Hong Kong’s built environment is often understood as the product of rapid, capitalist-driven development unfolding on a blank slate. This normative account is a reductive reading that elides two crucial aspects in the city’s planning history: the pre-existing landscapes that constrained and shaped human interventions, and the contested economic and political agendas that continue to reconfigure construction processes and urban practice. Although many historiographies have downplayed these frictions, recent cOfficerns about territorial integration and environmental sustainability have renewed interest in Hong Kong’s urbanism, leading to a surge of publications that probe the multiple dynamics shaping the territory’s built landscapes.
This article offers a brief survey of publications on Hong Kong’s “built environment” across roughly twOfficenturies. To identify shifting emphases, it groups representative works into seven broad periods. While particular themes might distinguish each period, most cOfficerns can be traced back to earlier work or seen as part and parcel of evolving foci of academic and popular discussions. A central premise is that publications about Hong Kong’s built environment—from official surveys and travelogues to academic studies—are not neutral records but curated materials produced by specific individuals and institutions. Read closely, these narratives reveal the social, cultural, and political conditions that determine what is recorded and how it is presented. Tracing connections and contradictions across these sources allows a more critical account of the built environment: not as a set of isolated built forms, but as dynamic, historically contingent relations that are continually reproduced and reconfigured over time. By mapping diverse strands of writing, this article synthesizes a wide-ranging, heterogeneous body of literature, highlighting its evolving cOfficerns, methodological shifts, and changing interpretive frameworks.

This article proposes Zap Saang Design 執生設計 as a distinctly Hong Kong design methodology rooted in the everyday practice of improvisation under constraint. Derived from the Cantonese vernacular ethos of zap saang (making do and improvising on the spot), this research reframes informal adaptation not as a marginal survival tactic or temporary compromise, but as a sophisticated, user-driven system of design knowledge. Engaging affordance theory and design anthropology, the article argues that optimal zap saang occurs when a user perceives and activates a secondary affordance in an existing object or spatial condition so perfectly that it operates with the maturity, precision, and functional elegance of an intentionally engineered primary design. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic observation across Hong Kong’s urban and rural contexts, the study investigates three analytical tiers: object-level translation (washing machine drums as ritual offering trays), spatial appropriation (urban railings for cart storage), and systemic standardization (Blue Girl beer bottles as universal solvent containers). The article establishes a four-part methodological framework: constraint recognition, negative space reading, functional translation through secondary affordance maturity, and collective transmission. Ultimately, the article positions these practices as a living, dispersed archive of resilience, offering Hong Kong Studies a vernacular framework for evaluating bottom-up cultural production and adaptive intelligence in high-density urban environments.

This article compares Anson Mak Hoi-shan’s essay-film documentary One Way Street on a Turntable (2007) and Kimburley Choi Wing-yee’s interactive ethnofiction installation A Story of One’s Own (2022) to examine how experimental documentary forms make everyday experience historically meaningful in Hong Kong. Drawing on Linda Lai’s history of everyday life and Mary Holmes’s account of the gendered organization of everyday life, I propose feminist everyday historiography as a framework for reading these works. The article situates both practices within Hong Kong’s evolving institutional and cross-media ecology and compares how different media forms connect situated experience with historical change.

Despite working as Professor of English at The University of Hong Kong for over a decade (1953-1964), Blunden’s time in Hong Kong has been little documented. This article aims to fill the critical gap by tracing Blunden’s footsteps in Hong Kong through exploring previously undiscussed archival materials mainly in overseas archives, supplemented by oral history interviews, contemporary accounts and analysis of Blunden’s works as well as secondary literature, bringing together archival research, literary biography, and historical investigation. This article argues that Blunden’s networks, movements, and cultural presence in Hong Kong were not only limited to The University of Hong Kong, but were more widely felt across the territory. By illustrating Blunden’s connections with various places (and by extension the people associated with them) in Hong Kong, this article not only contributes towards elucidating his biography in greater details and exploring his multiple roles as poet, educator, and public intellectual, but it also demonstrates the diversity of his reach and the legacy of his influence to English studies in Hong Kong as well as East-West literary and cultural exchange. An enhanced understanding of Blunden’s life in Hong Kong would simultaneously shed light on the development of Anglophone literature and the education as well as arts and cultural sectors in Hong Kong in the period, highlighting the significant potential of accessing Hong Kong’s history through the individual/literary archives in diverse locations.

