End of Empire: Hong Kong - Signed, Sealed and Delivered
by Peter Moss
FormAsia
To many Hongkongers, the handover seems long ago, buried under memories of two financial crises, a botched election, and Sars. So Peter Moss' 248-page picture book, End of Empire, is a timely reminder of that distant Monday night, 15 years ago, when the colonising British left in the rain.
Moss has an intimate knowledge of Hong Kong and its pre-handover administration. In 1978 the author became the colonial Government Information Services department's head of publicity, until he retired in 1993 with an MBE. He has also written three acclaimed novels set during British colonial pull-outs: Bye-Bye Blackbird, set in India of 1947; Distant Archipelagos, set in Malaya in 1957; and No Babylon, in Hong Kong in 1997.
In End of Empire, Moss again proves he can sketch a historic scenario in short, simple sentences, first with a well-researched potted history of the colony, and then in a similarly digestible pictorial timeline of events, from the arrival of the British in 1842, to the Joint Declaration in 1984, and their final departure.
Moss' text seems intended to highlight publisher FormAsia's photographs, but his brevity is sufficiently informative to generate debate about how Hong Kong might have looked if the British didn't lease the New Territories in 1898, or if Zhou Enlai hadn't, as Moss writes, 'saved Hong Kong from a Communist takeover in 1967'.
In Countdown, the first of four sections in End of Empire, Moss recalls how Hong Kong braced for 1997 after the Joint Declaration. He quotes Lu Ping, secretary-general of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, as saying, 'Do the British really believe that we are going to allow them to stay on in Hong Kong after 1997?', but readers might wish he had said more about Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher's tough talks.
Instead, End of Empire reveals an unremarkable jumble of colonial-era stock shots, of the ruined gun emplacements on Stonecutters' Island; Victorian and pre-war Central, and the garrison facilities in Admiralty. A portrait of the robed chief justice Yang Ti-liang and other bigwigs highlight the ceremony of the British legal system, while colonial garrison regimental silver is shown to be sold off as June 30, 1997, neared. On page 86 readers are told the initials 'ER' stand for 'Elizabeth Rex'. How quickly Hong Kong forgets the old order. It should be 'Elizabeth Regina'.
