James Hayes

Perhaps no other part of post-war Hong Kong experienced the trauma of rapid urbanization and industrialization as intensely as did Tsuen Wan. The district (including Kwai Chung, Tsing Yi, Ma Wan, and north-east Lantau) was once known for its sweet pineapples and fiercely independent villagers. The arrival of floods of refugees from China converted it into a loose hotchpotch of people and a polluted and overcrowded centre for Hong Kong's burgeoning textile industry and expanding port. Tsuen Wan: Growth of a 'New Town' and Its People is the story of this metamorphosis. Formerly Tsuen Wan's Town Manager and District Officer, James Hayes offers a first-hand glimpse inside government and its relations with local residents at a time when Tsuen Wan was a guinea-pig for some of the administration's first efforts at relocating masses of people and implementing large-scale urban development, town planning, and more representative district-level government. He writes with wit and insight of the local people whose traditional ways of life have been irrevocably altered by post-war growth.

The book covers several decades of Hong Kong's recent past, from the time James Hayes joined the Administrative Grade of the Hong Kong Civil Service in the 1950s to his retirement in the 1980s, thirty-two years later.

x, 308 p., p. of plates : 26 cm