Patricia O'Sullivan is a writer and researcher on the lesser-known aspects of Hong Kong's history prior to 1941. Stumbling upon an article concerning the death of her great-uncle in 1918 when an inspector in the Hong Kong Police, she quickly became immersed in the social history of colonial Hong Kong.
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Beginning with the ill-starred arrival in 1873 of a lone Irishman from Newmarket, County Cork, to be a policeman, followed by twenty more from the same town, and ending with the death of the last man in 1950, this groundbreaking book is a story of life, death, and crime in colonial Hong Kong. It is also an account of an important part of Hong Kongs population that has eluded most historians: the European working class. With an arsenal of previously untapped materials in Ireland, Britain and Hong Kong, Patricia OSullivan, granddaughter and great-niece of two of these policemen, tells the remarkable tales of the families who over eighty-five years built their own little Ireland in Hong Kong. John M Carroll, Department of History, University of Hong Kong, author of "A Concise History of Hong Kong" & "Edge of Empire: Chinese Elites & British Colonials in Hong Kong"