Gillian Bickley

A Magistrate's Court in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong Gillian Bickley

The Court Cases Reported in The China Mail of The Honourable Frederick Stewart, MA, LLD, Founder of Hong Kong Government Education, Head of the Permanent Hong Kong Civil Service & Nineteenth Century Hong Kong Police Magistrate. Modern Commentary & Background Essays with Selected Themed Transcripts. With additional discussion of "The Opium Ordinance". 2005 edition with new material."The book has an interesting contribution on English journalism in Hong Kong at the time. The cases deal with incidents ranging from the abduction and sale of young girls for prostitution (something that still happens elsewhere in Asia) to the snatching on the street of women's ear-rings. Behind this book lies a controversy between those who think that, in Jan Morris's words, 'On the whole, with many lapses and exceptions, British government in Hong Kong [was] good government, ' and those who believe that 'the early modern state had to resort to violent and exemplary punishment to demonstrate [its] monopoly of authority' [Samson Chan, in an unpublished UK doctoral thesis quoted here]. In this stand-off, Bickley, a Hong Kong poet and academic of long standing, is on the whole on the pro-British side. Her lengthy introduction, however, is a masterly and impartial survey of her subject-matter. - Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times."The contributors have written with insight and understanding . . . a most readable book." - Sir T. L. Yang.