A kaleidoscopic history of Hong Kong, revealing how the city continues to shape China, Asia, and the world to this day.

In 1841, Britain claimed a sparsely populated island on China’s southern coast as its own. In Lion Rock, historian Robert Bickers narrates Hong Kong’s stunning expansion from nineteenth-century colonial backwater to vibrant twenty-first-century commercial metropolis.

From its first decades, Hong Kong drew in people from China, Japan, Europe, India, and Europe’s other imperial margins. The colony grew at a furious pace, developing its own hybrid identity as a way station between empires. Over nearly two centuries, Hong Kongers experienced a series of seismic shifts, from Japanese occupation during World War II and the turbulent origins of the People’s Republic of China to the city’s eventual return to the mainland.

China’s officials have long labored to reshape Hong Kong’s history for their own political ends, seeking to smooth away the contradictions that have always typified this exceptional city. By embracing Hong Kong in all its cosmopolitan complexity—a place both welcoming and insular, wealthy and poor, rooted in tradition but looking ever to the future—Lion Rock tells Hong Kong’s story as never before. It is essential reading for understanding today’s China and its ambitions in Asia and the wider world.