Hong Kong Heritage

In a specially extended Hong Kong Heritage Annemarie talks with history researcher Liz Chater and antiquarian Jonathan Wattis about Sir Catchick Paul Chater, the Armenian teenager who arrived in Hong Kong from Calcutta on April 1 1864. He was a pionee...

Shouson Chow was educated in the US - one of a group of Chinese boys sent to America after the Second Opium War in 1860. He would go on to serve the Qing Dynasty in maritime customs and railways before returning to Hong Kong in 1911. He was director o...

Sir Cecil Clementi was a superb linguist and academic and governor of Hong Kong from 1925 to 1930, a tumultuous time of big strikes and unrest. Clementi empathized with the Chinese but was also conservative who believed in the British Empire. China a...

The multi-talented artist and photographer Norman de Brackinghe, 89, invites Annemarie to his Causeway Bay studio for their second chat about the abstract photography he finds on Hong Kong walls, his loose landscape art, past exhibitions and we hear h...

Historian Dr Sarah Ng  shows Annemarie her two-part exhibition showing the works of seven artists in “Kings' Inscriptions Contemporary Interpretations” – on show at the Fung Ping Shan Gallery and also at Oi! in North Point.

This past year, the Hong Kong Observatory marked its 140th anniversary. Former director Shu Chi-ming talks to me about his time from 1986 onwards - seismology, radiation and weather forecasting as well as how he invented a wind shear instrument for ru...

Tea in Chater Garden with Bel Ng who runs a small business called Searching Cha. Plus a few minutes at the end of the programme of the original Radio Hong Kong broadcast of the opening of the Cross Harbour Tunnel.

Businessman Robbie Brothers came to Hong Kong at the age of 19 to work for Wheelock Marden in 1960 in their shipping department. There was initially talk of a bridge, but a few years he oversaw the construction of the Cross Harbour Tunnel in 1972. Wi...

Historian Dr Sarah Ng shows Annemarie her two-part exhibition showing the works of seven artists in “Kings' Inscriptions Contemporary Interpretations” – on show at the Fung Ping Shan Gallery and also at Oi! in North Point.

Singer and actor Anders Nelsson gives Annemarie a tour round Tsim Sha Tsui - from the YMCA to noodles at the Haiphong temporary market; the old nightclubs of the 60s where Mongo Santamaria, the Kinks, and Trio Los Panchos came to play. Memories of...

Singer and actor Anders Nelsson gives Annemarie a tour round Tsim Sha Tsui - from the YMCA to noodles at the Haiphong temporary market; the old nightclubs of the 60s where Mongo Santamaria, the Kinks, and Trio Los Panchos came to play. Memories of a...

Jeweller Sunny Ko on  public housing estate childhood; his father as a wood, ivory and jade carver and the family jewellery business. Plus extracts from: Michael Wright; Wing Lee Street; and antiquarian Jonathan Wattis on early photography

Author Paul French, former observatory head Shun Chi-ming, Radio Hong Kong reporters on the street Typhoon Wanda 1962

American lawyer and collector Roy Delbyk on collecting three Beatles signatures out of four from their Hong Kong visit in 1964 plus other collectors’ items.

Authors and journalists Gary Cheung and Oliver Chou talk about Hilton’s life, legacy and how they helped him to co-write his autobiography.

Author Paul French and academic Diana Yeh give a tour of Belsize Park in London while talking about the Chinese literary greats who lived there in the 1930s and 40s.

Author Vaudine England’s latest book on the diverse communities that have made Hong Kong.

American lawyer and collector Roy Delbyk shows a Pan Am bag that went on one of Richard Nixon’s two press planes to Beijing; plus two Hong Kong tennis players – Gem Hoahing and Wei Wing-lock, both of whom should be more celebrated after making it int...

Mechanic, motocross champion and published poet David McKirdy on a poem-filled tour of Sai Kung

Hong Kong veteran singer and Mr EYT Robert Chua join Annemarie to pay tribute to the renowned and talented composer Joseph Koo Kar-fei who died this month at the age of 92. He wrote many of Hong Kong’s beloved classic TV drama theme songs including Be...

Fun, frank, and that singing voice... In 1963, at the age of six Teresa Carpio won a major talent show, at age 11 she began her singing career in Tahiti - the Hong Kong treasure, singer and actress, chats to Annemarie from her home in Toronto about h...

Antiquarian Jonathan Wattis talks  about his latest exhibition featuring a collection of early original Hong Kong maps and charts some of which appear in the landmark book Mapping Hong Kong, 1992: A Historical Atlas by Hal Empson. Out chat includes th...

Movie director and radio host Crystal Kwok talks about her documentary  Blurring the Color Line: Chinese in the Segregated South, [https://www.blurringthecolorline.com/synopsis] , Crystal tells the history of her grandmother's family, who were grocery...

Colin Touchin was a British conductor, composer, musical director and a Radio 4 presenter of Live on Four and his own show “In Touch with Music”.  He died last month.  In this programme, we return to two shows with Colin – one, an interview with him a...

What a year! In this bumper, 50 minute edition, using Radio Hong Kong on-site reports from the time, Annemarie tells how an ocean liner goes up in flames in Victoria Harbour; floods and landslides kill 160 people; Hong Kong has financial woes; Nixon t...

Alison McEwan was born in Hong Kong in 1950. Her father was a physical training instructor and after he died she found a diary of his – that he had been part of the elite Z-force, part of the wartime Special Operations Executive and had helped to get ...

Rosalie Carpio has loved singing and dancing all her life and began as a young girl in her native Australia.  In the 1970s she came to Hong Kong to dance and sing in the nightclubs and shows.  She would later marry musician and composer Tony Carpio of...

Rosalie Carpio has loved singing and dancing all her life and began as a young girl in her native Australia.  In the 1970s she came to Hong Kong to dance and sing in the nightclubs and shows.  She would later marry musician and composer Tony Carpio o...

The late Queen Elizabeth II who died last month at the age of 96 was the first British monarch to visit Hong Kong. She came here twice – in 1975 and then again in 1986.  In this programme we hear original live coverage of her arrival with Prince Phili...

Jonathan Douglas MBE was with RTHK Radio 4 for more than 30 years bringing classical music to the listeners of this city. He died in August of cancer.  A consummate pianist and actor, Jonathan also played in a band with his two sons.    Then later in...

In the second half of a two-part programme, publisher Pete Spurrier tells me about living in a Greek cave in winter, and then heading on via Istanbul to the new countries of a disintegrating Soviet Union and how he tries to travel across the ‘Stans” w...

Pete Spurrier is a longtime and well known British publisher in Hong Kong of largely Hong Kong and China-related English-language books.  He left England in the early 1990s with a yearning for travel and 500 pounds in his pocket, off to get work in th...

Pete Spurrier is a longtime and well known British publisher in Hong Kong of largely Hong Kong and China-related English-language books.  He left England in the early 1990s with a yearning for travel and 500 pounds in his pocket, off to get work in th...

In 2019, some contractors working at the Maryknoll Convent removed a false ceiling and found the door to an attic. In it was a treasure trove of 3000 orders for vestments, embroidery, threads on bobbins, parts of Singer sewing machines – all part of a...