If you want to read something about Hong Kong before setting out on your trip, good places to start are A History of Hong Kong by Frank Welsh (HarperCollins, 1997) or A Modern History of Hong Kong by Steve Tsang (I.B. Tauris, 2004), both of which give a thorough historical account of the colony's ignoble beginnings to the 1997 handover. Life in the infamous Walled City is the subject of Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Watermark Publications, 2003), complete with photographs of a life now vanished. Even though it remains slightly dated, one of my favorite books is Jan Morris's Hong Kong (Vintage, 1997), which traces the evolution of the British colony from its birth during the Opium Wars to just before the handover. This book gives a unique perspective on the workings of the former colony and imparts an astonishing wealth of information, making it fascinating armchair reading. Business travelers may want to pick up Culture Shock! Hong Kong: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (Marshall Cavendish, 2005) by Betty Wei and Elizabeth Li.
I love looking at pictures of old Hong Kong, and especially fascinating is Nigel Cameron's An Illustrated History of Hong Kong (Oxford University Press, 1991), with photographs that show Hong Kong of yore and vividly illustrate how much the city has changed. An even more thorough pictorial history is presented in Old Hong Kong (FormAsia Books Ltd., 2002), edited by Trea Wiltshire and covering Hong Kong from 1860 through the June 1997 handover.
For an intimate view of Hong Kong, a longtime favorite is Hong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time (Praeger, 1968) by Richard Hughes, a foreign correspondent who lived in Hong Kong for several decades and was said to have been the inspiration for several characters in John Le Carré's novels. Similarly, another exceptional -- though hard to find -- read is Austin Coates's Myself a Mandarin (Heinemann, 1977), which gives a passionate firsthand account of the author's experiences working as a Special Magistrate in Hong Kong's New Territories. A great accompaniment to any guidebook is Travelers' Tales Hong Kong (Travelers' Tales Inc., 1996), an anthology edited by James O'Reilly and filled with personal accounts and essays by well-known writers about life in Hong Kong, including those by Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, and Paul Theroux. Hong Kong: Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth (Oxford University Press, 1996), edited by Barbara-Sue White, is a collection of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, letters, speeches, and diaries with ties to Hong Kong, written by both Chinese and people of other nationalities from all walks of life -- soldiers, doctors, politicians, writers, and others, from Queen Victoria to Jules Verne and ranging from historical accounts dating from the Song dynasty to the present day.
Fictional accounts that depict the character of Hong Kong are Richard Mason's The World of Suzie Wong (World Pub., 1957) and Han Suyin's A Many-Splendored Thing (Little Brown, 1952), an autobiographical account of life in Hong Kong shortly after the Chinese revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s. James Clavell's Tai-Pan (Atheneum, 1966) is a novel about Hong Kong's beginnings; Noble House (Delacorte Press, 1981) is its sequel. John Le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy (G. K. Hall, 1977) details the activities of George Smiley, acting head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong. The Monkey King, by Timothy Mo (Faber & Faber, 1988), is a hilarious account of a Macau native who marries into a dysfunctional Cantonese family in 1950s Hong Kong. More recent is Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), the story of a British expatriate born and raised in Hong Kong but who lives as an outsider, never learning Chinese and failing to understand what's at stake when he's offered a large sum of money by a Chinese mainlander for his family business just before the handover. Fragrant Harbor (Putnam, 2002) by John Lanchester is a historical novel that brings to life Hong Kong from the 1930s to the present, as seen through the eyes of an Englishman in love with a Chinese woman and spying for the Empire during the Japanese occupation.
