“This is what I fear the most: The skyscrapers remain intact, the countryside hikes still beautiful, and our harbor rippling with night lights; you can still go to work and tweet dumb shit and outwardly you can’t tell that anything is wrong, but the only ones left are those who believe this is the best version of Hong Kong there could ever be.”
Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (2022)
Hong Kong has gone through a lot in the past eight years as its citizens have fought for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law only to see them all be taken away by the Chinese communist party.
Where did this desire for these Western values come from?
Why are Hong Kongers so passionate about fighting for their rights and freedoms?
In these 50 books on Hong Kong, you’ll find answers to these questions and more with a look at this former British colony’s history and Hong Kongers’ identity.
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In This Post, You’ll Find…
Jump to the section of this post that interests you the most:
Where to Start Your Book Travels to Hong Kong?
For those who want to explore Hong Kong in-depth, start with a book on the Opium Wars.
Then add some background to your reading with Steve Tsang’s A Modern History of Hong Kong. After that, jump into one of the many books about the pro-democracy movement I have listed here. I also loved The Impossible City by Karen Cheung, which looks at the major social issues facing Hong Kong today.
Finally, pick up some novels set in Hong Kong. I have a long list of fiction books here, ranging from historical fiction to contemporary novels.
The ones that will help you understand the city and culture better include The Borrowed, Ghost Forest, and On Java Road.
For those wanting to understand Hong Kong’s colonial past, try The Piano Teacher for a look at the war years and Gweilo for the 1950s. Tai-Pan is a flawed novel, but it does give you a sense of the first year of the British colony. Noble House, equally flawed, takes place during the 1960s and covers the rise of Hong Kong as the business center of Asia.
Books on the Opium War
To understand Hong Kong, you have to understand the Opium War — why it was fought, and how it handed Hong Kong to the British. For China, that war was a national humiliation. The return of Hong Kong in 1997 was seen as finally erasing it. That resentment still shapes everything.
Two books cover this period well. They approach it from opposite sides — one British, one Chinese. Read both reviews and decide for yourself which one earns a spot on your shelf.
1. Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age
By: Stephen R. Platt, 2018
MY RATING: 5 out of 5
“The basic fact was that the opium poppy grew very well in British India, which otherwise was a spectacularly unprofitable colonial venture (and which, without the rich profits from the Canton tea trade to offset its losses and debts, would likely have bankrupted the East India Company).”
Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is an engaging, thorough look at what led to the First Opium War — from McCartney’s failed attempt to establish diplomatic relations with China all the way to the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing.
Note: it doesn’t cover the Second Opium War.
The highlight for me was Platt’s portraits of the foreign community — the traders, missionaries, diplomats, British politicians, and military leaders on the ground. I came away feeling like I actually knew these people. The Chinese officials and merchants, though? Not so much. That imbalance stuck with me.
What Platt does really well is move between the on-the-ground action and the bigger global picture without losing you. The context lands. At times, it reads more like a novel than a history book.
My Verdict: A superb book — but not my first pick between the two. Read it, then read The Opium War by Julia Lovell and see which one stays with you longer.
2. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China
By Julia Lovell, 2015
MY RATING: 5 out of 5
“Why when China is more open to (and dependent on) global forces than at any other time in its history, has the government chosen to mobilize a nationalism fueled by resentment of the West’s historical crimes against China? Why, at a time when China is supposed to be on the edge of superpower status, are its people so regularly reminded of an abject history of humiliation?”
I wish Julia Lovell wrote all history books. She calls out the dishonesty, corruption, and hypocrisy of everyone involved — British and Chinese alike — but never in a preachy way. She’s sarcastic, biting, and funny. Very refreshing.
The Opium War focuses on the First Opium War, with one chapter on the Second and another on how the CCP has weaponized the war as propaganda ever since, which makes it disturbingly relevant to today’s geopolitics.
That propaganda angle is where it gets really interesting. The CCP insists the Opium War began 150 years of Western humiliation, and that only the Communist Party has erased it. Orwell said it best: “Who controls the past controls the future.” Lovell shows exactly how that playbook works.
But the real gold comes from the Chinese documents. So juicy and eye-opening that they kept me up way past my bedtime. That’s what Imperial Twilight is missing.
And before the Brits congratulate themselves, Lovell doesn’t let them off the hook either. Forcing a country to import an addictive drug is still one of the most egregious acts in history.
My Verdict: If I had to choose between the two, this one wins
More Books that Take You to Southeast Asia
Books on the History of Hong Kong
Good histories of Hong Kong written in English are hard to find. Most are written by Brits or Americans — and most ignore the Chinese entirely.
A Modern History of Hong Kong is the exception. It’s the best out there, told from a Hong Kong Chinese perspective.
Three others worth knowing about: Vaudine England’s Fortune’s Bazaar (2023) takes a multicultural angle, looking beyond the usual British and Chinese figures. The Gate to China by Michael Sheridan is the one to read if you want to understand Hong Kong’s history through its relationship with China. And City on the Edge by Ho-fung Hong (2022) is on my list — I haven’t gotten to it yet, but the reviews are promising.
3. A Modern History of Hong Kong
By Steve Tsang, 2007
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“The Hong Kong identity that emerged was based on a shared outlook and a common popular culture which blended traditional Chinese culture with that imported from overseas, with the influences of the USA, Britain and Japan being particularly noticeable. This shared outlook incorporated elements of the traditional Confucian moral code and emphasis on the importance of the family, as well as modern concepts like the rule of law, freedom of speech and of movement, respect for human rights, a limited government, a free economy, a go-getting attitude and pride in the local community’s collective rejection of corruption.”
