Indelible City

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

By: Louisa Lim

Narrated by: Louisa Lim

An award-winning journalist takes to the protest-riven streets of Hong Kong to write this startling landmark account of the island city's complex past and precarious future.

The story of Hong Kong has long been obscured by competing myths- to Britain, a 'barren rock' with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial that had at last returned to the ancestral fold. To its inhabitants, the city was a place of refuge and rebellion, whose own history was so little taught that they began mythmaking their own past.

When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim-raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who had covered the region for a decade-realised that she was uniquely positioned to unearth Hong Kong's untold stories.

Lim's deeply researched and personal account is startling, casting new light on key moments- the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the centre of their own story.

Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong-a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.

©2022 Louisa Lim (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"‘Unapologetically personal…The engine for this vivid, loving book is Lim's insistent questioning—her recognition that whatever comes next for Hong Kong will require not only fortitude but also willful acts of imagination." (New York Times)

"The best book about the indelible city to date. Irresistibly real and emotionally authentic, it shines with a shimmering light rarely seen in political narrative. A truly extraordinary elegy." (Ai Weiwei)