.' Not at all, England gives us the story of the visionary, deal-making, itinerant Eurasian elite who created this unique, international place that is Hong Kong -- Humphrey Hawksley, former BBC Beijing, Hong Kong and Asia Correspondent

If you love Hong Kong and have lost her, as have I, Vaudine England's marvellous account of the "in-between people," who made it the remarkable place it was, will fill you with wonder, understanding and a sadness for a place - and an idea - that no longer exists

-- Richard Hornik, former TIME bureau chief in Beijing and Hong Kong
In Fortune's Bazaar, Vaudine England rejects a tale-of-two-cities approach to the history of Hong Kong's colonization and this is what makes it so illuminating... [Fortune's Bazaar] offers lively, confounding and sometimes even inspiring stories about Eurasians and others, show[ing] that cities are constructed not from zero-sum games and political theory, but from generations of human interactions that defy us-and-them formulas Thomas Dyja, New York Times Book Review
To call a history 'rollicking' may indicate that it isn't serious, but Fortune's Bazaar is both. Vaudine England's well-written take on the historical record is likely to delight anyone who loves Hong Kong Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books
In Fortune's Bazaar, Vaudine England examines [Hong Kongers], these 'in-between people,' as she calls them, and their often overlooked role in the development of Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan, world-class city. [With] impressive research, Fortune's Bazaar is less a straightforward narrative than a history told through the stories of Eurasians and other mixed-culture residents. The reader will be rewarded with an enhanced understanding of what it means to be a Hong Konger Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal

A vivid, entertaining guide, rich in anecdote and understanding for an early globalised world that
has gone

Michael Sheridan, Sunday Times

Vaudine England was a journalist for three decades in South East Asia and Hong Kong for the BBC, Reuters, the Far Eastern Economic Review and several London newspapers. Now a research associate with the Hong Kong History Project, under the auspices of Bristol University, she brings her journalistic skills of investigative reporting and interviewing to the archives and old stories. She lives in Hong Kong and Amsterdam.

Fortune's Bazaar is her first book.

From Emanuel Raphael Belilio's arrival in Hong Kong in 1862 to the present day, FORTUNE'S BAZAAR examines how the region rose to a cosmopolitan port city and an incomparable global centre of business, culture and cuisine. The book goes behind the scenes erected by past histories, in which Hong Kong is portrayed as either a marvel of British administration or a symbol of China's humiliation by the West, to shine a light on the varied peoples who helped make Hong Kong; the people who built the tower blocks, ran the brothels, founded the banks and transformed this one-time fishing village into what it is today.

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