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Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong

Part of the book series: Global Histories of Education ((GHE))

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Abstract

In 1924, the fourteen-year-old Betty Steel – who had come to Hong Kong with her parents at the age of five – finished school and began to learn Pitman’s shorthand and typewriting to prepare herself for a career as a secretary. By 1926, Betty had started her first job as a secretary in the Hong Kong Telephone Co. The following year, a friend told her that the Governor Sir Cecil Clementi (1925–1930) needed a stenographer at the Government House and that she had been recommended for the job. There, at the age of seventeen, she began her career as the Governor’s secretary. Before her employment, Betty had attended a few mission-run schools. First the Italian Convent and then the French Convent, both of which had a multi-racial admission. During her school years, Betty was also a Girl Guide. She had joined the 1st Wan Chai Girl Guide Company in 1921 with her Chinese neighbour and school friend Ruby Chue. In her childhood, under the persistence of Betty’s mother, who worked as an accountant at the mercantile firm Shewan, Tomes & Co., Betty’s family constantly moved in search of a home that resembled the English countryside with ‘wide flowers’, and they at last settled in ‘a tree-lined road of houses and gardens with wild violets and ferns growing in shady places’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Betty Steel, Impressions of an Upbringing in 1920s Hong Kong. https://gwulo.com/node/20232/view-pages. Accessed on June 6, 2022.

  2. 2.

    Annie Lee, born in 1919, Hong Kong. Hong Kong Oral History Archives: Collective Memories, Hong Kong University Library Special Collection, access no. 51.

  3. 3.

    For detailed discussion, see Chap. 2. Here, very briefly, in 1922, in order to ‘revise, consolidate, and coordinate the schemes of development that had been prepared in the past for various sections of the colony, and to consider the directions for future development of Hong Kong and Kowloon’, a Town Planning Committee was convened and schemes ‘prepared for the improvement of the existing layouts and the development of new areas’. This marked the systematic involvement of the colonial state in urban reforms. “Report of the Director of Public Works for the Year 1922,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 108–109.

  4. 4.

    For a discussion on the social demography of the Chinese bourgeoisie in interwar Hong Kong, see John M. Carroll, The Hong Kong–China Nexus: A Brief History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

  5. 5.

    “The Housing Problem, Big Scheme for Kowloon Tong,” South China Morning Post, Dec. 28, 1920, 6.

  6. 6.

    Detailed discussion in Chap. 2. Here, of the 250 subscribers to the Kowloon Tong scheme, 210 were Chinese, 10 British, and 30 Portuguese. “Kowloon Tong Squatters,” South China Morning Post, Feb. 9, 1927, 9.

  7. 7.

    Vivian Kong, “Exclusivity and Cosmopolitanism: Multiethnic Civil Society in Interwar Hong Kong,” The Historical Journal 63, no. 5 (2020): 1281–1302; also see Vivian Kong, “Whiteness, Imperial Anxiety, and the ‘Global 1930s’: The White British League Debate in Hong Kong,” Journal of British Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 343–371.

  8. 8.

    “Kowloon Residents’ Association, Year’s Work Reviewed,” The China Mail, Oct. 5, 1920, 8.

  9. 9.

    For a discussion on the history of the Chinese bourgeoisie in colonial Hong Kong, see John M. Carroll, Edge of empires: Chinese elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  10. 10.

    “Advertisements Prepaid,” South China Morning Post, Aug. 17, 1926, 5; “Advertisements Prepaid,” South China Morning Post, Dec. 28, 1926, 5; “For Sale,” South China Morning Post, Nov. 19, 1931, 5; “For Sale,” South China Morning Post, Jan. 18, 1932, 5.

  11. 11.

    Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, “The Global Bourgeoisie,” in The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle-Class in the Age of Empire, eds. Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1–41.

  12. 12.

    John M. MacKenzie, British Empire Through Buildings: Structure, Function and Meaning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 125.

  13. 13.

    Vivian Kong, “Exclusivity and Cosmopolitanism: Multiethnic Civil society in Interwar Hong Kong,” The Historical Journal 63, no.5 (2020): 1281–1302.

