Streets: Exploring Hong Kong Island

Jason Wordie has established an enviable reputation as a historian of Hong Kong who can communicate to a general audience and engage them with the way buildings and places reveal the history, changing nature and culture of Hong Kong. His knowledge of Hong Kong and its history is complemented by an eye for the intriguing, and a wonderful sense of the telling anecdote that humanizes and brings history to life. In this book, he takes the reader on fifty tours through the urban and historic places of Hong Kong Island ranging from Central through Wan Chai, to Shau Kei Wan then to Shek O, along the south coast from Stanley to Aberdeen, completing a circuit of the Island through Pok Fu Lam, Kennedy Town to Sheung Wan. Each place is introduced with an essay that describes the area and the way it has changed, then the reader is taken on a walk around the area's streets with the important, interesting, curious and historically illuminating sites described and illustrated. This is a book to read for the pleasure that the author's insights give to the lover of Hong Kong, to carry as one travels around Hong Kong, and to use as a guide book when following the suggested routes. The outstanding photographs taken by three of Hong Kong's most notable photographers, Richard Abrahall, Tony Hedley and John Lambon, help make this not just a guide book, but a book to revisit many times as a handsome contemporary record of this ever-changing city.