Forthcoming events

(Talk in the Community Hall at St Anne's)

The speaker: David first visited Hong Kong in 1989 and lived there continuously from 1992 to 2024. Since 2009 he has run the Gwulo.com website, providing an online meeting place where people from around the world meet to ask questions, and share their knowledge, about Hong Kong’s history. The site has grown to over 50,000 pages, including over 30,000 photos of old Hong Kong. In 2014 David received the SCMP’s Spirit of Hong Kong award for Heritage Preservation for his work on Gwulo. Then in the 2025 New Year’s Honours List he was awarded the British Empire Medal, For services to Heritage Preservation in Hong Kong.  David is a regular speaker, using photos from his collection to introduce Hong Kong’s history in a way that is easy for audiences to enjoy. He has also published a series of five illustrated books, Volumes 1 – 5 of Old Hong Kong Photos and The Tales They Tell. 

All five volumes of Gwulo's books are back in stock at Amazon UK (this is an affiliate link - it doesn't affect the price you pay but Gwulo earns a small commission from Amazon if you buy via this link)

How have places in Hong Kong evolved since well before the 19th century? Dr Hase will show how its various suburban settlements came into being. Such is a history of immense interest as well as unending fascination.

Since arriving at Hong Kong more than half a century ago, Patrick Hase has been researching its local history, with a particular focus on the market towns and villages in the New Territories. Due to a lack of written documentation for the study of these communities, much of his research was conducted through oral interviews with village elders in the 1980s and 1990s. Hase sought their memories of the villages in their youth, as well as their grandparents’ accounts of the communities prior to the age of high technology, urbanization, and modernization.

During the 17th and 18th century, Chinese and Japanese craftsmen responded in imaginative and striking ways to new commercial opportunities presented by the arrival of European ‘East India Company’ merchant ships in Asian trading ports.

Access to Asian craftsmen coincided with changing Western tastes in interior decoration, especially the growing enthusiasm for fanciful ‘Chinoiserie’ objects. ‘China Traders’ imported increasing quantities of (principally) Chinese artefacts, which were eagerly dispersed into the upper levels of European society. These decorative yet functional accessories encouraged new social practices like drinking tea and eating off porcelain plates, greatly enhancing daily life for many people after about 1650.

This lecture explores this culturally influential, yet fundamentally commercial, Sino-European maritime relationship; and illustrates the fine lacquers, silks, ‘Export-taste’ porcelain and even wallpapers which the East India Companies introduced to fashionable Western buyers.

*Colin Sheaf is Chairman of The Sir Percival David Foundation and an independent art adviser

Chinese characters constitute the only writing script in the world today that is not based on the sound of the spoken language. My talk looks with seriousness and humour into the difficulties and tricky situations faced by users of the script, and the solutions they have come up with, in ancient and modern times. Think typewriter, dictionary, … or the roundabout way you arrive at a Chinese name (if you are non-Chinese and have one). But ultimately, it is the difficulty of learning to read and write characters that makes some change necessary. We look at modern reforms and why it is so hard to live without characters, given the way they have shaped poetry, calligraphy …etc. I shall recite a Tang poem or two as illustration.

The Chinese are not the only users of Chinese characters. We count also the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese as former users who have kept ‘some’ use for characters today.  We shall see how their countries have partially or wholly abandoned the use of characters, and how Tibet, Mongolia and Manchuria  have gone their own way ‘from the start’.