Read Your Way Through Hong Kong
10 Books to Inspire and Inform
There are cities that show you who they are. And then there’s Hong Kong.
A city that never stops moving. Upward. Forward. But never in a straight line. Glass towers rise beside laundry strung from bamboo poles five stories up. The last neon signs buzz above wet markets. Incense curls through the doors of a temple wedged between two beauty salons. A skyline that for decades promised the future, and alleyways that still whisper something older, stranger, harder to name.
Hong Kong is contradiction distilled. Cantonese by culture, global by necessity. A capitalist fever dream. On paper, its history is well known: a British colony until the 1997 handover to China. But that’s only the surface. Hong Kong has never fit cleanly into anyone’s narrative. It was always going to be unfinished — because of its velocity, its ambition, its people.
Come here expecting answers and you’ll leave with better questions. What does it mean to belong to a city that’s always in flux — architecturally, linguistically, emotionally?
Stacks of dim sum are carted around like steam engines. You can hike to a quiet beach the same morning you’re crushed on the MTR. On Sundays, domestic workers turn Central into a public living room — chatting, eating, playing cards on flattened cardboard, a gesture of belonging in a place that rarely pauses to make space.
Hong Kong doesn’t ask you to choose a side. It asks you to stay inside the tension. To resist easy definitions. To care about complexity.
These ten books won’t hand you a single story. But if you read them closely, they’ll take you nearer to what makes this city unforgettable: the ghosts that haven’t left, the lives lived in tight spaces and open defiance, and the idea — still alive — that a city can belong to itself, even when the world keeps trying to claim it. I’ve also included links to the Substack writers featured here so you can follow their work directly.
Non-Fiction
Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – Vaudine England
A sweeping social history that restores the forgotten builders of Hong Kong — Parsis, Jews, Portuguese, Indians, Cantonese — and shows how their networks shaped the city’s unique character.
Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong – Neil Monnery
The biography of the Scottish civil servant who embedded laissez-faire economics into Hong Kong’s DNA. Dry? Sometimes. Essential? Absolutely.
Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong – Louisa Lim
Blending memoir, history, and reportage, Lim explores the myths and contested memories shaping Hong Kong’s present. Urgent, personal, and unforgettable.
City of Darkness Revisited – Greg Girard & Ian Lambot
The definitive portrait of Kowloon Walled City, captured just before demolition. A haunting mix of photographs and oral history that preserves one of Hong Kong’s most mythologized spaces — and the one place I wish I could go back in time to visit myself.
The Hong Kong Diaries – Chris Patten
The last British governor’s record of his turbulent final years before the 1997 handover. Candid, political, and tinged with farewell.
Fiction
The Piano Teacher – Janice Y.K. Lee
A postwar romance/mystery set amid colonial high society and wartime trauma. This is one of Hong Kong’s most widely acclaimed modern novels and rightly so.
Noble House – James Clavell
Clavell’s blockbuster epic of intrigue, tycoons, and power plays. Fictionalized, yes, but inseparable from the Hong Kong of the 1970s and ’80s.
Tai-Pan – James Clavell
Clavell again, this time at Hong Kong’s beginning: opium wars, trading dynasties, and the founding of the colony itself. Sweeping, pulpy, and undeniably influential.
My City – Xi Xi
Playful, affectionate, and surreal, Xi Xi’s cult-classic captures everyday Hong Kong with wit and intimacy. If Clavell gave us the city of empire, Xi Xi gives us the city of life.
Fragrant Harbour – John Lanchester
A multi-perspective saga that spans the city’s 20th-century transformations, weaving together lives of love, compromise, and survival.
If this list got you thinking differently about Hong Kong, there’s more where that came from. If you have a country or place you would like to see featured, let me know in the comments!
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Thank you, Scott - Looking forward to reading some of these. Just perusing the list brought back memories of my life there for 4 years before the British turn-over. I was young - 21 - and the Hong Kong I knew was the Wild West. You could do anything and be anyone!
Great Recommendations! Definitely not about the city itself, but I’d throw in Legend of the Condor Heroes. Probably an oversimplification, but as Marvel is to America, so is Jinyong to Hong Kong (though I’m sure many would say that extends to all of China 😉)