I was looking for a history of Hong Kong that actually focused on the Chinese — not just the British. Most books get that wrong.
Tsang gets it right.
A Modern History of Hong Kong runs from the Opium Wars in the 1840s all the way to the 1997 handover. No tedious parade of colonial governors here. Instead, Tsang keeps the lens firmly on the ethnic Chinese — how they lived, how they were governed, and how a distinctly Hong Kong identity slowly emerged from under British rule.
He tackles three big questions: Why did Hong Kong become so prosperous? What did British rule actually do to its Chinese population? And how did Hong Kongers develop an identity so separate from mainland China?
What sets this book apart is how balanced and nuanced Tsang’s account is — critical of the British where criticism is due, but also genuinely praiseworthy when credit is deserved. That honesty is rare.
By the 1980s, he argues, Britain had built something in Hong Kong that had never existed in over two thousand years of Chinese history. I’ll leave it to you to find out what.
My Verdict: The best single-volume history of Hong Kong in English. Start here.
4. The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong
By Michael Sheridan, 2021
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“To the Chinese side this was the end of a national humiliation. They were determined to make it drawn out and bitter for the departing colonialists. That was not a diversion—it was the whole point. About one thousand Chinese officials were directly engaged in the handover and many of them swelled with patriotic pride as the foreigners inevitably submitted to their demands. To some it was vengeance for the poverty and suffering inflicted on past generations.”
The Gate to China by Michael Sheridan traces Hong Kong’s role in China’s rise — and China’s role in Hong Kong’s fall. It’s a well-researched, eye-opening read.
Sheridan walks you through the brutal 1997 handover negotiations. China played hardball. Britain showed up unprepared. Thatcher didn’t stand a chance.
But the part surprised me? I had always assumed China modeled its economy on the United States. Wrong. They were copying Hong Kong. That one revelation alone is worth the price of the book.
The last three chapters cover how the PRC slowly dismantled Hong Kong’s freedoms over the past eight years. Hard to put down.
One caveat: Hong Kongers’ own voices are largely absent. Given that neither the British nor the PRC ever bothered to ask them, maybe that’s the point.
My Verdict: Read it.
5. Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong
By Vaudine England, 2023
Fortune’s Bazaar by Vaudine England was released in May 2023–after I wrote this post. So, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
England tells the history of Hong Kong through its mix of cultures. Most histories focus on British and Chinese figures, but in this book, England looks at the Indians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians, Portuguese, and Eurasians. She also focuses on the less well-known and in some cases less reputable characters, such as the opium and gold smugglers, missionaries, and migrants.
Even though reviews on Goodreads have not been stellar, I’m still eager to read it.
Books on Hong Kong – Memoirs & Travelogues
You can find some good memoirs and autobiographies written by people who’ve visited or lived in Hong Kong over the years. And one brilliant book by a local Hong Konger.
In Hong Kong Holiday, journalist Emily Hahn writes about her time in Hong Kong during World War II.
Martin Booth has a beautifully written book called Gweilo describing his childhood in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
The best travel writer who’s ever lived, Jan Morris, writes about the last days of colonial Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Diaries by the last governor of Hong Kong gives you some observations and insights into the colony’s last five years leading up to the Handover.
But my favorite is The Impossible City, a very moving memoir by Hong Kong local Karen Cheung, describing her childhood in Hong Kong and her struggles with mental health issues, a dysfunctional family, and Hong Kong’s housing situation.
6. Hong Kong
By Jan Morris, 1997
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
“The urge for profit, the taste for good living, the flair for the dazzling, the energy, the mayhem, the gossip—all were there. East and West merged kaleidoscopically in the city streets.”
Written by one of the greatest travel writers who has ever lived, Hong Kong is Jan Morris’s tribute to one of the world’s greatest cities.
Hong Kong is part travelogue, part history — and she moves between the two effortlessly. Alternating chapters weave her impressions of the colony in its final years with the history of Hong Kong from its beginnings as a fishing village.
The history chapters are where Morris really shines. She writes history like a travelogue. She transports you not only across an ocean but also across decades. I wanted a time machine to transport myself to the shores of Hong Kong Island as the first opium smugglers came ashore, or sit in the stands at Happy Valley watching the horses cross the finish line.
My one criticism is her description of the Chinese people of Hong Kong. Morris is never purposely disrespectful or racist. But in today’s world, her descriptions come across as stereotypical and insensitive–exotic, foreign, inscrutable. She’s looking at the ethnic Chinese from afar, never getting close to them, and never getting to know them. Just generalizing.
Verdict: Although the writing and concept are brilliant, Hong Kong is probably too out-of-date to be worthy of your time.
7. Hong Kong Holiday
By Emily Hahn, 1946
In today’s world, Emily Hahn’s life wouldn’t cause anyone to blink an eye. But in the 1930s and 1940s, she was way ahead of her time.
An American from the Midwest, Hahn was the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering from the University of Wisconsin. In the 1930s, she worked for the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo and hiked by herself across central Africa. By 1935, she was in Shanghai, teaching English and writing for the New Yorker — while also becoming an opium addict and the concubine of a Chinese poet.
In 1941, she moved to Hong Kong. When the Japanese invaded, she escaped internment by claiming to be the wife of a Chinese man. She left in 1943.
