By Liu Yu
As I stepped into the Hong Kong Maritime Museum this afternoon, the scent of old paper and polished leather wrapped around me—an aroma I'd missed since my university days, when I hoarded thread-bound books from Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. Their rough, rice-paper pages and stitched spines felt like tangible fragments of history; little did I know that decades later, at the 2nd FIRSTS Hong Kong Antiquarian Book Fair, that childhood obsession would bloom into a front-row seat to Hong Kong's role as a bridge between East and West.
My eyes first locked on a glass case of leather-bound volumes: two massive tomes labeled History of China (1738), flanked by An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China—the 1797 record of Lord Macartney's mission, priced at HK$140,000. Running a finger along the case (careful not to smudge the glass), I thought of the Shanghai thread-bound books on my shelf: these Western works, written by men who'd traveled thousands of miles to document China, were the other side of the cultural conversation my old volumes had started.
Turning a corner, I gasped at a 16th-century woodblock-printed volume of Water Margin (1589–94)—its yellowed pages etched with scenes of Lin Chong and Lu Zhishen, identical in style to the Shanghai-published thread-bound editions I'd collected. The label noted it was a "hitherto lost volume" dispersed to Europe in the 17th century, now back on display in Hong Kong. It felt like a homecoming: a piece of Chinese literary heritage, circled the globe and landed in a city that exists to stitch such stories back together.
Next came a surprise: The Life of Confucius (Paris, 1788), its copper engravings based on drawings sent from Beijing to Paris by Jesuit missionary Jean Joseph Pierre Amiot. Here was Confucius—rendered in Western printmaking, read by 18th-century European intellectuals—proof that Hong Kong's cultural brokerage isn't new; it's a thread stretching back centuries, connecting Chinese scholars to French philosophers long before this fair existed.
I lingered over a 1896 Plan of Victoria, Hong Kong: its hand-colored streets (labeled in English and Chinese) mapped a city still finding its identity, while a nearby black-and-white photo of a 19th-century Hong Kong temple sat beside a crumpled ad for "Cheun Cheong Ladies Tailor"—English script tangled with Chinese characters, a tiny snapshot of the East-West daily life that defines this city. Through the museum window, Victoria Harbour glinted; the same waters that carried Macartney's embassy and Water Margin's pages now bore cargo ships and ferries, still moving culture as they did 200 years ago.
The final stop was a case holding Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)—a signed limited edition, number 40 of 250, priced at €35,000. It sat a few feet from the History of China tomes, and for a moment, the contrast felt perfect: Wilde's decadent Victorian prose, side-by-side with Western accounts of Qing-dynasty China, all gathered in a city where neither is "foreign."
As I left, I thought of my thread-bound books, now dusty on a shelf. Today, at this fair, I saw they're not just relics—they're part of a global dialogue, one that Hong Kong curates better than any other place: a place where a 16th-century Chinese novel can come home, a French edition of Confucius can find new readers, and Wilde can sit beside accounts of imperial China, all breathing the same harbor air.
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