One Step Back

ONE OF THE MOST SPOKEN DIALECTS in China, Southeast Asia, and globally, Cantonese was nevertheless deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong. The Cantonese language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-20th century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention. Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can now trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese since the 19th century— how differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today. In this book, Hung-nin Samuel Cheung, an acclaimed scholar on the study of Cantonese, offers profound insights to various firsthand century-old materials including language manuals, Bible translations, and maps of Hong Kong, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to study the development of

When Marshal Hong breaks the seals which generations of Taoist Masters have placed on the temple doors to hold back 108 incarcerated Demon Princes, powerful forces of disorder are released. One after

The number 8 plays a crucial role in mythology. In Asian art this can be seen in the 8 trigrams of the I Ching, the 8 Immortals, the 8 Buddhist symbols and the 8 Auspicious symbols. These interrelated elements are often depicted as a group of 8 in the form of a serial narrative, which are supplemented by motifs of pairs, figures or scenes from stories, landscapes, plants, flowers, animals, ornaments and symbols.To illustrate this point, nine objects—each consisting of eight sections or eight motifs—were selected from the UMAG collection. The items, including an eight-part panel with silk painting, each demonstrate the diversity and richness of serial narratives in Chinese art and craftsmanship. In addition to the narrative structure, these eight-part objects can be understood as components of superordinate systems. In the microcosm of their diverse details, they refer to the macrocosm of mythology, which results in a network of relationships that continuously refer back to one another.

Leung Ping-kwan (梁秉鈞), better known under his pen name Ye Si (也斯), is an internationally known Hong Kong poet. This book brings back into print 40 bilingual poems from one of Hong Kong's most beloved

This weighty monograph offers a thoughtful assessment of one of globally raising China s most profound political issues democratization since the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. Not exactly a looking back re

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-four titles published for 2017 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2017 is “Ancient Enmity”. IPNHK is one of the most influential