Hong Kong Holiday is a collection of her New Yorker dispatches from that time — her observations and experiences in Hong Kong during one of its most dramatic periods.
My Verdict: I own the book but haven’t read it yet.
8. The Hong Kong Diaries
By Chris Patten, 2022
Chris Patten was the last British governor of Hong Kong — and one of its most controversial.
He arrived in 1992 and immediately stirred things up by introducing limited democratic reforms. Beijing was furious. Talks broke down. The Chinese government made clear that the moment they took over in 1997, everything Patten had done would be scrapped. And it was.
Depending on who you ask, Patten was either a hero for giving Hong Kongers a taste of democracy — or a reckless politician who antagonized China and made things worse for the people he was trying to help. That debate still hasn’t been settled.
The Hong Kong Diaries is his account of those five years — how the colony was governed, what it was like negotiating with Beijing, and who pushed back against his reforms. He ends with his assessment of the 2019 protests and the 2020 National Security Law.
I haven’t read it yet. But Goodreads readers rate it 4.11 out of 5, and given how central Patten is to Hong Kong’s story, it’s on my list.
My Verdict: Not rated — but if you’re interested in the handover years, this one looks essential.
9. Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood
By Martin Booth, 2005
MY RATING: 4 out of 5
“I thought about it. I had been happy in Hong Kong. It had been an exciting place in which to live and I was sure it had much to offer that I had yet to uncover. However, there was more to it than that. I felt I had grown up in Hong Kong. I could recall little of my life prior to the Corfu. It was as if my memory—my actual existence—had begun the minute my foot had touched the dock in Algiers. England was as strange a place to me now as Hong Kong had been on that June morning in 1952. In short, I felt I belonged here.”
Gweilo is Martin Booth’s beautifully written, evocative memoir about growing up in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
He’s a wonderful writer. Before you know it, you’re whipping through the pages. The descriptions are so vivid that you feel like you’re right there with him — sneaking out of the hotel on his first night, roaming the back alleys, encountering the legendary Queen of Kowloon.
The book also gives you a real window into Hong Kong in the 1950s — a city still recovering from the war, absorbing waves of immigrants from China, and buzzing with sailors on their way to Korea. What I loved most is that the focus stays on the Chinese people of the city, not the Western expats. That’s rare.
My Verdict: One of the best memoirs on Hong Kong. Read it!
10. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
By Karen Cheung, 2022
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“I had bought into all the cliches that the adults told me about my city: that it was an apolitical cultural desert inhabited by go-getters who have no real values except becoming rich. But I did not know yet that this is a place where parallel universes coexist, and you could live your entire life here without ever pulling back the curtains on the other Hong Kongs.”
This one hit me differently.
The Impossible City by Karen Cheung is part memoir, part social and cultural commentary — and it’s the best memoir on this list. One of the top five books written about Hong Kong. A must read.
Cheung is a journalist and a Hong Konger. She writes about growing up in Hong Kong with an abusive and dysfunctional family, her struggles with mental health, and her fierce, complicated love for her city. The memoir sections are deeply moving. I dare you not to feel something.
But what makes this book truly special is the social commentary. Cheung describes the problems Hong Kongers actually live with — the crushing lack of affordable housing, the inadequate mental health care — and she says things about filial piety that you rarely hear a Chinese person say openly. Brave and honest in equal measure.
If you read only one book from this list, read this one.
My Verdict: THE best memoir here. One of the top five books on Hong Kong, full stop.
Books that Take You to Latin America
Books on Hong Kong – Pro-Democracy Movement
If you read only one section of this post, make it this one.
These five books on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement are some of the best writing on the subject in English. Each author brings a different perspective — a movement leader who lived it, a local journalist who covered it, foreign journalists who watched it unfold from the inside, and an academic who helps you make sense of it all. Together, they give you the full picture.
One thing worth noting: every book here is written by someone who supported the movement. The perspective of those who won — the pro-Beijing politicians, the property developers, the tycoons who helped Beijing take control — is largely absent. History is usually written by the victors. In Hong Kong’s case, it’s the opposite.
11. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong
By Louisa Lim, 2022
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“The British had not endowed their subjects with full citizenship, the right of abode in Britain, or universal suffrage, but they had inculcated them with civic values, including an almost religious respect for freedom, democracy, and human rights. And Hong Kongers were not going down without a fight.”
Here’s the thing about Hong Kong that most people miss: Hong Kongers have never had a say in their own fate. Not under the British. Not under China. Never.
That’s the beating heart of Indelible City. Louisa Lim digs into Hong Kong’s history, dispels myths told by both sides, and shows how Hong Kongers were written out of their own story each time. No democracy under the British. No voice in the handover negotiations. No say in what came after.
The book then moves into the pro-democracy movement — the Umbrella Movement of 2014, the Causeway Bay Booksellers incident, and the 2019 protests — and how the political system was slowly reshaped to exclude them entirely.
Two side stories run throughout. The first follows Lim’s own search for identity — half British, half Chinese, a journalist trying to stay objective while covering a city she loves. The second is the story of Tsang Tsou-choi — the King of Kowloon — an eccentric local who spent decades plastering Hong Kong with posters accusing first the British, then the PRC, of stealing his land. An unlikely symbol. But a perfect one.
My Verdict: Thought-provoking, personal, and essential. One of the best books on this list.
12. Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World
By Mark L Clifford, 2022
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“In the post-1997 world, freedom is at the core of what it means to be a Hong Konger. Even a National Security Law, a patriotic education campaign, a hotline to snitch on neighbors and colleagues, purges of teachers and journalists, loyalty oaths for government officials, elections that are delayed and rigged, and the jailing of nonviolent political dissidents won’t be enough to extinguish Hong Kongers’ fight for freedom.”
Mark Clifford spent over twenty years in Hong Kong. He’s not a local — but he’s not an outsider either. That in-between perspective is what makes Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World so valuable.
The book covers the full arc: the Umbrella Movement of 2014, the rise of the pro-democracy movement, the 2019 protests, and Xi Jinping’s response with the 2020 National Security Law. Clifford was there for all of it. He writes with the authority of someone who watched it happen from the inside — and the clarity of someone who could still step back and see the bigger picture.
His central argument is chilling: what Beijing did to Hong Kong, it’s now doing to the rest of the world. He backs it up with examples. It’s hard to argue with him.
One honest criticism — Clifford explains broadly that Beijing coopted Hong Kong’s business elite to take control of the city, but doesn’t go deep enough on how. That story deserves its own book.
My Verdict: One of my favorites on this list. Essential reading for anyone trying to understand not just Hong Kong — but where China is headed next.
13. Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back
By Nathan Law, 2021
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“…Hong Kong is also a lesson in how authoritarian power undermines a free society. It may not always arrive in a tank. It does not always happen overnight, by means of a coup. More often than not, it happens through a million subtle adjustments, each in itself so incremental that it might seem unnecessary to object.”
Of all the books I’ve read on Hong Kong, this one made me the angriest.
Nathan Law isn’t an outside observer. He organized the 2014 Occupy Central Movement, ran for office and won — only to have his seat stripped from him on a retroactively applied law — and spent time in prison for protesting. In 2020 he fled to the UK, where he was granted asylum. This is his city. And he watched it be taken apart piece by piece.
Freedom is his account of what that felt like — what it means to have your country’s freedom dismantled, the rule of law replaced by rule by law, your culture erased, truth rewritten, and a promised democracy that never came. He also shows how Beijing uses economic blackmail to control what private citizens in other countries say and do. That chapter alone should alarm everyone.
Compared to the other books on this list, this one hits hardest emotionally. It’s personal, powerful, and beautifully written.
My Verdict: The most emotionally devastating book on this list. Read it alongside Indelible City for the full picture.
14. Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now
By Joshua Wong and Jason Y. Ng, 2020
MY RATING: Not read yet
Joshua Wong is one of the most important figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. He began his activism at 14, leading a successful fight against a pro-CCP school curriculum. He went on to lead the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 anti-Extradition Bill protests.
As of June 2025, he’s in prison serving a 56-month sentence for subversion under the National Security Law, with an expected release date of January 2027 — though additional charges of foreign collusion could extend that further.
Unfree Speech was written while Wong was imprisoned for his activities during the 2014 protests. It covers his life story, letters from prison, and a global call to action.
I haven’t read it yet. But Wong’s story is too important to leave off this list. Netflix’s documentary about him, Teenager versus Superpower, is worth watching while you wait.
My Verdict: Not rated — but Joshua Wong is essential to understanding Hong Kong.
15. Among the Braves
By Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin, 2023
My Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
“The movement mushroomed, anger within young people like Tommy swelling into something they could not control or even fully understand. It was directed at the police, at the broken promises of Hong Kong, at their government for its arrogance, and at China for trying to erode an identity they had only just discovered for themselves in the streets, standing beside like-minded others. It was directed at the lives they were told to achieve—a family, a house—but that were out of reach for their generation. They fought not because they knew it could work but because the cost of not doing anything was simply too much to bear.”
Among the Braves tells the story of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement through four people: Tommy, a young frontline fighter; Chu You-Ming, a veteran activist and priest; Finn, an online warrior organizing from the UK; and Gwyneth Ho Kwai-Lam, a journalist turned politician. Four lives. One city. And a movement that changed all of them.
Authors Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin are two foreign journalists — not locals, not fluent in Cantonese — who moved to Hong Kong just a year before the last protests. You’d think that would be a disadvantage. It isn’t. Their outsider clarity is exactly what makes this book so valuable. They helped me finally see how the movement evolved over time: from the 1989 Tiananmen vigils, to the centrally-led Umbrella Movement of 2014, to the leaderless uprising of 2019.
They also made me care deeply about these four people. I was emotionally invested by the end.
One thing I couldn’t shake: Western politicians — especially in the United States — used these brave Hong Kongers for their own political gain. Then when it was time to act, to offer safe passage, they did nothing.
My Verdict: One of the best on this list. Read it.
16. Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, 2020
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
“The degree of inequality in the territory is staggering. While 18 percent of Hong Kongers lived under the poverty line in 2016, the net worth of Hong Kong’s top ten billionaires represented 35 percent of the city’s GDP, compared to 3 percent in the U.S. Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient, a measurement of income distribution, is one of the highest in the world at 0.533.”
At just over 100 pages, Vigil is the shortest book on this list. It’s also one of the most useful.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of Chinese history who specializes in student protests. He knows this movement cold. And what he does that no other book here does quite as well is fill in the gaps — the questions I still had after reading six other books on the pro-democracy movement.
How did the 2014 Occupy Movement lead to the 2019 protests? How were they different? What was the real meaning behind the umbrella symbol? Why did the older and younger generations of movement leaders so often disagree? Vigil finally gave me clear, concise answers.