  14. 14.

    See Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, eds. Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013).

  15. 15.

    David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  16. 16.

    Li** Bu and Ka-Che Yip, “Introduction: Interpreting Science and Public Health in Modern Asia,” in Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia, eds. Li** Bu, Darwin H. Stapleton, and Ka-che Yip (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–15.

  17. 17.

    Ka-che Yip, “Science, Culture, and Disease Control in Colonial Hong Kong,” in Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia, eds. Li** Bu, Darwin H. Stapleton, and Ka-che Yip (New York: Routledge, 2012), 17–32.

  18. 18.

    Ibid. For other types of pandemic prevalent in colonial Hong Kong, see, for example, Margaret Jones, “Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900–1950,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (2003): 653–682.

  19. 19.

    Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  20. 20.

    Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5.

  21. 21.

    Beginning in the 1910s, considerable efforts were being made to put a stop to the inveterate habit of the lower-class Chinese for spitting in public buildings and offices and on staircases, footpaths, and wharves. Notices had been posted in many public buildings, as well as in tramcars, ferry boats and other public vehicles, while lectures had been given and leaflets distributed, calling attention to the dangers incident to this habit. It was hoped in this way, coupled with the improved sanitary condition of the native dwellings, to gradually reduce the death rates of Phthisis. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1912,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 19.

  22. 22.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1925,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 5.

  23. 23.

    See Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012).

  24. 24.

    Madeleine Y. Dong, “Who Is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?,” in The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 194–219.

  25. 25.

    Rachel Leow, “Age as a Category of Gender Analysis: Servant Girls, Modern Girls, and Gender in Southeast Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012): 975–990.

  26. 26.

    Su Lin Lewis, “Cosmopolitanism and the Modern Girl: A Cross-Cultural Discourse in 1930s Penang,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 1385–1419.

  27. 27.

    Louise Edwards, “Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China,” Modern China 26, no. 2 (2000): 115–147.

  28. 28.

    Sarah E. Stevens, “Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China,” NWSA Journal 15, no. 3 (2003): 82–103.

  29. 29.

    Tani Barlow, “Theorising Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese women, Chinese state, Chinese family],” Genders 10 (1991): 132–160.

  30. 30.

    Carlton Benson, “The Manipulation of Tanci in Radio Shanghai during the 1930s,” Republican China 20, no. 2 (1995): 117–146.

  31. 31.

    As the historian Pail Bailey suggests, in 1920, nine female students became the first to attend Bei**g University when they enrolled to audit a number of courses. See Paul Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2007), 106.

  32. 32.

    “St. Stephen’s Girls’ College, Speech Day,” The China Mail, Jan. 19, 1922, 8.

  33. 33.

    While historical studies on women and print media in colonial Hong Kong are rather scarce, a recent strand of scholarship exploring Chinese women and the print media in Republican China (1911–1949) offers useful insights on the circulation of women’s magazines and periodicals in the treaty ports of China in the interwar period. See, for example, Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Oakland, CA: California University Press, 2015).

  34. 34.

    Further discussion in Chap. 5. Here, very briefly, the historian Marie Sandell shows how, in the early twentieth century, a class of elite Chinese girls pursued their higher education in the West. Influenced by the women’s movement during their university study, this cohort of highly educated elite Chinese girls started and led women’s organisations upon their return to China. Marie Sandell, “Learning in and from The West: International Students and International Women’s Organisations in the Interwar Period,” History of Education 44, no. 1 (2015), 5–24.

  35. 35.

    “Report on the Census of the Colony of Hong Kong 1921,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 12/1921, 164, 216–217.

  36. 36.

    For a discussion on history of women’s clubs, see, for example, David Doughan and Peter Gordon, Women, Clubs and Associations in Britain (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  37. 37.

    See Margaret Mih Tillman, “Mediating Modern Motherhood: The Shanghai YWCA’s “Women’s Work for Women,” 1908–1949,” in Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA, 1889–1970, eds. Harald Fischer-Tiné, Stefan Huebner, and Ian Tyrrell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020), 119–144.

  38. 38.

    “For the Baby, Children’s Health Conference at Y.W.C.A.,” The China Mail, Feb. 28, 1924, 1.

