Colonial administrator, writer, explorer, Buddhist, and friend to China’s last emperor, Sir Reginald Johnston (1874-1938) was a distinguished sinologist with a tangled love life that he kept secret even from his closest friends. Born and educated in Edinburgh, he began his career in the colony of Hong Kong and eventually became Commissioner of the remote British leased territory of Weihaiwei in northern China. He travelled widely and, during a break from colonial service, served as tutor and advisor to Puyi, the deposed emperor. As the only foreigner allowed to work in the Forbidden City, he wrote the classic account of the last days of the Qing Dynasty – Twilight in the Forbidden City. Granted unique access to Johnston’s extensive personal papers, once thought to be lost, Shiona Airlie tells the life of a complex and sensitive character whose career made a deep impression on 20th-century China.

"The Shek Kip Mei Myth" provides a new explanation for the beginnings of Hong Kong's massive public housing program, tracing it to the colonial govenrment's inability to resolve the squatter problem due to constraints posed by the geopolitics of the early Cold War.

During China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), the empire's remote, bleak, and politically insignificant Southwest rose to become a strategically vital area. This study of the imperial government's handling of the southwestern frontier illuminates issues of considerable importance in Chinese history and foreign relations: Sichuan's rise as a key strategic area in relation to the complicated struggle between the Zunghar Mongols and China over Tibet, Sichuan's neighbor to the west, and consequent developments in governance and taxation of the area.

This triggered resistance by the some of the population of the New Territories. There ensued six days of fighting with heavy Chinese casualties.

This book deals with a wide range of issues on the history of the book in late imperial China (1000 to 1800), mainly concerned with literati publications and readers in the lower Yangzi delta.

This is a collection of administrative dispatches from the 1910s through the early 1960s which illuminate not only rural life in Hong Kong but also Hong Kong government policies during the post-World War II period. The authors of the reports include such notable figures as Eric Hamilton, Walter Schofield, S. H. Peplow, Paul Tsui, Austin Coates, and James Hayes. The volume is another important addition to the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies series, which has played a vital role in reviving and sustaining local history.

This book on the Spanish presence in Taiwan (1626-1642) shows the Spanish efforts to counterbalance the Dutch encroaching in China waters, and the aim to facilitate to the missionaries their way to China. Besides, Professor Borao constructs a new historical realm in which we can observe the transition from the Renaissance originated adventures to their pragmatic Baroque endings.

This is a story of one courageous woman's fight against the vicissitudes, brutality and starvation that faced civilians incarcerated in the infamous Stanley prison, by the Japanese, in Hong Kong during World War II.

The world was watching when footage of the "tank man" -- the lone Chinese citizen blocking the passage of a column of tanks during the brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- first appeared in the media. The furtive video is now regarded as an iconic depiction of a government's violence against its own people.

Throughout the twentieth century, states across East Asia committed many relatively undocumented atrocities, with victims numbering in the millions. The contributors to this insightful volume analyze many of the most notorious cases, including the Japanese army's Okinawan killings in 1945, Indonesia's anticommunist purge in 1965--1968, Thailand's Red Drum incinerations in 1972--1975, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge massacre in 1975--1978, Korea's Kwangju crackdown in 1980, the Philippines' Mendiola incident in 1987, Myanmar's suppression of the democratic movement in 1988, and China's Tiananmen incident. With in-depth investigation of events that have long been misunderstood or kept hidden from public scrutiny, State Violence in East Asia provides critical insights into the political and cultural dynamics of state-sanctioned violence and discusses ways to prevent it in the future.

The Chinese Educational Mission was the earliest effort at educational modernization in China. As part of the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Qing government sent 120 young boys to New England to live and study for a decade, before abruptly summoning them home to China in 1881. The returned students helped staff numerous other modernization projects; some rose to top administrative and political posts in the Qing government. This book, based upon extensive research in US archives and newspapers, sheds new light on the students during their nine-year stay in the United States, and it compares their lives with those of the Japanese students in New England at about the same time. This detailed study of one of the most important projects in China's Self-Strengthening Movement will appeal to historians of modern China as well as to comparative historians of China and Japan. The book also contrasts the experiences of the Chinese Educational Mission students with those of other Chinese in the United States during a period of anti-Chinese sentiment, which was to culminate in the enactment of Chinese Exclusion in 1882. Its conclusion that the anti- Chinese movement may have been as much class-based as race-based will provide much food for thought to scholars of Asian American studies.