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with Sir John Davis, the Governor of Hong Kong, as its president and remained active for 12 years, but ceased to exist in 1859. The Hong Kong branch was re-established under the active patronage of another governor, Sir Robert Black, in 1959.
Since the handover, the society no longer has a patron. When the present Chief Executive of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, Mr. Tung Chee-hwa was asked to serve in that role, he politely declined.
An American in Hong Kong...
The conference participants are back from the lunch break and the 82-year-old Reverend Carl Smith is helped to the stage by Elizabeth Sinn. Smith's talk is titled "Forty Years of Research on Hong Kong." The lights are dimmed and heads begin to nod off again...
"You get out at exit A and on your right you'll see this big set of steps leading up to the skies...don't take them," said Smith as he was giving directions to his home in Mei Foo Sun Chuen. As soon as he said that it reminded me of an episode of the popular TV series M*A*S*H when the doctors had to dispose of a bomb. It went something like, “cut the red wire"...the doctor cuts it... "after cutting the blue wire"...explosion!!!
The reverend's instructions are spot on and I arrive without any trouble. The block is 19 and he's on the 11th Floor, flat D, but his flat is labelled 19D...go figure. Smith greets me and has to unlock the gate with a key. Not very safe, I think, for a man of his age. What if there's a fire? How is he going to get out?
The apartment is smaller than I had expected and it is filled wall to wall with file cabinets and card files all of Smith's research work over the last 40 years. The cards were put on microfilm and housed in the Public Records Office as the Carl Smith collection. Smith has recently agreed to leave the cards themselves to the Library of Congress in the United States.
"The Asian division of the Library of Congress, right before the handover, came to Hong Kong with the purpose of getting documents