Books published by Hong Kong University Press

Rehabilitation A Life's Work is the autobiography of a remarkable man and his remarkable career. Sir Harry Fang, a world-renowned pioneer in the development of rehabilitation medicine, tells a fascinating story of his own emergence as an expert in medical practice and the emergence of a whole new branch of that practice. But this book is much more. It is the story of Hong Kong's coming of age. In this memoir, Sir Harry proves to be an insightful and articulate witness to Hong Kong's evolution from colonial outpost to thriving international metropolis. With humour, wit and deep understanding, he brings us a refreshing look, not only at the practice of rehabilitative medicine, but at the politics, economics and personalities that have shaped our times.

This book is the first systematic attempt to introduce the current practice and statistics of town planning in Hong Kong. Part I gives an analytical account of the practical and ideological context, discusses design principles and describes procedures of town planning with particular reference to change in use. The emphasis is on skills of plan interpretation and an appreciation of the intellectual disposition of planners and various objective constraints confronting them. Part II is the first of its kind in presenting and analysing the statistics of planning applications for 11 zones from 1978 to 1998. The success rates of planning applications as well as the main reasons used by the Town Planning Board for rejecting planning applications are elucidated.

In this volume, dedicated to the memory of Hong Kong University students, faculty and members of the Court who lost their lives as a result of hostilities in the Far East during 1941-1945, we ask what happened to the University during those years of Japanese occupation when there was only the shell of a campus left standing on Pokfulam Road. Though physically non-existent, the idea of the University persisted, as shown by the recollections here of twenty-five contributors, many of whom were students of faculty when war broke out. Their stories of imprisonment or escape, mainly to China, help to capture something of the spirit of those challenging times that eventually led to the re-establishing of the University in 1948 and its remarkable growth since then.

The earliest book-length treatise in Chinese literary criticism, the Wenxin diaolong is of central importance in the Chinese tradition. The work was compiled in the sixth century, one of the most fertile and original periods in Chinese critical thinking. Its author, Liu Xie, was a Buddhist monk as well as a Confucian scholar, and so represented the main persuasions of China. The Wenxin diaolong first came to be noted in the seventeenth century, when it was studied by scholars and edited by Mei Qingsheng. When the study of literary criticism became an independent discipline early in the twentieth century, it developed into a cynosure that was widely discussed and provided with learned annotations. This volume presents a fresh translation of the Wenxin diaolong that is at once authoritative and elegant. It may well be regarded as a standard reference by students of sinology and comparative literature.