Indelible City — Louisa Lim

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.

INDELIBLE CITY: DISPOSSESSION AND DEFIANCE IN HONG KONG

AWARDS & PRIZES

THE STELLA PRIZE - LONGLISTED
THE WALKLEY BOOK AWARD - SHORTLISTED
THE VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION - SHORTLISTED
OVERSEAS PRESS CLUB OF AMERICA CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD CITATION - WINNER

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.

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PRAISE FOR INDELIBLE CITY

“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

“An utterly brilliant and original ode to Hong Kong, throbbing with eccentricity and sense of place. Like Joseph Mitchell’s singular rendering of New York, Lim’s Hong Kong will be read decades from now as an indelible portrait.”
– Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award

“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

“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

“I absolutely loved this book. Each page is a revelation about a city whose history I thought I knew well. Lim’s exploration of Hong Kong’s identity is insightful, refreshing and entirely original.”
— Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha

“I read Louisa Lim’s book slowly, haunted by memories and stymied by sorrow. An archaeological dig into the disappearing present, her fascinating and heartbreaking account reveals an indelible history hidden in plain sight, and a future that Hong Kong’s unique sensibility promises even as the world’s most powerful autocracy strives to erase it.”
– Geremie Barmé, editor of China Heritage

“Lim’s outstanding history of Hong Kong is an epic must-read, covering Hong Kong from its earliest beginnings to the 2019–20 protests. 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