  39. 39.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1933,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 16.

  40. 40.

    Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Making of a Modern Female Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Interwar Britain,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 299–317.

  41. 41.

    See Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  42. 42.

    Hilary Marland, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7.

  43. 43.

    Charlotte Macdonald, “Body and Self: Learning to be Modern in 1920s–1930s Britain,” Women’s History Review 22, no. 2 (2013): 267–279.

  44. 44.

    “Girl Guides Movement, Mrs. Southorn’s Interesting Broadcast Address Last Night,” Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 4, 1932, 7.

  45. 45.

    David M. Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Sandford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

  46. 46.

    Karen Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  47. 47.

    Heidi Morrison, Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 7.

  49. 49.

    S. E. Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860–1895 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  50. 50.

    Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson, “Introduction,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, eds. Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 3.

  52. 52.

    See Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012).

  53. 53.

    Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, “Introduction,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, eds. Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 5.

  55. 55.

    Roy Kozvolsky, The Architectures of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  56. 56.

    Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, eds. Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and The Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

  57. 57.

    For a discussion on the medicalisation of childhood, see Mona Gleason, Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); Claudia Díaz-Díaz and Mona Gleason, “The Land is My School: Children, History, and the Environment in the Canadian Province of British Columbia,” Childhood 23, no. 2 (2016): 272–285.

  58. 58.

    John M. MacKenzie, British Empire Through Buildings: Structure, Function and Meaning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 3.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 260.

  60. 60.

    Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (first published in French 1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).

  61. 61.

    Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life: The One-volume Edition (New York: Verso Books, 2014). Also see Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 7–11; Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Routledge, 2017).

  62. 62.

    Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013).

  63. 63.

    Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, and Kathryn Gleadle, “Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn,” Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 527.

  64. 64.

    Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11–12.

  65. 65.

    See Yi-Fu Tuan, “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” Geographical Review 65, no. 2 (1975): 151–165.

  66. 66.

    Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien, “Introduction,” Children in the City: Home Neighbourhood and Community, eds. Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–13.

  67. 67.

    Karen Fog Olwig, “Cultural Sites: Sustaining A Home in a Deterritorialized World,” In Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, eds. Karen Fog Olwig and Kirsten Hastrup (London: Routledge, 2005), 23–44; also see Karen Fog Olwig and Eva Gulløv, eds. Children’s Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2013).

  68. 68.

    Karen Fog Olwig, “‘Displaced’ Children?: Risks and Opportunities in a Caribbean Urban Environment,” in Children in the City: Home Neighbourhood and Community, eds., Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2003), 63.

  69. 69.

    James Hayes, The Hong Kong Region 1850–1911: Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 25–55.

  70. 70.

    The census return of 1931 suggests that the Chinese residents as recorded in the Gazette of May. 15, 1841, was 5650. “Report on the Census of the Colony of Hong Kong, 1931,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 5/1931, 87.

  71. 71.

    This background discussion on the geography of Hong Kong is presented in the “Annual Report of the Education Department for the year 1938,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 1.

  72. 72.

    Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 1.

  73. 73.

    Elizabeth Sinn, “Introduction,” in Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984, eds. Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Munn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), x. Christopher Munn discussed extensively on the activities of these different groups of European in early colonial Hong Kong, see Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong 1841–1880 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 21–53. Also see Gillian Bickley, “Early Beginnings of British Community (1841–1898),” in Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s, ed. Cindy Yik-yi Chu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 17–38.

  74. 74.

    Sinn, “Introduction,” xi.

  75. 75.

    The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, May. 6, 1871, 196.

  76. 76.

    Phillip Mar, “Accommodating Places: A Migrant Ethnography of Two Cities (Hong Kong and Sydney)” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2002), 38. For the forming of Chinese commercial districts in Hong Kong, see Frank Leeming, Street Studies in Hong Kong: Localities in a Chinese City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  77. 77.

    John M. Carroll, Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13.

  78. 78.

    John Carroll, “Colonial Hong Kong as a Cultural-Historical Place,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (2006): 517–543.

  79. 79.

