Then & NowHong Kong’s role in the Pacific war started long before the city’s surrender in 1941

December 8, 1941, is the date when – according to most histories – the Pacific war came to Hong Kong. That was the day when Japanese forces finally invaded the British colony from the north. After intermittently heavy fighting, Hong Kong was decisively captured less than three weeks later, and the British surrender was signed on Christmas Day.

But historical events “begin” long before they actually “occur”. Hong Kong had been on a precarious war footing for more than three years by the time the Japanese crossed into the New Territories, and a couple of hours later bombed Kai Tak airport. Potentially hostile forces had been on the border since October 1938, following the capture of Canton, and from then, every­thing in Hong Kong life – however much the threat of impending war was ignored and wished away by those who were able to do so – became geared towards eventual conflict.

The “China Incident”, as the Sino-Japanese war was euphemistically labelled, started in earnest in July 1937. Like the Spanish civil war raging at the same time on the other side of the world, the conflict in China provided a dramatic backdrop for literary and journalistic tourism, and this cavalcade continued almost until Pearl Harbour.

After the Japanese blockaded most of coastal China, Hong Kong became the usual entry point, and remained a haven of peace and relative normality for those returning from active war zones, Japanese-occupied areas, or the strange half-life that prevailed behind the enemy lines in “Free China”.

Like many others, English poets W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood passed through Hong Kong on their way to China; their travel book, Journey to a War (1939), written in prose and verse, was the result. Auden’s poem Hong Kong took sharp aim at pompous mercantile types, and their pretensions to gentility and grandeur:

The leading characters are wise and witty