The Best China：Essays from Hong Kong

　　It represents one of the finest traditions in Chinese culture: the tradition of creativity, of the freedom of thought, freedom of spirit and freedom of the imagination. These are the characteristics of Hong Kong literature.

　　The Best China, an expression traditionally used to refer to the finest crockery brought out when one is entertaining special guests, has been adapted here to mean the best chinese tradition of free-thinking discursive prose.

　　This anthology of essays from Hong Kong and the diaspora, ranging across the past hundred and seventy years, records the intellectual ferment that has characterized the city since its founding in 1842, sometimes restless and questioning, sometimes meditative and lyrical, buoyed by an all-pervasive and indomitable spirit of freedom.
 

編者簡介

John Minford

　　John Minford is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at The Australian National University and Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.

v | Series Editor’s Preface
ix | Acknowledgements
xi | Translations
xv | Introduction
I
Forerunners
3 | Sir John Francis Davis, ‘The Poetry of the Chinese’
11 | Karl Gützlaff, ‘Nymphs of Perfect Beauty’
25 | James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hongkong: Reminiscences of a Long Residence in the East’
31 | Wang Tao, ‘On James Legge & Hong Kong’
43 | Johannes Nacken, ‘Chinese Street-Cries of Hongkong’
55 | E. J. Eitel, ‘Hongkong: Haven of Refuge, Home of the Free’
59 | James Dyer Ball, ‘The Bamboo’
67 | Cecil Clementi, ‘The Singsong Girls of Canton’
91 | Sun Yat-sen, ‘I Got My Ideas in Hong Kong’
II
More Recent Times
99 | Liu Ts’un-yan, ‘Cutting Grass’
115 | Liu Ts’un-yan, ‘A Mongol Bannerman in Hong Kong’
121 | Anthony C. Yu, ‘Days of 15 Shelley Street’
137 | Stephen C. Soong, ‘Somerset Maugham and My Father’
169 | Louis Cha, ‘That Little Brat Trinket’
189 | Margaret Ng, ‘The Many Faces of Louis Cha’
203 | Lee Yee, ‘Going in Opposite Directions: Louis Cha and Me’
209 | Jimmy Lai, ‘Freedom and Information’
221 | Lee Yee, ‘Back in the Year 1984’
229 | Liu Yichang, ‘This Time I Just Want to Entertain Myself—Preface to The Drunkard’
235 | David Hawkes, ‘Memories of Wong Siu-kit’
241 | Timothy Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing: The Unholy Lingo of RLS and Kung Fu Tse’
267 | Leung Ping-kwan, ‘The Walled City of Kowloon’
271 | Leung Ping-kwan, ‘The Sorrows of Lan Kwai Fong’
275 | Leo Ou-fan Lee, ‘A Conversation with Mahler in Paradise’
291 | Xi Xi, ‘The Drawer’
297 | San Su, ‘Paying One’s Last Respects Is Both a Source of Anguish for the Living and an Insult to the Dead’
301 | Ha Gong, ‘Getting High’ and Other Essays
315 | Xiao Si, ‘Loneliness among the Mountain Flowers—Xiao Hong in Hong Kong’
323 | Tung Chiao, ‘Raising the Bamboo Curtain’ and Other Essays
335 | Chip Tsao, ‘Memento Mori’