Hong Kong: The Tropical Mixing That Made It
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.
➽ Details
Speaker: Vaudine England
Moderated by: Gareth Richards
Organised by: Penang Institute and Gerakbudaya Bookshop
Date and Time:
Monday, 27 October 2025
8.00–9.30pm
Location:
Penang Institute
10 Jalan Brown
10350 George Town
Pulau Pinang
➽ About the Speaker
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. Her book – Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – was published in 2023. She is now based in Amsterdam.
➽ About the Moderator
Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. His most recent book (as co-author) is Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives (2021).
Event Summary
Has Hong Kong always been ‘Chinese’? Or did it represent the model ‘British’ colony? The question often arises in the minds and conversations of those who have visited, or perhaps just curious about, the city that had been under British rule for 150 years before it was handed (back?) to China in 1997.
But as New Zealand-born journalist-turned-historian Vaudine England told her audience gathered on 27 October 2025 at the Penang Institute to hear her talk about her book, Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong (Scribner, 2023), Hong Kong has always been far richer than the either-or answer demanded by the question. It is a city that has always defied, bridged, and (re)defined differences and identities.The discussion was moderated by Gerak Budaya director Gareth Richards.
England highlighted in her talk the critical/crucial role and position of Hong Kong in the infinite entanglements, transactions, interactions, and diasporas that have come to make up the process of globalization. Globalization did not begin a few decades ago with advances in information and communication technologies and the Internet, but several hundreds of years ago in places such as Hong Kong where all manners of activities, interactions, and relations created and sustained activities, interactions, relations and things elsewhere – everywhere – around the world.
In this way, some things that used to be sources of shame and secrecy – such as the affairs and relations between men and women within Hong Kong over the centuries to produce the definition-eluding ‘Eurasian’ of today – are now be held up as a source of pride, identity, and yes, wealth. And just as Hong Kong contributed to the development and creation of economies and societies far from its own shores, those far away places also contributed to making and building up Hong Kong to what it became and is today.
Lastly, England showed through her talk that while ‘meaning’ and ‘understanding’ are usually associated in histories with recourse to neat lines and order produced by dividing and separating things off from each other, the historical experience and phenomenon that is Hong Kong perhaps approximates reality and life more closely. By the very messiness and chaos of the shifts, overlaps, and clashes in England’s narrative and portrait of Hong Kong, the result is a cauldron of names, dates, personalities, genealogies, interests, and events that does not quite get us closer to ‘what’ Hong Kong is. And that is perhaps the most valuable lesson that Hong Kong – and England – offers about all great cities in the world.