That last point — the generational divide — is particularly valuable. Other books mention the disagreements but don’t explain them. Wasserstrom does, and it reframes everything.
If you’re new to the pro-democracy movement, start here before tackling the longer books. If you’ve already read them, read this one anyway.
My Verdict: The best entry point on the movement. Short, sharp, essential.
More Books that Take You Around the World
Fiction Books Set in Hong Kong
I had a hard time finding novels set in Hong Kong written in English or translated into English. At first, I found a lot of books written before 2000 that portrayed the Hong Kong Chinese as exotic, strange, devious, and unscrupulous (Tai-Pan and Noble House).
Contemporary novels on Hong Kong are better but they also tend to focus on Westerners in Hong Kong. My favorite ones are The Piano Teacher, Expatriates, and On Java Road.
It took me quite a while to find books written by Hong Kongers. But luckily I found some good ones–romances, mysteries, and family dramas. The perfectly titled Love in a Fallen City by one of the best contemporary Chinese writers, Eileen Chang, is a good book of short stories set during the 1930s and 1940s in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
For contemporary books on Hong Kong written by Hong Kongers, I recommend reading either The Borrowed or Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei. Both are brilliant books.
Ghost Forest is another good book on Hong Kong. It will give you a glimpse at the life of a Hong Kong family and the tensions between a father and daughter.
If you just want a fun book set in Hong Kong, I recommend the brilliant Ava Lee series starring Ava Lee as a forensic accountant who solves accounting mysteries around the world while working with an ex-triad boss.
17. Tai-Pan: The Epic Novel of the Founding of Hong Kong
By James Clavell, 1966
MY RATING: 2 out of 5 stars
“Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium—and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.”
At over 1,000 pages, Tai-Pan is a truly epic novel set during the first year of the British colony of Hong Kong. It’s 1841, and the opium smugglers, Chinese compradors, missionaries, and colonial government are just beginning to settle on Hong Kong Island.
The main character is Dirk Struan — a Scottish trader and opium smuggler known as the Tai-Pan, the most powerful and wealthy trader in Asia. Clavell reportedly based him on William Jardine, head of the famous trading house Jardine, Matheson & Company. The resemblance is loose at best.
Two things bothered me. First, all the historical figures have been renamed and events reshuffled, so if you’re hoping for grounded historical fiction, you’ll be disappointed. This feels closer to 90% fiction, 10% fact. Second, and more seriously, the book hasn’t aged well. Published in 1966, it reflects the casual racism of its era. The Chinese characters are portrayed as exotic, devious, and inscrutable. I found myself cringing every time one appeared on the page.
And yet…Dirk Struan is a fabulous character, Hong Kong is a captivating setting, and the plot held my attention all the way to the end. Someone should rewrite this book. The story of Hong Kong’s founding is worth telling well.
My Verdict: A page-turner with a conscience problem. Read it with eyes open…or skip it and wait for the version it deserves.
18. Noble House
By James Clavell, 1981
MY RATING: 2 out of 5 stars
“He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odor nor perfume—just strange, and curiously exciting. “Superintendent, what’s that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door.” Armstrong hesitated. Then he smiled. “That’s Hong Kong’s very own, Mr. Bartlett. It’s money.”
Noble House is the sequel to Tai-Pan. It’s now 1963, and Hong Kong has transformed into the business center of Asia. The trading house that Dirk Struan built still stands — and one of his descendants is still the most powerful Tai-Pan in the city.
There are two storylines. The stronger one follows Ian Dunross, the new Tai-Pan, as he tries to close a deal with an American company while fending off a rival determined to destroy Noble House. The weaker one involves Soviet spies. It is a subplot so convoluted it could have been cut entirely, and the book would have been better for it.
The book does a good job showing what Hong Kong looked like at this pivotal moment — the discrimination faced by the Chinese population, rampant corruption in the police force, unsafe housing, chronic water shortages. The social portrait is surprisingly sharp.
Like Tai-Pan, it hasn’t aged well. The sexism and racism are hard to ignore. Women and Chinese characters are handled in ways no writer today would get away with.
And yet, at over 1,000 pages, I kept track of who was who until the very end. That’s not nothing.
My Verdict: Flawed but compelling. Read Tai-Pan first. If you survived that one and want more, this is your next stop.
19. Love in a Fallen City
By Eileen Chang, 1943
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
“That’s why Jimiao is desperate to leave Hong Kong. It’s too colonial here. If we go somewhere else, the race restrictions can’t possibly be as severe, can they? There must be some place in the world where we can live.“
Eileen Chang is one of China’s greatest writers. If you haven’t heard of her, that’s the first thing to fix.
Love in a Fallen City is a collection of six novellas and short stories set in 1930s and 1940s Hong Kong and Shanghai. The themes are consistent throughout — romantic love, family dysfunction, and the near-impossible position of women in Chinese society at the time. Politics and war hover in the background, but Chang keeps them there. She’s interested in the people, not the events.
The characters frustrated me constantly. The women are passive and trapped. The men are selfish and entitled. The families are manipulative and suffocating. And yet, weeks after finishing the book, I still couldn’t stop thinking about them. Especially “The Golden Cangue” and “Red Rose, White Rose.” Bizarre, dark, unforgettable.
This is also one of the very few books written by a Chinese woman about Hong Kong in the 1930s-40s. That alone makes it worth reading.
My Verdict: Challenging and strange. Stick with it.
