The chapters of this book depict an array of interesting cross-cultural encounters in Hong Kong over most of the century and a half that it was a British colony. Its first chapter, by Elizabeth Sinn, discusses the 19th century Jiangnan intellectual Wang Tao, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and was repelled, finding its southern Chinese inhabitants unable to speak a Chinese that he understood, and eating foods that he found repulsive. The chapter chronicles how, over the years, he rose up the social ranks of the city, and became at home enough in Hong Kong to found its first Chinese-owned newspaper. The book's second chapter, by Yoshiko Nakano, jumps ahead a century to discuss how Japanese instant noodles became an essential part of the Hong Kong diet from the 1970s on; she discusses the importance of the Hong Kong merchant Tong Pak-wing in bringing first Japanese chewing gum and then instant noodles to Hong Kong as exotic foreign foods rendered local. The third chapter, by Vicky Lee, moves from food to love, exploring mixed-heritage Eurasians from the 1860s through to the 1960s. Early Eurasians in Hong Kong “made conscious efforts to avoid drawing attention to their European heritage” (p. 43), bearing the stigma of being not “genuinely Chinese” partly because of the illegitimate birth of many, as the progeny of European men and their Chinese mistresses; this stigma did not wear off until the post-war era.

The fourth chapter, by Patricia P. K. Chiu, looks at English education for girls in the early 20th century, foregrounding St. Stephen's Girls’ College and the Diocesan Girls’ School, and discussing the broadening effects cross-cultural education had on girls of Chinese and various other cultural backgrounds. Chapter five, by David M. Pomfret, continues this theme in examining the Ministering Children's League, which initially was open only to English girls, but in 1911 opened itself to Chinese girls, who in the decades thereafter came to predominate, “accommodat[ing] the desires of a new, self-fashioning Chinese elite” (p. 100), and teaching their children by means of multicultural and interethnic engagement up until the late 1930s.

Chapter six, by Bert Becker, examines the long-term business relationship of the 19th-century Chinese comprador K. C. Chau and the German businessman Michael Jebsen, as well as his son Jacob: two men who remarkably never met, sealing their trust in one another's trading and shipping concerns on the basis of correspondence from halfway around the world. Evidence of their close relationship includes the abrupt dismissal by Jebsen of European shipmasters of whom the Chinese customers of Chau did not approve, and lifelong personal fealty extending to the exchange of portraits and grieving upon Chau's death. Chapter seven, by Stephen Davies, considers seafarers from Hong Kong's founding up until the 1970s. In the earliest years of the colony, seafarers’ welfare provisions such as boarding houses included Europeans and Asians such as Filipinos, but specifically excluded Chinese; in the early 20th century, boarding houses in Hong Kong for Chinese seafarers became closely regulated because seafarers were seen as potential agents and arms-carriers for Sun Yat-sen's anti-Qing movement. Western seafarers became a rarity by the 1980s, and eventually so too did Hong Kong Chinese seafarers, lured to land by easier ways of making a living. Finally, chapter eight, by Christopher Munn, opens up the remarkable story of the mysterious character Carvalho Yeo and his role in the 1928 Hong Kong Treasury swindle. Yeo, a man of multiple ethnic disguises, absconded with a quarter of a million dollars, to the immense interest of the Hong Kong public, and was tried, jailed, and never heard from again. This case sheds light on how government and business, British senior officials and their Chinese subordinates, actually worked together in the 1920s.

This book is fun and informative to read. The editors provide only limited overarching explications as to what the book as a whole is attempting to argue. But then, perhaps they do not need to, for the individual chapters are for the most part fascinating in their particular historical portrayals. Of greater critical import is the fact that the cross-cultural encounters described in the book's chapters involve Chinese and Europeans, as well as, in one chapter, Japanese, but not South Asians and those of other backgrounds, who also have played a pivotal cross-cultural role in Hong Kong's history. This is regrettable – the panorama of Hong Kong's cross-cultural history was not simply a matter of Europeans and Chinese. Nonetheless, this book is worth reading for its revealing portrayals of cross-cultural lives and encounters in Hong Kong's colonial past; some of its various chapters might fruitfully have a place in any undergraduate course exploring Hong Kong's history