A definitive new history of Hong Kong.Lion Rock is the epic story of Asia's global city and its people, sitting on the edge of China yet under British jurisdiction, spanning both empires and belonging to neither, growing an economy at a furious pace and developing its own unique identity. It is also the tragedy of how a vibrant financial and cultural hub was just as swiftly wrecked by the Chinese authorities who lost patience with free expression and the d...

Shanghai in the 1930s was one of the world's most dangerous cities, with kidnappings and murders daily occurrences. British police officer E.W. Peters of the Shanghai Municipal Police takes us down the city's dark lanes and alleys, through a crime-ridden underworld of brothels, opium dens and gambling parlors. This often riotous, true-crime chronicle is filled with colorful criminals, fumbled police raids and gross misunderstandings, one of which lands the author on trial for murder. A mus...

In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by British and European powers - but as new technology started to change this balance, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. Would the Chinese suffer the fate of much of the rest of the world, carved into pieces by Europeans? Or could they adapt rapidly enough to maintain their independence?This important and compelling book explains the roots of China's complex relationship with the West by...

This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and te...

In 1900, China chose to take on imperialism by fighting a war with the world on the parched north China plain. This multidisciplinary volume explores the causes behind what is now known as the Boxer War, examining its particular cruelties and its impact on China, foreign imperialism in China, and on the foreign imagination. This war introduced the world to the "Boxers," the seemingly fanatical, violent xenophobes who, believing themselves invulnerable to foreign bullets, died in their thou...

'This is a biography of a nobody that offers a window into an otherwise closed world. It is a life which manages to touch us all...' Empire Made MeShanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities - an incredible panorama of nightclubs, opium-dens, gambling and murder. Threatened from within by communist workers and from without by Chinese warlords and Japanese troops, and governed by an ever more desperate British-dominated...

After 1914, between tiffin and a day at the race track, the British in Shanghai enjoyed a life far removed from the horrors of the Great War. Shanghai's status as a treaty port – with its foreign concessions home to expatriates from every corner of the globe – made it the most cosmopolitan city in Asia. The city's inhabitants on either side of the conflict continued to mix socially after the outbreak of war, the bond amongst foreign nationals being almost as strong as that between...

From its origins in Liverpool in 1816, one unusual British firm has threaded a way through two centuries that have seen tumultuous events and epochal transformations in technologies and societies. John Swire & Sons, a small trading company that began by importing dyes, cotton and apples from the Americas, now directs a highly diversified group of interests operating across the globe but with a core focus on Asia. From 1866 its fate was intertwined with developments in China, with the story...

This book presents a range of new research on British-Chinese relations in the period from Britain’s first imperial intervention in China up to the 1960s. Topics covered include economic issues such as fi nance, investment and Chinese labour in British territories, questions of perceptions on both sides, such as British worries about, and exaggeration of, the ‘China threat’, including to India, and British aggression towards, and eventual withdrawal from, China.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZEThe extraordinary and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is today.**Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories: the long, often agonisi...

As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability -- a regression that...

As the increasingly powerless Qing Dynasty in 19th Century China struggled to defend itself from European, American and Japanese colonial control, and bloody civil wars and rebellions fought by an angry and desperate people raged, a new revolutionary force emerged.Sun Yat Sen's Tongmenghui, later known as the Kuomintang adopted the revolutionary ideas of the west, but in a bid to sweep away not only the weak Qing Dynasty, but the western powers that had brought China to her knees. This is ...