    Helen Siu, “Hong Kong: Cultural Kaleidoscope on a World Landscape,” in Tracing China: a Forty-year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 387–400.

  80. 80.

    Elizabeth Sinn, “Hong Kong as an In-Between Place in the Chinese Diaspora, 1849–1939,” in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, eds. Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Boston: Brill, 2011), 225–247. For an extended discussion on the medical, social, and charitable services of the Tung Wah Hospital, see Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  81. 81.

    Carroll, “Colonial Hong Kong as a Cultural-Historical Place,” 517–543.

  82. 82.

    Alan CK Cheung, E. Vance Randall, and Man Kwan Tam, “The Development of Local Private Primary and Secondary Schooling in Hong Kong, 1841–2012,” International Journal of Educational Management 30, no. 6 (2016): 826–847; also see, Peng Deng, Private Education in Modern China (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).

  83. 83.

    Lun Ngai-ha Ng, “Village Education in The New Territories Region Under the Ching,” in From Village to City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, eds. David Faure, James Hayes, and Alan Birch (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1984), 106–118.

  84. 84.

    Anthony Sweeting, Education in Hong Kong Pre-1841 to 1941: Facts and Opinion (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1990), 2. Cited in Cheung, Randall, and Tam, “The Development of Local Private,” 829.

  85. 85.

    Patrick H. Hase, “Village Literacy and Scholarship: Village Scholars and their Documents,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 52, (2012): 77–137, here, 78.

  86. 86.

    Cheung, Randall, and Tam, “The Development of Local Private,” 830.

  87. 87.

    Lun Ngai-ha Ng, Interactions of East and West: Development of Public Education in Early Hong Kong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1984), 24.

  88. 88.

    “Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1939,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 1.

  89. 89.

    Cheung, Randall, and Tam, “The Development of Local Private,” 831.

  90. 90.

    This background discussion on the history of urban education in Hong Kong is included in “Report on Education in Hong Kong by E. Burney, M.C.,” published on behalf of the Government of Hong Kong by the Crown Agents for the Colonies, 4 Millbank London, SW1, 1935, 6.

  91. 91.

    This background discussion on the history of education in Hong Kong is presented in the “Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1938,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 2.

  92. 92.

    Anthony Sweeting and Edward Vickers, “Language and the history of colonial education: The case of Hong Kong,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 1–40.

  93. 93.

    The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, March. 18, 1871, 116.

  94. 94.

    Ibid.

  95. 95.

    “Report on the Census of the Colony of Hong Kong, 1901,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 39/1901.

  96. 96.

    “Report on the Census of the Colony of Hong Kong, 1931,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 5/1931.

  97. 97.

    For a discussion on the history of urban education in relation to urban transition, see, for example, Sol Cohen, “American History, Urban History, History of Urban Education,” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1976): 194–206.

  98. 98.

    For a discussion on urban education in relation to urban culture, see, for example, Gary McCulloch, “Education and The Middle Classes: The Case of The English Grammar Schools, 1868–1944,” History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 689–704.

  99. 99.

    “Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1939,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4. The name of ‘Saiyingpun School’ was changed to ‘King’s College’ in 1926. “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1926,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 11.

  100. 100.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1937,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 28.

  101. 101.

    “Annual Report of the Education Department for the Year 1938,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4.

  102. 102.

    “Report of the Inspector of Schools for the Year 1906,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, July. 19, 1907, 451.

  103. 103.

    “Report of the Inspector of Schools for the Year 1907,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, July. 10, 1908, 297.

  104. 104.

    Peter Cunich, “Making Space for Higher Education in Colonial Hong Kong, 1887–1913,” in Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940, eds. Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 181–205, here, 199.

  105. 105.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1912,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 14.

  106. 106.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1913,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7.

  107. 107.

    “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1915,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 21.

  108. 108.

    “St. Stephen’s Girls’ College, Speech Day,” The China Mail, Jan. 19, 1922, 8.

  109. 109.

    Patricia P.K. Chiu, “The Making of Accomplished Women: English Education for Girls in Colonial Hong Kong, 1890s–1940s,” in Meeting Place: Encounters across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984, eds. Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Munn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 64–86.

  110. 110.

