BOOK REVIEWS
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Chinese period. Perhaps because of this, the historian H. B. Morse commented in his International Relations of the Chinese Empire (3 volume, 1910) (Vol. I, p. 694) that it was "history written to support the utmost pretentions of the Hongkong residents" meaning its western inhabitants and especially the British. Saving Professor Lo Hsiang-lin's book on pre-1842 Hong Kong (1959) much of it done by his students and only part of it available in the English version (1963), we have had to wait all this time for someone to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the Chinese history of the region. It is fitting that it should have been written by China's scholar gentry, rescued from obscurity by a contemporary Chinese scholar businessman, aided and embellished by a British scholar long familiar with Hong Kong, and supported and published by the Hong Kong University Press.
The book is the result of collaboration between Peter Ng, who wrote a master's thesis for the University of Hong Kong on this subject in 1961 and Dr. Hugh Baker who revised and edited it for publication. I have used Peter Ng's thesis in connection with my own work for many years, and was consulted by the Hong Kong University Press when it was considering who might edit it for publication. I suggested that Dr. Baker, if available, would be the best person, but hinted that this would be a difficult task not because of any shortcomings in Mr. Ng's work but because a good deal of extra work would be necessary to make it suitable for the English-speaking public. It is therefore not surprising that, in the preface, the joint authors agree that the task was greater than they had anticipated. The work could have gone on and on, and it says much for Dr. Baker's will power that he was able to bring his complementary labours to a close so that we could all benefit.
Chinese gazetteers were never conceived for foreigners, as the Hong Kong University Press now intends. They were meant to provide a useful handbook of information on local subjects, for the benefit of senior officers in the district administration, particularly for the district magistrates and prefects who by the "law of avoidance" practised by the civil administration in imperial times, were required to be natives of other provinces of