Old photos of Hong Kong show the historic events that made it the city it is today
- The University of Hong Kong’s online photo exhibition charts the city’s history as a British colony, including the Japanese occupation and the 1967 riots
- In a separate show at the Foreign Correspondents Club, American engineer Nick DeWolf’s meticulously captured images focus on scenes of daily life
An online exhibition of photographs spanning 140 years of Hong Kong’s history as a British colony has just been launched by the University of Hong Kong.
These historic images have been selected from the thousands the university acquired last year from photojournalist Frank Fischbeck, a treasure trove of visual records since the 1860s of such events as the Japanese occupation during World War II, the 1967 riots and Britain’s handover of the city to China in 1997.
About a third of the photographs in the collection were taken by Fischbeck, who was born in Namibia and settled in Hong Kong in the 1970s. The rest were bought by his company, FormAsia Books, best known for richly illustrated titles about Asian culture and heritage.
Fischbeck had a front-row seat at major news events that happened in the three decades before the handover – and not just in Hong Kong. In 1971, he was asked by America’s Life Magazine to shoot the historic visit by the US table tennis team to China, and he also had the rare chance, for a Western photographer at the time, to shoot ordinary citizens on the streets of Beijing and in Lo Wu, just across the border in Hong Kong. One remarkable image that he took shows a row of schoolchildren in a solemn procession, with one child holding a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong in his hands.
