No walk-ins - Fully Booked
This talk is now fully booked, and as the hall is at its full capacity we won't be able to take any walk-ins. If you've already booked, we're looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!
Date : Saturday 25th April 2026
Speaker : David Bellis, B.E.M., of Gwulo
Title : 1880s – 1940s Hong Kong photos: 70 years of stories to tell
Venue : The Community Hall, G/F, St. Anne’s Church, 55 Dean Street, London W1D 6AF
Time : 2:30 pm
Booking is required: Email to Florence at Florence.lkcan@gmail.com.
Lecture cost: £10 for members of the Friends of East Asia and £12 for guests, to include refreshments after the talk. Free of charge to full time students with a Student I.D. Guests are welcome.
Friends of East Asia
www.friendsofeastasia.org.uk info@friendsofeastasia.org.uk
David Bellis returns with a new set of old Hong Kong photos for us to enjoy. The excellent detail in these old photos, combined with modern high-resolution scanning, allows David zoom in to reveal their minutest details. These details become the clues he’ll use to tell us the photos’ hidden stories.
We’ll explore views of Hong Kong’s people, the ever-changing city, and the effects of storms and the Second World War, using photos taken from the 1880s through to the 1940s.
The speaker: David first visited Hong Kong in 1989 and lived there continuously from 1992 to 2024. Since 2009 he has run the Gwulo.com website, providing an online meeting place where people from around the world meet to ask questions, and share their knowledge, about Hong Kong’s history. The site has grown to over 60,000 pages, including over 40,000 photos of old Hong Kong. In 2014 David received the SCMP’s Spirit of Hong Kong award for Heritage Preservation for his work on Gwulo. Then in the 2025 New Year’s Honours List he was awarded the British Empire Medal, For services to Heritage Preservation in Hong Kong. David is a regular speaker, using photos from his collection to introduce Hong Kong’s history in a way that is easy for audiences to enjoy. He has also published a series of five illustrated books, Volumes 1 – 5 of Old Hong Kong Photos and The Tales They Tell. Volume 1 is also available in Chinese.
No walk-ins - Fully Booked
The organisers have let me know this talk is now fully booked, and as the hall is at its full capacity they won't be able to take any walk-ins.
If you've already booked, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
Regards, David
Thank you to everyone who…
Thank you to everyone who came along to the talk. It was great to see a full house.
Thank you to the Friends of East Asia for hosting us. You can see details of their future talks at https://www.friendsofeastasia.org.uk/forthcoming-events