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perceptive writings on the cultural history of the Territory, and in this instance he has been able to add to his long experience in this field his particular advantage of having worked personally in the new town for many years, first as a District Officer and then as Town manager; both as a government officer within the Hong Kong New Territories Administration. In the Preface to his book Hayes sets out his basic approach to the study succinctly:
As a former career civil servant, my approach to writing has inevitably been coloured by the knowledge and experience gained as an official. However, this book is not a thinly disguised 'official version' of events in Tsuen Wan. The motivation has been wholly personal, and readers should view it as the work of an interested writer who was also the man doing the job'.
This view is fully reflected by the text, and it is not an overstatement to suggest that at times the narrative comes across as a labour of love in which the author is very much expressing his personal involvement and feelings on the events that he is unfolding in the text. The result is a unique blend of academic scholarship and personal interpretation.
This is not to say that the book is in any way polemical or less than fairly researched. It is a text packed with carefully reviewed and assessed detail, and put into that wider cultural context that only this author can provide. It is thus not only about Tsuen Wan's development itself, but also its place within the wider contexts of recent Hong Kong history over the twentieth century. The book is organised into eleven chapters, with very full notes, bibliography and index. All but two of the chapters are largely chronological: the remaining two (VIII and IX) concentrating rather more on the various processes and policies of government and management at the local level with which James Hayes was himself so intimately involved during the formative years of the town's development. The joy of the book is that its style is not at all the dry factorial text that some historians are apt to produce, but rather the author has been able to intersperse the chronology with intense personal reminiscence, both of his own and of the many other participants of the Tsuen Wan story that he has been able to interview over the many years of his involvement with the town.
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perceptive writings on the cultural history of the Territory, and in this instance he has been able to add to his long experience in this field his particular advantage of having worked personally in the new town for many years, first as a District Officer and then as Town manager; both as a government officer within the Hong Kong New Territories Administration. In the Preface to his book Hayes sets out his basic approach to the study succinctly:
As a former career civil servant, my approach to writing has inevitably been coloured by the knowledge and experience gained as an official. However, this book is not a thinly disguised 'official version' of events in Tsuen Wan. The motivation has been wholly personal, and readers should view it as the work of an interested writer who was also the man doing the job'.
This view is fully reflected by the text, and it is not an overstatement to suggest that at times! the narrative comes across as a labour of love in which the author is very much expressing his own personal involvement and feelings on the events that he is unfolding in the text. The result is a unique blend of academic scholarship and personal interpretation.
This is not to say that the book is in any way polemical or less than fairly researched. It is a text packed with carefully reviewed and assessed detail, and put into that wider cultural context that only this author can provide. It is thus not only about Tsuen Wan's development itself, but also its place within the wider contexts of recent Hong Kong history over the twentieth century. The book is organised into eleven chapters, with very full notes, bibliography and index. All but two of the chapters are largely chronological: the remaining two (VIII and IX) concentrating rather more on the various processes and policies of government and management at the local level with which James Hayes was himself so intimately involved during the formative years of the town's development. The joy of the book is that its style is not at all the dry factorial text that some historians are apt to produce, but rather the author has been able to intersperse the chronology with intense personal reminisance, both of his own and of the many other participants of the Tsuen Wan story that he has been able to interview over the many years of his involvement with the town.
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