https://www.scmp.com/rss/322646/feed Ian Gill is a freelance journalist who has worked on staff in Asia and the Pacific for publications as diverse (and some defunct) as the Asian Wall Street Journal, Asiaweek, Insight, Fiji Sun and Evening Post (in Wellington). Married with teenage children, a feisty dog and a cat with tapeworms, his ambition is to sleep eight hours uninterrupted. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Ian Gill’s first visit to Hong Kong, in 1975, took an unexpected turn when he met the friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war of his mother, Louise Mary “Billie” Gill, lifting the veil on her tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He moved to Asia and unravelled her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha, central China, to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp in... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3252148/pregnant-ex-prisoner-wars-anxious-life-hong-kong-camp-after-japans-world-war-ii-surrender?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3252148/pregnant-ex-prisoner-wars-anxious-life-hong-kong-camp-after-japans-world-war-ii-surrender?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 18 Feb 2024 03:15:10 +0000 Driving into Penang’s capital, George Town, grey-haired yet youthful driver Danny Khoo pulls over on Gurney Drive, once a seaside promenade and now a lengthy procession of gleaming condominiums. The area beyond this shoulder is fenced off from the beach by a large reclamation project. “When I was a kid,” says Khoo, getting out of the car and smoothing down his multi-hued shirt, “we would park here and run straight onto the beach for a swim.” It’s the same story around the island, with sea views... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3050442/fight-save-penang-proposed-mega-projects?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3050442/fight-save-penang-proposed-mega-projects?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 15 Feb 2020 02:15:09 +0000 Harbin, in China’s far northeast, owes its modern beginnings entirely to a railway. For the first three decades of the 20th century, it was effectively a Russian city. It is a place that has sparked my curiosity ever since I came across a 1927 ship’s passenger list that revealed the name of my grandfather Frank Newman’s “second wife”: Nina Kovaleva, 25, born in Sevastopol, Russia. He would leave his Shanghai-based family with her in the early 1930s. The list also named a daughter, Kyra, aged... https://www.scmp.com/society/trail-my-secret-white-russian-grandmother-harbin-china-and-her-descendants-america-i-knew-nothing/article/3038886?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/society/trail-my-secret-white-russian-grandmother-harbin-china-and-her-descendants-america-i-knew-nothing/article/3038886?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 22 Nov 2019 10:04:05 +0000 Harbin, in China’s far northeast, owes its modern beginnings entirely to a railway. For the first three decades of the 20th century it was effectively a Russian city. It is a place that has sparked my curiosity ever since I came across a 1927 ship’s passenger list that revealed the name of my grandfather Frank Newman’s “second wife”, for whom he would leave his Shanghai-based family in the early 1930s: Nina Kovaleva, 25, born in Sevastopol, Russia. The list also named a daughter, Kyra, aged... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3038623/tracking-down-two-mysterious-white-russian-women?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3038623/tracking-down-two-mysterious-white-russian-women?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 21 Nov 2019 21:00:10 +0000 In heavy rain, we are driving along a narrow, twisting road in the Philippines’ Mountain Province, never knowing what lies around each hairpin bend. Downpours loosen the thin soil of these craggy mountains, causing landslides. We have been slowed or stopped several times by rocks strewn in our way, long cracks in the road surface or large pools of muddy water. I am trying to adjust to the constantly unpredictable conditions but I cannot foresee the near-fatal mishap that lies ahead … The... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3026649/perilous-trip-northern-philippines-get-tattoo-whang?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3026649/perilous-trip-northern-philippines-get-tattoo-whang?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:15:08 +0000 As an inland city, Changsha lacks the glamour and sophistication of coastal metropolises, but therein lies its appeal. Rubbing shoulders with locals who boast of being laid back and friendly, a visitor can recapture the flavour of yesteryear China. Even as industries such as engineering machinery, electronic information and carmaking are developed in the capital of Hunan province, a giant bust of Mao Zedong, on Orange Island, reaffirms its ties to the founder of the People’s Republic, who was... