How do public markets, as ordinary as they seem, carry the weight of a city’s history? How do such everyday buildings reflect a city’s changing political, social, and economic needs, through their yearslong transformations in forms, functions, and management? Integrating architecture and history, this book invites readers to go through the growth and governance of colonial Hong Kong by tracing the past and present of public markets as a study of extensive firsthand historical materials. As the readers witness the changes in Hong Kong markets from hawker pitches to classical market halls to clean modernist municipal complexes, the book offers a new perspective of understanding the familiar everyday markets with historical contexts possibly unfamiliar to most, studying markets as a microcosm of the city and a capsule of its history. This book is a robust and in-depth study of the market building history of Hong Kong since the 1840s and contributes to a holistic understanding of everyday
In this ground-breaking, posthumous study, the late Lo Jung-pang discusses the geographic, political, and commercial factors that led to the emergence of seapower and a navy under the Ming. While Zheng He and his seven expeditions have received some scholarly attention, few understand the long history of maritime engagement which provided the nautical and technical background for these voyages. The evolution of this maritime engagement and its extension into the Indian Ocean is the focus of Lo’s still-timely and highly significant work. In addition to detailing the rise of the Ming navy and its extraordinary accomplishments, Lo also examines some of the factors that led to the end of China’s first great maritime era: Why did China suddenly seem to turn away from the seas? Were the military defeats in Annam and on the northern borders significant in this? Or were financial pressures key? Empire in the Western Ocean represents the most comprehensive and insightful English-language trea
Initially based on a comparative study of Chinese and Euro-American art theory in the 18th and 19th centuries, this book examines how both cultures looked at their own past and their outside, i.e. what was construed as not belonging to their own cultural sphere, and how they devised new ways of adapting them into evolving cultural constructs. While the 17th century was still a time when the epistemological backgrounds of both civilizations were so profoundly different that nearly no dialogue was possible, the 18th century saw the emergence in both places of profound changes that would get them close enough to create the conditions for the beginning of a conversation. First quite superficial and taking shape mostly in the decorative arts, this process of rapprochement, while remaining chaotic and unpredictable, led to wider and more profound zones of contact throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Through the reinterpretations of each other’s cultural creations, these zones of con