Taking Hong Kong in WW1 on RTHK & some links for those interested…..

Had a fun chat with RTHK3’s Morning Brew host Phil Whelan the other morning about Hong Kong in the First World War….internment of Germans, the SMS Emden, British men running home to fight, divided European communities in the Colony etc etc – you can listen online here…

Anyway, I promised a few links and some further reading for anyone interested in this subject  – which really does deserve a book of its own….

The story of the SMS Emden (below) is told in this recent book about the Battle of Penang and in this excellent article by Stuart Heaver in the South China Morning Post and citing the research into the period by Bert Becker of HKU.

The article below, from the San Francisco Chronicle (1/9/14) refers to the seizure and internment of German and Austrian nationals in Hong Kong during World War One – click on it and it should expand and readable.

For more on the old Stonecutters Island (now part of the West Kowloon reclamation) see here – the picture below shows the old gun sheds on the Island back in the 1930s…

Details of the Penguin China and World War One series of books and e-books is here – they’re available as small books in China and Hong Kong or online via Amazon everywhere else. Most relevant perhaps to all this is Robert Bickers’s book on the men from Shanghai who left to fight in Europe in 1914…