Speakers:

Otto Lam and Peter Cunich

Moderator:

Professor John Carroll, School of Humanities (History), HKU

Date:

23 January 2019 (Wednesday)

Time:

6:30 - 8:00 pm

Venue:

2/F Multi-purpose Area, Main Library, HKU

Language:

English

Otto C.C. Lam started to collect rare books and photographs relating to Hong Kong and China in 1993. He holds a PhD in the history of early Western banking in China from The University of Hong Kong and is a member of the Royal Numismatic Society. Otto is a Museum Expert Advisor in Hong Kong and a member of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Archives and Advisory Committee. His latest publications include Hong Kong in the Early Banking of China (2016) and Beyond Black and White: Colour Snapshots of Hong Kong (2018).

Peter Cunich has been teaching history at The University of Hong Kong since 1993. Although his main area of research is early modern English history, he has also written extensively on the history of Hong Kong and European missionary activity in south China. He is the author of Old Hong Kong (2014), and for several years was editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch.

Previous collections of photographs illustrating the lost world of Old Hong Kong have tended to focus exclusively on black-and-white images from before the Second World War. In this new collection of photographs from the period 1948-1970, Otto Lam has instead selected a dazzling array of images in glorious full colour, most of them taken by overseas visitors to Hong Kong, including some of the earliest surviving colour views of the city and its environs. These evocative images demonstrate what a vibrant place Hong Kong was during this crucial period in the colony's rapid economic growth and modernisation. This volume, covering a wide range of images from daily life in post-war Hong Kong, comes at a time when a new generation of citizens is taking a greater interest in the rich and largely intangible heritage of their city.