FOR MORE THAN 20 years, Professor Lo Wai-luen has been uncovering the forgotten footprints of China's literary figures who visited or stayed in Hong Kong between the 1920s and 1940s. Far from being a cultural desert between the World Wars, Hong Kong was a shelter for intellectuals and mainland entrepreneurs from the civil and Sino-Japanese wars, says the 63-year-old Chinese University don.
For some, Hong Kong was a fleeting stopover on the way to other Asian havens. Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature and the icon of the May Fourth Movement, stayed only long enough to hold a few seminars, but others lingered longer in the British colony. 'They penned their works and left a lot of artefacts here. They also held salons and contributed enormously to the local cultural scene,' recalls the grey-haired scholar.
Thanks to Lo's painstaking work, the burial sites of great Chinese literary figures such as the architect of the May Fourth Movement, Cai Yuanpei, Taiwanese writer Xu Dishan and feminist author Xiao Hong have all been pinpointed on Hong Kong Island.
Ferreting out evidence of the Chinese literary presence in Hong Kong has been a task worthy of Sherlock Holmes. It has involved delving into old library archives to pore over yellowed, pre-1949 newspapers, not to mention treasure-hunting in second-hand bookstalls and scouring old listings columns for tiny mentions of any appearance by a historic literary hero. 'Gathering these lost gems is very challenging,' Lo says. 'But I don't mind. Somebody has to take on this mission to bridge the gap in the history of modern Chinese literature.'
In an effort to publicise her discoveries, the professor wrote a Chinese-language guidebook and organised a walking tour with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department last year. The day trips were enthusiastically received but Lo found them too tiring to continue this year. 'Many participants say the experience rekindled their interest in Chinese literature,' she says. 'It helped them to visualise what happened long ago, when the poets and writers spent their time here.'
Lo would like her discoveries to become part of the civil-education curriculum for Hong Kong children. 'It is not fair to neglect these legacies. We should learn more about our past. As Hong Kong citizens, we should treasure the monuments and be proud of them,' the professor says.
Lo hopes the Hong Kong Tourism Board will include the landmarks on future cultural heritage trails. She says the body should follow the lead of Japan, where the literary sites of the works of the 1968 Nobel literature laureate, Yasunari Kawabata, have been preserved. A visit to the scenes depicted in Kawabata's novella Izu No Odoriko (The Izu Dancer, published in 1926) is a highlight of many tourist itineraries in the Izu Peninsula, a hot-spring area southwest of Tokyo. 'Hong Kong can do the same,' the professor says.