20. The Language of Threads
By Gail Tsukiyama, 1999
MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
“Just that we can’t run away from what defines our fates. Who we are and what we believe in grow from the roots of our past, no matter how much we might try to deny it.”
It’s 1938. The Japanese are advancing on Canton. Pei and Ji Shen are two “self-combed women,” bound by a vow never to marry. They flee to Hong Kong to start over.
One important note before you pick this up: The Language of Threads is a sequel to The Women of Silk, which is set in China. You really can’t read this one without reading that one first. The Women of Silk is not on this list. It’s not set in Hong Kong, but consider it essential reading before you get here.
That said, the premise is worth the journey. Self-combed women were a fascinating and little-known phenomenon in southern China. They were women who rejected marriage, lived independently, and formed tight-knit communities. This book gives you a real window into that world, and it’s the best part.
The rest is more uneven. Pei is almost too good to be true. She is endlessly patient, selfless, and forgiving. The plot follows a predictable arc.
My Verdict: Read The Women of Silk first. Then come back to this one.
21. The Painted Veil
By W. Somerset Maugham, 1925
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
“’I had no illusions about you,” he said. “I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aim and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. Its comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn’t ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid.’”
W. Somerset Maugham could make a grocery list sound beautiful. The Painted Veil is proof. The prose flows so effortlessly. You barely notice you’re reading.
The story follows Kitty, a vain and shallow woman who marries Walter, a bacteriologist, purely to escape her life in England. He takes her to 1920s Hong Kong, she has an affair, he finds out, and as punishment drags her to a plague-ridden village in China.
Here’s the honest caveat: if you’re picking this up for Hong Kong, you’ll be disappointed. The city is barely a backdrop. The real story happens in China. Hong Kong could have been any British colony and it wouldn’t have mattered.
But the themes of redemption, freedom, and self-discovery are universal, and Maugham’s writing carries you through every page.
My Verdict: A great novel that happens to be partially set in Hong Kong.
22. The Honourable Schoolboy: A George Smiley Novel
by John le Carre, 1977
MY RATING: 2 out of 5 stars
“He breathed in, savouring the familiar pleasures. The east had never failed him: “We colonise them. Your graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.”
John le Carré is one of the greatest spy writers who ever lived. Unfortunately, The Honourable Schoolboy is not one of his best. At least for me.
This is the second book in the Karla trilogy. It probably helps to have read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy first. I hadn’t, and I think it showed.
The story is set in Hong Kong in the early 1970s, just before the fall of Vietnam. George Smiley, having just exposed a mole inside British intelligence, is now trying to uncover what the Russians are up to in Hong Kong. The operation stretches across Southeast Asia.
Spy thrillers are usually books I whip through in a few days. With this one, I needed a lot of patience. The writing is stuffy and wordy — le Carré takes far too many pages to say one thing. He’s no Hemingway. I had to read carefully and reread certain parts just to make sense of the story.
The ending was a disappointment.
And like so many books of its era, it hasn’t aged well. The sexism is hard to ignore. If you’re a man, maybe it doesn’t register.
My Verdict: Skip it unless you are on a quest to read all le Carré novels.
23. The Piano Teacher
By Janice Y.K. Lee, 2009
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“She is the most amiable rude person ever. People bask in her attention.”
I loved this book. Of all the fiction on this list, The Piano Teacher is the one that stayed with me longest.
It’s set in Hong Kong during two periods: the Japanese occupation of 1941-1945, and the postwar colonial world of the 1950s. Two timelines, two very different Hong Kongs.
The story follows Claire, a young English woman who arrives in 1950s Hong Kong and falls into an affair with Will. He is a man haunted by his years in the Japanese internment camps. The novel moves between the two timelines, but the occupation years are where the book truly comes alive.
The most fascinating character is Will’s girlfriend, Trudy, who remained outside the internment camps and had to navigate life under Japanese occupation on her own terms. How she dealt with the Japanese is the most compelling part of the book.
If you want to understand what Hong Kong was like during the Japanese occupation, this is the best piece of fiction on the subject I’ve found.
My Verdict: One of my favorites on this list. Read it.
24. The Expatriates
By Janice Y.K. Lee, 2016
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire—a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks—and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life.”
Expatriates doesn’t get the highest reviews on Goodreads. But for me, I couldn’t put the book down.
The book centers around three main characters: Mercy, Margaret, and Hillary—all ex-pats in Hong Kong.
First, Mercy. 20 years old, Korean-American from Queens. She’s got a talent for making bad decisions. Everything she comes into contact with, she breaks. In real life, you’d be her friend because you’d feel good about yourself for not being her. On the pages of a book, she’s like a car crash you can’t look away from.
Second, Margaret. Stay-at-home mom. Mother of three. Married to Clarke. Lives a cushy life in Hong Kong. She wants to immerse herself in Hong Kong society, but she ends up immersed in the American expat ghetto.
Third, Hillary. Married to a very successful lawyer named David. Childless. She wants children, but she has yet to conceive after years of trying. Her marriage is on the rocks. She’s lost and purposeless.
One day, Margaret and Mercy meet. Margaret hires Mercy to babysit her children. Little does she know that this decision will come at a great cost to her and her family.
My Verdict: Read it, especially if you’ve ever been an expat or spent time in Hong Kong. Lee captures the exhilaration and suffocation of an expat bubble perfectly.
25. The Borrowed
By Chan Ho-Kei (author) and Jeremy Tiang (translator), 2014
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
“People started insinuating that in Hong Kong, power was now able to crush justice, and that the police were just the stooges of those in authority, closing one eye when it came to groups supported by the government, serving no one but the politicians.”