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3010284/changsha-china-british-writer-finds-clues-his-own?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3010284/changsha-china-british-writer-finds-clues-his-own?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 15 May 2019 11:00:09 +0000 The ghost of William Boot is back to haunt the resurrected Liberty Hotel. Addis Ababa’s Itegue Taitu Hotel, made famous as the Liberty in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s acclaimed 1938 satire about sensation-seeking foreign corres­pondents, has been restored following severe fire damage in early 2015, more than a century after it was built. Glorious past: Ethiopia abounds in sacred sites and places of stunning natural beauty “It is a heritage building and has been repaired close to its original form,”... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/2159020/ethiopias-oldest-hotel-made-famous-evelyn-waugh?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/2159020/ethiopias-oldest-hotel-made-famous-evelyn-waugh?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 10 Aug 2018 03:00:45 +0000 A photograph in our family album captures an extraordinary scene at Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay in 1939. People in the British colony at that time were acutely aware of social and racial distinctions, and yet the beach party in the picture has Chinese, Eurasians and Westerners – most of them in swimwear – all relaxing together. The multiracial gathering consisted mostly of displaced Shanghailanders – writers and staff of cultural magazine T’ien Hsia Monthly, which launched in Shanghai in 1935 and... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2146411/belle-epoque-shanghai-occupied-hong-kong-literati?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2146411/belle-epoque-shanghai-occupied-hong-kong-literati?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 17 May 2018 12:45:30 +0000 Next month, thousands of Chinese children from Hong Kong and the mainland will head off or return to boarding schools in Britain for a prized education, but it was not always so. When I arrived at my English prep school in 1953, having been raised in Shanghai and Bangkok, I was the only Eurasian out of the 100 or so boys at Grace Dieu Manor House, in the Leicestershire country­side. Asians would remain a rare sight at the school for a few decades more, until I was followed by a stream of Hong... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2107103/eurasian-who-went-british-boarding-school-1950s?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2107103/eurasian-who-went-british-boarding-school-1950s?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 19 Aug 2017 10:45:15 +0000 My wife and I travelled to Yantai, formerly known as Chefoo, in October, to explore a family mystery. We had asked a local historian if we could meet him, but had no idea what to expect. To our surprise, our four-day visit to Shandong province turned out to be revelatory, attitude-changing and deeply moving. A few months earlier, I must confess, I had not heard of Chefoo. Then I made the astonishing discovery that my English great-grandparents had moved from Hong Kong to northern China in 1873,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2084999/life-chinese-treaty-port-eurasian-traces-great?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2084999/life-chinese-treaty-port-eurasian-traces-great?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:15 +0000 His grave is near the top of a short hill in Hong Kong’s Stanley Military Cemetery, and each time I make the climb, as I have done many times over the decades, my breathing is a little heavier. The inscription on the tiny tombstone is simple: “Brian Gill 31 July 1940 – 9 May 1944 R.I.P.” It gives no hint of the shock that his untimely death caused in a Japanese civilian prison camp on a summer’s day 15 months before the end of the second world war in Asia. Brian was my older half-brother. On... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2017592/hong-kong-half-brother-i-never-knew-and-life-i?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2017592/hong-kong-half-brother-i-never-knew-and-life-i?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:45:30 +0000 What a difference a century makes. One hundred years ago, a generous-hearted, independent-minded, Hong Kong-born Briton found a baby girl abandoned on his doorstep in Changsha, in China's Hunan province. He took her in and made her part of his family but, in doing so, drew the disapproval of his compatriots. While widening income inequality is a divisive issue in Hong Kong today, in 19th- and early 20th-century "Britain in China", race and class divided the world of treaty ports and foreign... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1947270/my-grandfathers-amazing-life-china-and-how-he-found-my?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1947270/my-grandfathers-amazing-life-china-and-how-he-found-my?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 19 May 2016 09:00:15 +0000