A Chinese scholar who showed colleagues Hong Kong wasn’t full of philistines

Of Hakka origin himself, Lo became one of China’s foremost scholars in the Hakka language, culture and society.

Intra-ethnic animosity – largely caused by competition for scarce agricultural land – led to periodic outbreaks of armed conflict between Hakka and Cantonese in Guangdong, most devastatingly in the mid-19th century, but by the early 20th century, open conflict had largely abated, apart from intermittent village clashes.

Nevertheless, Hakka remained the butt of ethnic slurs and language-based derision. A pioneering researcher in the use of Chinese genealogies, Lo conclusively proved that the Hakka were actually Han Chinese in origin, despite their migratory background in earlier centuries.

His seminal work, A Preliminary Study of the Hakka (1935), led to successive scholarship, and remains influential today.

Keenly committed to the idea of national regeneration, Lo held various administrative posts in the Nationalist government from the mid-1930s onwards, and continued to do so after the defeat of Japan in 1945.

As the eventual Communist assumption of power became inevitable, Lo moved to Hong Kong with his family, and brought with him his extensive library and collection of research papers, which were carefully packed in trunks and sent down in advance by train.

From 1956 to 1968, Lo taught in the Chinese Department at the University of Hong Kong. During his time there – and for a couple of decades afterwards – this functioned as a kind of alternative history department for scholars who were more comfortable or capable in Chinese than in English, particularly for those scholars whose primary and secondary source materials for their individual research subjects – late Ming dynasty court politics and their wider economic significance, for example – were entirely in Chinese anyway.

After his arrival in Hong Kong, Lo became fascinated by the unexpected extent of cultural interchange that first occurred in the British colony, and then gradually percolated back into China, and began to study the subject in depth.

Lo maintained that “Friendship between nations, like friendship between persons, only grows where there is mutual give and take,” and his later works reflect this personal conviction.

Hong Kong and its external communications before 1842: The History of Hong Kong Prior To British arrival (1963) explores what was in the Hong Kong region, and more specifically on Hong Kong Island, prior to British acquisition.

Hong Kong and Western Cultures, originally written in Chinese for HKU’s golden jubilee in 1962, was subsequently translated into English, and published in Japan in 1963.

Among the earliest works to explore the early establishment of urban Hong Kong as a place of cultural interaction, exchange, and mutual benefit and gradual change, Hong Kong and Western Cultures inspired a generation of scholars passionately interested in the study of Hong Kong in its own right, and remains an important early local studies reference text.

Lo Hsiang-lin died in Hong Kong in 1978.