Historic Hong Kong

History & Heritage
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Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been a place of ever-changing contours and skylines as well as home to a great variety of people. Here we present columns, photo galleries and stories about people who've lived in and helped shape Hong Kong, buildings preserved and long vanished, historical events, the city's changing culture and how the past shapes the present.

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Hong Kong residents have been chuckling away at amusing T-shirt slogans since the 1980s, but only the foolish or careless are laughing now.
Humble roadside food stalls introduced hungry Hongkongers to spicy but affordable South Asian delicacies that originated in the British Army garrisons stationed across the New Territories.
An eccentric Hong Kong University English teacher in the late 1930s, Adrian Paterson absorbed Chinese culture with an enthusiasm that left its mark on his students long after his earthly tenure ended.
The 1.5 million refugees from China’s civil war who flooded post-war Hong Kong were practical folks. The fruit trees and bushes they planted are a legacy of the squatter settlements they once inhabited.
Healthy and full of protein, soybeans have been a popular foodstuff in China for centuries. Here’s how they’re processed, made into products like soy sauce – and used in Cantonese to refer to lesbians.
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They are a staple in many a home throughout Hong Kong during Lunar New Year, but not all golden citrus fruits are born equal.
Cheap but pungent, fermented bean curd has been adding flavour to Chinese rice and congee dishes for generations. Even stinky tofu can become highly addictive to those who come to enjoy it.
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Direct flights now take people and goods between Hong Kong and other cities around China and Southeast Asia, but in decades past, small coastal vessels connected the region at a much slower pace.
It makes no difference whether one uses cow or bull dung on the plants in one’s garden – it will still grow. Perhaps the same applies to Hong Kong District Council election candidates.
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The Friday market in Shek Kong, Hong Kong, was a favourite of British service wives living in married quarters near the then remote village. Now long gone, it is reduced to mere memory.
Jason Wordie remembers his enduring friendship with Irene Smirnoff, whose father, George Vitalievich Smirnoff, painted his famous scenes of Macau in World War II with his young child by his side.
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Hong Kong missed an opportunity to promote itself as tolerant and outward-looking when it hosted the Gay Games 2023, all thanks to a self-appointed cabal of guardians of ‘traditional family life’.
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