Following on the substantial collection of photos published in Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong and accompanied in that book by a major text in both English and Chinese, Edward Stokes has, in Hong Kong As It Was, selected the very best of Hedda Morrison's images and correspondingly shortening the text to make a new briefer and more manageable book in English that will bring these wonderful pictures of Hong Kong in the immediate post-war period to a new readership.

In 1946, the photographer Hedda Morrison, acclaimed for her 1930s and 1940s images of China, arrived in Hong Kong. During about six months there she photographed virtually every aspect of local life. These pictures capture Hong Kong as it long had been, but as it was poised on the brink of radical change. This book presents Morrison's compelling, intimate documentary images of Hong Kong, its people and patterns of life, with narrative essays by Edward Stokes that vividly describe the post-war years.

These unrivalled photographs, superbly printed at Harvard University from Hedda Morrison's original negatives, hold up a mirror to a vanished world....