    Ibid.

  111. 111.

    See Anthony Sweeting, Education in Hong Kong Pre-1841 to 1941: Facts and Opinion (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1990), 343.

  112. 112.

    For full description and access page, see http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkgro/index.jsp. Accessed on June 10, 2022.

  113. 113.

    Gary McCulloch, Documentary Research in Education, History, and the Social Sciences (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), 11.

  114. 114.

    Ibid., 22.

  115. 115.

    John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (London: Longman, 2010), 97.

  116. 116.

    For full description and access page, see https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. Accessed on June. 10, 2022.

  117. 117.

    **a Shi, At Home in the World: Women and Charity in Late Qing and Early Republican China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 29.

  118. 118.

    Christopher J. Lee, “Children in the Archives: Epistolary Evidence, Youth Agency, and the Social Meanings of ‘Coming of Age’ in Interwar Nyasaland,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 25–47; also see Harry Hendrick, “The Child As a Social Actor in Historical Sources: Problems of Identification and Interpretation,” in Research with Children, eds. Pia Christensen and Allison James (London: Routledge, 2008), 40–63.

  119. 119.

    Philip Gardner, “Oral History in Education: Teacher’s Memory and Teachers’ History,” History of Education 32, no. 2 (2003): 75–188, here 184, 187.

  120. 120.

    Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–124; also see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2015).

  121. 121.

    See Andreas Eckert and Adam Jones, “Introduction: Historical Writing about Everyday Life,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2002): 5–16.

  122. 122.

    Hong Kong Memory is a project led by Dr. Elizabeth Sinn (of Hong Kong University) and sponsored by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust. Its primary objective is to ‘build a digital repository for the collection, conservation, preservation and presentation of Hong Kong’s cultural heritage’. This curated database collects ‘text documents, photographs, posters, sound recordings, motion pictures and videos’, organised under specific themes. While the Government Reports Online (1842–1941) elucidates the sites of colonial intervention and the day-to-day colonial administration, Hong Kong Memory is a project designed to unearth and preserve the experience of Hong Kong people. It is interested in the local and lived experience of the colonial past. For full project description, see https://www.hkihss.hku.hk/en/research/completed_projects/hong-kong-memory-project/. Access page, https://www.hkmemory.hk/index.html. Accessed June 10, 2022.

  123. 123.

    For full archive description, see https://www.hkmemory.hk/collections/oral_history/intro/index.html. Accessed on June 10, 2022.

  124. 124.

    For full project description, see http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkoh/. Accessed on June 10, 2022.

  125. 125.

    Lee, “Children in the Archives,” 29.

  126. 126.

    Emma J. Teng, “Reinventing Home: Images of Mobility and Returns in Eurasian Memoirs,” Centre for Chinese Studies Research Series No. 12 (2009), 355–388, here, 359. Taipei: Centre for Chinese Studies.

  127. 127.

    Searchable visual database, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu. Accessed on June 10 2022.

  128. 128.

    This collection focuses on ‘the early maps of Hong Kong since the nineteenth century, including maps of the whole territory, district plans, street maps, geological maps, topographic maps, street naming plans and other thematic maps. It greatly facilitates researches on the boundary history, landscape changes, district development and street names in Hong Kong’. More details in https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/web/guest/map-collection. Accessed on June 10, 2022.

  129. 129.

    For further discussions on the use of visual sources, see, for example, Julianne Moss and Barbara Pini, eds. Visual Research Methods in Educational Research (New York: Springer, 2016); Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels, eds. The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (London: Sage, 2011).

  130. 130.

    “The First Garden City, Interesting Facts Concerning Letchworth,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Mar. 6, 1914, 3.

  131. 131.

    ‘Lady Caldecott at Y.W.C.A.’, Hong Kong Daily Press, July 3, 1936, 7.

  132. 132.

    ‘Chinese YWCA, First Annual Meeting’, The China Mail, Mar. 12, 1921, 1.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Stella Meng Wang

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  1. Stella Meng Wang
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Meng Wang, S. (2023). Introduction. In: Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong. Global Histories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44401-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44401-2_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-44400-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-44401-2

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