Named on the New York Times 100 Notable Books List of 2022. Shortlisted for a Walkley Award. A most anticipated book of 2022 by NEWSWEEK, LITERARY HUB and COSMOPOLITAN.
"Arriving at the exact right moment, Indelible City charts the course of the region by digging deeply into its history. Lim deftly weaves her way through the ages, arriving at our current time, all the while capturing Hong Kong's soul inside the book's pages." -Newsweek
"Riveting...a vivid and vital contribution to postcolonial history." -Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
"Lim's outstanding history of Hong Kong is an epic must-read...From the first page, the importance of language and the voices of Hong Kongers are central themes. Yet Indelible City captures much more as it records the struggle of people oppressed by British colonialism and suppressed by communist China yet determined in their pursuit of freedom and cultural identity." -Booklist, STARRED review
"Throughout this smooth mixture of reportage and memoir, Lim ably captures the increasingly malignant actions by the Communist Party, which have become more alarming by the day. An affecting portrayal of the spirited nature of Hong Kong and the many challenges it faces." -Kirkus Reviews
An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased.
The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a 'barren rock' with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, its history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion.
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 has covered the region for more than a decade—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth Hong Kong's untold stories.
Lim's deeply researched and personal account casts startling 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 and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center 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.
