84 years ago, tensions were high as war with Japan grew ever more likely. On December 8th, Hong Kong's fears were confirmed when Japanese planes attacked Kai Tak, and Japanese soldiers crossed the border into the New Territories. The fighting continued until the British surrendered on Christmas Day.
The end of the fighting marked the beginning of the Japanese occupation, a time of great hardship for Hong Kong's residents. They would have to endure for three years and eight months, until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 and Hong Kong was liberated shortly afterwards.
What was it like?
Let the people who lived through those times tell you themselves: A new cycle of Hong Kong's wartime diaries has just begun, where a daily email message from Gwulo shows you a selection of diary entries written on the same date, 84 years ago.
If you look at the diary entries from 7 Dec 1941, you'll see that on the eve of war there were still conflicting opinions: Hong Kong's soldiers were being mobilised, but Major Monro had strong doubts, "I don’t really believe that anyone thinks that it will come to anything".
I'm currently adding Joan MACLEOD (née WHITELEY)'s wartime diary to Gwulo. Joan was a nurse, working at Bowen Road Military Hospital until the Japanese moved all the nurses into Stanley Camp. I'm very grateful to Joan's family for sharing it with us.
Welcome to the new readers who've joined us from my recent talks in Glasgow and Exeter. It was a pleasure to meet you, and thank you to everyone who brought along their family photos & stories to share.
On with what's new and updated on the Gwulo website:
Tip: if you want to take a closer look at any of the photos in the newsletter, click on the photo to visit its page on the Gwulo website, then click on the 'Zoom' tab where you can enlarge the image.
If you've ever made a 'Place' page on Gwulo, please read this:
If you've ever made a 'Place' page on Gwulo, please check this list to see if your name appears. If you see your name there, it means that one or more of the Places you created has its 'current condition' set to 'unknown'. Please click on your name to see a new page with a list of the Places affected.
Look down the list of Places, and if you see any that you know are currently in use, ruined, or demolished, please edit their page and set the 'current condition' accordingly. Of course if you don't know the current condition of a Place, just leave the 'current condition' set to 'unknown'.
This is valuable housekeeping that helps make Gwulo's maps work better.
Gwulo's books - 9,000 copies sold!
At some point in November we sold the 9,000th copy of Gwulo's books. I was worried that once we left Hong Kong the sales of my books would dry up, so it's great to see them continue to sell. (This total is just for the English-language books. I'm looking forward to finding out how the Chinese translation is selling when I receive my first sales report from the publisher.)
UK readers, I now have copies of the Chinese translation of my Volume 1 here in the UK. If you'd like to order them (£17 a copy, includes postage within the UK), please reply to this email and let me know.
US readers, unfortunately Amazon UK isn't currently shipping my books to the United States. I believe we'll have to wait for the tariff situation to settle down before they resume.
Future Gwulo talks
Exeter: I'm already planning to give another talk there next year.
Glasgow / Scotland: Although Glasgow has a population over four times the size of Exeter, less people attended the talk in Glasgow than in Exeter. We didn't sell enough tickets to cover the cost of renting the venue. If anyone has ideas for how to attract more people to attend a future talk in Scotland, please let me know.
Other locations: If you've got a group of people that would enjoy seeing old Hong Kong photos and hearing their stories, please get in touch to discuss setting up a talk.
Do AI-generated images have a place on a history website like Gwulo?
Several contributors have experimented with using AI to generate coloured, sharp images from old low-resolution black & white photos. I believe that these will cause us problems, so I've asked contributors to only upload original images in future, not AI-generated images. Read more about the thinking behind this decision.