The Borrowed is one of the most original novels on this list. It is a mystery series set in Hong Kong that doubles as a social history of the city.
The book is divided into six standalone mysteries, each set in a pivotal year in Hong Kong’s history: 2013 (the Umbrella Movement), 2003 (SARS), 1997 (the Handover), 1989 (Tiananmen), 1977 (the founding of the Independent Commission Against Corruption), and 1967 (the communist strikes and bombings). The parts run in reverse chronological order. As you read backward through time, you watch Hong Kong’s society and police force transform before your eyes.
The detective, Kwan Chun-Dok, solves ridiculously complex mysteries in the vein of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. The first four parts lean heavily into classic mystery territory, with only glancing references to the historical events unfolding around them. Parts 5 and 6 are where the book truly comes alive. The social upheaval moves to the center, and I found myself savoring every page.
If Chan had maintained that societal focus throughout all six parts, this would be a perfect book.
My Verdict: Read it, especially after A Modern History of Hong Kong. It’ll give you a feel for the city across six decades that no history book can.
26. Second Sister
By Chan Ho-Kei (author) and Jeremy Tiang (translator), 2017
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
“The problem isn’t the internet, it’s us.”
Second Sister is the second book on this list by Chan Ho-Kei, and in my opinion, the slightly better one. It’s set in 2014 during the Umbrella Movement. The protests hover in the background — closing streets, fueling distrust of the police. They add tension without dominating the story.
The mystery centers on Nga Yee, a young woman whose younger sister Siu Man takes her own life. Devastated and determined, she hires an investigator to find out what really happened.
I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. The characters are well-developed, the mystery is tightly plotted, and I had a hard time putting it down. Nga Yee is quietly likable — you root for her. The investigator, N, is an absolute jerk, mean and abrasive — but you keep reading because you suspect something warmer is hiding underneath.
What elevates the book is its social commentary. Housing struggles, bullying, sexual harassment, and social media. It gives readers a real window into the pressures of everyday life in Hong Kong.
My Verdict: Read it.
27. Ghost Forest
By Pik-Shuen Fung, 2021
My RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
“And as I got older, I kept moving and moving—from Vancouver to Providence to London to New York—because whenever I started to feel attached to a place or to people, I wanted, subconsciously, to make sure I would be the first to leave.”
Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung is a beautifully written, emotionally powerful story about a complicated father-daughter relationship and about what it means to grow up caught between two worlds.
It’s 1987, ten years before the Handover. Anxious about Hong Kong’s return to China, many families make the difficult decision to emigrate. The narrator’s family is one of them. At three years old, the narrator — whose name we never learn — moves to Vancouver with her mother. Her father stays behind in Hong Kong to support them — the classic “astronaut family.”
The daughter grows up barely knowing her father. Their rare encounters are a series of misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Some of the tensions are universal — the need for approval, the weight of disappointment, the slow work of forgiveness. Others are distinctly Hong Kong Chinese: filial piety, the preference for sons over daughters.
The chapters are short, sometimes just a few sentences, almost like poems. Simple language that lands hard.
My Verdict: A very moving story with interesting cultural insights.
28. Diamond Hill
By Kit Fan, 2021
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
“We are in a state of transition here. In fact, everyone in Hong Kong is obsessed with one single date: 1 July 1997. The whole city is in a state of violent change, moving from one regime we are used to loathing, to another one we are loath to get used to.”
Diamond Hill is set in 1987 — three years after China and Britain signed the Joint Declaration laying out the terms for the 1997 Handover. The whole city is waiting, anxious, counting down.
The narrator, nicknamed Buddha, has just returned to Hong Kong after two years in Thailand recovering from heroin addiction. He ends up staying with Buddhist nuns in a convent in Diamond Hill — a shantytown in a poorer part of the city.
Diamond Hill has a fascinating history. Once nicknamed the Hollywood of the Orient, it was home to Hong Kong’s first movie studios. Jackie Chan filmed Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon there. By 1987, the studios are long gone and property developers are eyeing the land. Buddha arrives just as they’re bulldozing shacks and displacing the people who live there.
The first half draws you in with evocative writing and a real sense of the pre-Handover mood. The helplessness and uncertainty mixed with the feverish energy of money to be made. The middle sags. But the final stretch, as the characters’ histories slowly come into focus, pulls everything together into something genuinely moving — a meditation on time, place, and second chances.
My Verdict: Recommended, especially if you like character-driven, philosophical fiction.
29. Hong Kong Noir
Edited by Jason Y. Ng and Susan Blumberg-Kason, 2018
MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
“In a place that never sleeps and barely even blinks, violent crimes are a relative rarity and people feel safe hanging out on the street at all hours of the day. When Hong Kongers do commit murder, however, they do so with plenty of dramatic flourish. Dismemberment, cannibalism, a laced milkshake, and a severed head tucked inside a giant Hello Kitty doll—Hong Kongers have seen it all.”
Hong Kong Noir is a collection of 14 short stories: ghost stories, murder mysteries, domestic dramas, and historical thrillers. All set in Hong Kong.
Fair warning: if you’re expecting horror and gore, you’ll be disappointed. These are pretty tame. What they do well is paint a picture of contemporary Hong Kong — the widening income gap, sky-high property prices, a tone-deaf government, and the slow erosion of the city’s unique character.
A few stories reach back into history — the Japanese occupation, the 1967 riots, the 1997 Handover — and those are the most rewarding.
