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The book is therefore both factual and interesting, and at times even amusing. The reader is thus able to learn much about Hong Kong's new town development process through the personal insights of many of its past and present inhabitants. The result is therefore a very readable variety of perspectives on the growth of Tsuen Wan, from government and newcomers alike, but perhaps more than any other through the eyes of the many indigenous inhabitants who grew up with the early town and endured the heady expansion of the 1960s and 70s.
Having worked on parts of the Hong Kong new town story before, the reviewer is well aware of how much remains to be learned and told of this amazing story which has been created largely over the last thirty-five years. In this book James Hayes has added a large and unique addition to that academic enterprise, and has been kind enough to add some very important gaps in our knowledge of that story that only he could fill. For that we should be grateful, for the result is a text that not only gives the wider public the first detailed account of just how one of Hong Kong's nine new towns has developed, but perhaps even more importantly it has been put into a social and cultural context that has rarely been touched upon before. It can well be said that a town is its people. In Tsuen Wan: Growth of a 'New Town' and Its People James Hayes has given us the very best of an account of how such a new community has grown up to form one of the dynamic new centres of contemporary Hong Kong.
MICHAEL BRISTOW
Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xix + 322 pp. Bibliography. Indices.
Anne Birrell's Chinese Mythology is unquestionably the best book on the subject in print in English. Despite Birrell's obvious and acknowledged debt to Yuan Ke's works in Chinese, her book is a vast improvement over Yuan Ke's recent publication in English, Dragons and Dynasties (Penguin), which supplies a single version of each myth (usually a composite of several versions), with no attribution to any Chinese text. Birrell's Mythology is to be applauded for the care with which it lists variant versions of the same myth and gathers different myths on the same theme. All the major subjects in early Chinese myth