This article examines Another Day in Hong Kong (2024), a research-based exhibition by the Asia Art Archive’s Research and Archives team. Reconstructing one randomly chosen day, October 19, 1996, through archival materials, oral histories, and ephemera, the project explores how the ordinary can illuminate cultural memory. Focusing on everyday life rather than major events, it proposes a method for rethinking art history through minor activities and overlooked evidence. The research develops three linked ideas: the everyday, the archive, and the microhistory. It positions the archive as both curatorial practice and research project, revealing Hong Kong’s art history through daily rhythms and collective acts of remembering.

Tung Chung, Office an isolated agrarian community on the northern shore of Lantau Island, was transformed within a decade into a new town serving Hong Kong International Airport and is now undergoing a second phase of urbanization. This article seeks to explore how agrarian memory associated with this space is produced, contested, and restaged under the current context. Noting a dominant “salvage” logic underneath these memories, we leverage (un)archiving, refocusing archival materials, photographs, and prior studies as to look back to a chain of knowledge producers—including women and residents born after the baby boomer generation who cultivated the land, men who emigrated and returned as village authorities, colonial officials, and academic researchers. Through this exploration, we put forward an epistemology of multi-temporality that holds these competing memories together, resisting a single linear narrative of rural-to-urban transition as progress. We treat memory as an ongoing, politically-charged negotiation, and foreground current knowledge productions that keep Tung Chung’s agrarian present alive.

This article examines and reflects on a digital project on early twentieth-century Cantonese popular periodicals, built around a bilingual annotated bibliography and a companion Cantonese-language YouTube channel. Focusing on the practical and interpretive work involved in building these two platforms, the discussion considers how scattered and often fragmentary materials are made identifiable and describable, and how they can be presented to researchers and wider publics.
The discussion begins with the historical significance of Cantonese popular periodicals. These publications circulated across Hong Kong, South China, Macau, and Cantonese-speaking communities overseas, yet many have remained difficult to access because of incomplete preservation and split holdings. Their marginal position within conventional literary and media histories has further limited their visibility. The article then turns to the design of the bilingual website, especially its selection principles, bibliographical structure, and use of annotation. The discussion also examines the YouTube channel, which re-presents selected materials through audiovisual narration and connects them with urban memory for contemporary Cantonese-speaking audiences.
The project is presented as an initial point of entry into a dispersed field of popular print culture, with particular attention to its practical scope and current limitations. By combining bibliographical description with audiovisual presentation, it offers a multimodal approach to early Hong Kong and Cantonese popular print culture. This approach helps make ephemeral materials easier to identify and organize, while giving selected examples a form of public-facing presentation in the digital age.

Scholars have identified colonial land reforms, beginning in 1890s Squatter Board and culminating in the 1900s New Territories Land Court, as “momentous” and “revolutionary” transformations in the history of Hong Kong and, indeed, China. But what did this transformation look like on the ground, during the mundane encounters between colonial officials and squatting residents? Inspired by Saidiya Hartman, this “critical fabulation” draws upon three pages of a Squatter Board notebook to sketch out the multiple actors that influenced the regularization of squatter landholdings into leaseholds in one neighborhood of Shaukiwan 筲箕灣. It then focuses on a unique doodle on the margins of the notes, marshaling various kinds of contextual and visual evidence to speculate on the role of gender and agency in the creation of colonial records. By comparing multiple accounts of the same encounter through three levels of the colonial bureaucracy, it reveals how vOffices and contradictions are erased and smoothed over by the final formulation of the new lease arrangements. This article ultimately complicates our understanding of these land reforms by exposing their underpinnings in mundane, negotiated, and exhaustive encounters between colonizer and colonized. Revisiting familiar events and processes through underexamined and unconventional sources beyond colonial officials’ reports can offer rewarding insights into the nature of colonial knowledge production and the agency of ordinary Hong Kong residents.