High ridges, sparkling waterfalls, lush feng shui woods and ancient fishing communities nestled in rocky harbours. Your mind refreshed, your limbs exercised, and your senses intoxicated, you wonder at the fact that only a few miles separate all this from one of the world’s most crowded cities. The Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong -- the bestselling guidebook to the [...]
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What to believe? The story of Google’s threatened exit from China has occupied a lot of column inches over the past fortnight. On one hand, its stand has been lauded as principled by many people. On the other, it may just be a well timed PR stunt for the company; its reputation has been receiving a hammering lately from authors, [...]
Can common ground be found on the divisive issue of Tibet? First, it’s necessary to find out what the people involved think, and why. Chinese-speaking journalist Annelie Rozeboom worked as a foreign correspondent in China for ten years. During that time she was able to interview numerous Tibetan people inside and outside Tibet, as well as Chinese and Western observers [...]
Singapore's beautiful Raffles Hotel hosted the launch of Lorette Roberts' latest book: Sketches of Singapore. (Thanks to the hotel for the complimentary Singapore Slings!) Razor TV filmed a three-part interview with Lorette, which includes lots of illustrations from the book. Watch below or directly at the Razor TV site. The book has been reviewed by Time Out Singapore and Expat [...]
Feng Chi-shun's Kowloon memoir Diamond Hill has been in the shops for a few weeks and has gained good reviews in the South China Morning Post, Time Out Hong Kong, Cairns Media Magazine and now The Correspondent, whose reviewer writes "The book finishes only to leave the reader wanting more -- it's a good read." Click on the following link [...]
I'm delighted to say that our titles will be available through bookshops in the United States and Canada as of June 2010. Our books will be handled on the other side of the Pacific by National Book Network. First up for the American market is With Bare Hands, since daredevil author Alain Robert has made a point of [...]
You may enjoy a few helpings of siu mai, char siu bau and har gau at your local dim sum restaurant. But did you know some places have up to 60 dim sum dishes on the menu? If you don't read or speak Chinese, you're sometimes stuck with ordering from the tourist menu, and this is far more [...]
If you were unable to attend the FCC launch of Mike Rowse's tell-all book No Minister, have no fear -- the former civil servant will be signing copies at two Hong Kong bookstores in early December. Mike will first be at Dymocks in Prince's Building, Central, at 1:00 pm on Thursday 3rd; and he follows this up with an appearance [...]
Veteran Hong Kong and China journalist Graham Earnshaw -- who is currently engaged on a series of walks from Shanghai to Tibet, picking up each time from the place he left off -- was interviewed this week for Shanghai Urbanatomy's Why I Write column. His latest book, The Great Walk of China, will appear in early 2010. Graham will also [...]
If you're in Central on Monday lunchtime, you could spend half an hour queueing up with the office drones for a bowl of instant noodles. Alternatively you could drop into Bookazine on the third floor of Prince's Building, where prize-winning Irish author Colm Tóibín will be signing books including his latest novel Brooklyn. Tóibín has been short-listed for the Man Booker [...]
Three copies of Bernd Hagemann's Sleeping Chinese are on their way to readers who can stay awake long enough to answer this question: There are sixty minutes in an hour. But how many winks are there in a nap? Answers to pete at blacksmithbooks dot com, Asian postal addresses only. (Does not include the Land of Nod).
Judge for yourself via my six-feet-of-seaview-cam. Beautiful, yes. Good for our health, probably not.
Further to last month's post about the Danxiashan national park in Guangdong, it's worth mentioning that many of the rock formations bear uncanny resemblances to human sexual organs. (I have no photos of those, but Wikipedia does). Ancient Confucians probably avoided the area for these reasons, and it's still very much off the beaten track, but modern China has few [...]
A new book out next week lifts the lid on a still-simmering political hot potato: In the depths of the 2003 SARS crisis, Mike Rowse (盧維思), a career Hong Kong civil servant, was handed the poisoned chalice of HarbourFest – intended to be (and which in many ways was) a psychological and commercial shot in the arm. Politics, as it [...]
The first time I visited Macau was to find a smuggler. Nothing as exciting as opium, gold or indentured coolies, three Macau exports before it became a gambling emporium, of course. No, my flat mate in Hong Kong wanted to bring his treasured Burmese cats into Hong Kong and he could not abide being separated from them for the six-month [...]
Katie Lau of the SCMP interviewed Feng Chi-shun last week about his new book, Diamond Hill: Memories of growing up in a Hong Kong squatter village. Click on the image below to open the story in full size.
CRI reporter Dominic Swire talks to Belgian entrepreneur Jack Leblanc about his 20 years in China, and how he turned from a physics teacher into a successful businessman. Listen to the radio interview online. Leblanc recalls several anecdotes from his recent book Business Republic of China, along with explaining the importance of guanxi, and how the shortest route between A [...]