One honest note: I put this book down after three stories on my first attempt. After reading 40 books on Hong Kong, I picked it up again and flew through it. The stories made sense.
My Verdict: Save it for after you’ve read some history. You’ll get far more out of it.
30. On Java Road
By Lawrence Osborne, 2022
MY RATING: 4.5 out of 5 stars
“She believed in the efficiency of the communist party but what was important was that she saw the communist party as the one entity that could make China and thus she the greatest power in the world. This would be her future and her family’s future. Her duty was to her clan, her dynasty, her people, and her civilization.“
I loved Lawrence Osborne’s previous novel, The Glass Kingdom, a thriller set in Bangkok. On Java Road, I loved equally — but for completely different reasons. Here, it’s all about the setting, the atmosphere, and the observations.
The book takes place in Hong Kong during the 2019 democracy protests. Osborne is as good as Graham Greene at capturing a city in political turmoil. Umbrellas. Tear gas. Rubber bullets. Students turning up dead. And because this is history — we already know how it ends — the mood carries extra weight.
The main character is Adrian Gyle, a mediocre British journalist and long-time Hong Kong resident with friends in high places. His best friend Jimmy Tang, from a wealthy pro-Beijing family, introduces him to his young mistress, Rebecca To, a democracy protester. Then Rebecca disappears, and Jimmy goes to ground.
The mystery of what happened to Rebecca never quite takes center stage. What is the larger question of what’s happening to Hong Kong — and to the world order? Osborne weaves in multiple perspectives brilliantly: the pro-Beijing elite, the Global South, and the Western left. It’s sharp and unsettling.
My one criticism: Rebecca’s disappearance needed more suspense. It felt unresolved.
My Verdict: Read it alongside Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World for the full picture.
31- 46. The Ava Lee Series
By Ian Hamilton, 2011 – 2022
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
I dare you to pick up one of these books and not immediately start the next one.
The Ava Lee series follows Ava Lee, a Hong Kong-Canadian forensic accountant and a practitioner of a lethal martial art. Her business partner is Uncle Chow, a former triad leader. Together they run a small operation helping clients who’ve been cheated out of their money, and Ava’s job is to track it down.
Who knew accounting could be this thrilling?
The cases take Ava all over the world — Hong Kong, Wuhan, London, the Faroe Islands, Milan, Singapore. The books are well-plotted, the dialogue is natural, and the settings are always fun. Highly addictive. Impossible to put down.
My Verdict: Start with Disciple of Las Vegas (Book 1). The prequel, The Dragon Head of Hong Kong, tells the story of how Ava and Uncle met. You don’t need to read it first, but it’s a good one.
Here’s a complete list of the Ava Lee Books in order:
- (0.5) The Dragon Head of Hong Kong (2013) – prequel – the story of how Ava and Uncle Chow met; you don’t need to read it first
- (1) Disciple of Las Vegas (2011) – I read this one first
- (2) The Water Rat of Wanchai (2011)
- (3) The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (2011)
- (4) The Red Pole of Macau (2012)
- (5) The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (2013)
- (6) The Two Sisters of Borneo (2014)
- (7) The King of Shanghai (2015)
- (8) The Princeling of Nanjing (2016)
- (9) The Couturier of Milan (2017)
- (10) The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (2018)
- (11) The Goddess of Yantai (2018)
- (12) The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (2019)
- (13) The Diamond Queen of Singapore (2020)
- (14) The Sultan of Sarawak (2022)
- (15) The General of Tiananmen Square (2023)
47 – 50. The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung Series (1 – 4)
By Ian Hamilton, 2019
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
“Basically, most things that ran contrary to the status quo were labelled criminal and since the British had imposed—and rigorously defended—their version of the status quo on a Chinese culture with a different set of values, there as a disconnect.”
If you loved the Ava Lee series, this is where to go next.
The Uncle Chow Tung series is the prequel. The four books trace the life of Ava’s business partner, from his arrival in Hong Kong in 1959 through his years as a member and eventual leader of the Fanling Triad.
The first book, Fate, opens in 1969. The Mountain Master of the Fanling Triad has just died, leaving a weak and ineffective successor. Rival triads smell blood. Uncle Chow steps up to unite the gang, fend off the competition, and keep the money flowing.
The story starts slowly but turns into a genuine page-turner by the end. My one honest criticism: the dialogue doesn’t quite ring true. These are triad members, but they talk like polite men from the suburbs of Toronto. It breaks the spell a little.
Still, I kept reading.
My Verdict: Read the Ava Lee series first. Then come back for this one.
Here is a list of all the books in the series:
Final Thoughts
That’s all 50 books about Hong Kong. I hope you’ve found something to read about what was once one of the greatest cities in the world.
I have enjoyed this reading journey through Hong Kong. If you were to ask me for my top 5 favorite books, here’s my answer:
- The Impossible City – passionate and insightful
- Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World – informative
- The Opium War – insightful and funny
- A Modern History of Hong Kong – informative
- All the books in the Ava Lee series – so fun!
Two books that deserve honorable mention are The Borrowed and On Java Road. Neither are perfect books, but both say something about Hong Kong that helped me understand the city better.
If you have any other books I should add to this list, let me know!
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I’ve written a novel about an English tourist who meets and falls in love with a Hong Kong protest leader. As their relationship develops, and then stalls, they have to make dangerous choices regarding love, loyalty and liberty.
https://shorturl.at/dc8PD