Probably the best literary evocation of Hong Kong in the late 1940s, Han Suyin's autobiographical novel A Many Splendoured Thing - and the 1955 Hollywood film adaptation, Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing - epitomised exotic Hong Kong in the wider world's imagination for at least a generation.
Most are familiar with the story, or at least the cinematic version; against the magnificent backdrop of Hong Kong, a beautiful Eurasian doctor named Han Suyin enjoys a passionate, life-changing affair with a married journalist, who - just as their romance is becoming heated - is killed in the Korean war.
The relationship upon which the story is based was just as dramatic and scandalised expatriate Hong Kong's suburban, small-town world. The author (above), a Sino-Belgian Eurasian, was known as Elisabeth Tang (her then-married name) when she worked at Queen Mary Hospital. Tang's lover, The Times newspaper correspondent Ian Morrison, was a married man. Apparently, the first his wife heard of the torrid affair was when the book appeared after her husband's death.
Morrison's brother, Colin, was a Hong Kong government official and Han's acerbic portraits of then-well-known local personalities fell just on the safe side of a libel suit.
While her romantic, beautifully wrought prose is rather self-indulgent in places, her expansive descriptive powers marvelously evoke a Hong Kong now largely vanished: 'Conduit Road is lined with large old houses perched on massive fortresses of stone, gay with flowers and graceful with trees,' she wrote in 1950; whatever happened to that more gracious world, one sadly asks, in the intervening half century or so?
After she married Leonard Comber, a Malayan Special Branch officer (and later publisher at Hong Kong University Press) in 1952, Han became Dr Elisabeth Comber and moved to Johor Bahru, just across the causeway from Singapore, where she established a private medical practice. Later, divorced from Comber, she married Vincent Ratnaswamy, an Indian army colonel.