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
