Hong Kong / History Seminar
Free and open to the public
Along with fishery, smuggling, and piracy, collaboration with foreigners had long been integral to the economy and society of the region of Guangdong in South China before the Opium War (1839–42). In this talk, Dr. Gary Chi-hung Luk traces Chinese collaboration in Hong Kong and its surrounding lower Pearl River Delta region during the 1839–42 hostilities to the social ecology and frontier setting of late imperial South China’s littoral. From this fluid water world one could observe a China that was much less hostile to—and more accommodating with—the West than what has usually been portrayed in textbooks, Mainland official discourses, or popular media.
Gary Chi-hung Luk did his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford and is currently the Elizabeth and Cecil Kent Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan. His research areas include early modern and modern China, the British Empire, and Hong Kong. His edited volume From a British to a Chinese Colony? Hong Kong before and after the 1997 Handover was recently published by the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is completing a monograph on China’s coastal and river societies during the Opium War and its following years.
This seminar is organized by the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative and co-sponsored by: Department of History, Department of Asian Studies, Centre for Chinese Research, and St. John’s College.
