Hong Kong’s Southern District Literary Trail has created five landmarks to commemorate and trace the footsteps of five notable literary figures who fled south during war time in the 1930s and 40s. On Pokfulam Road, prolific Chinese writer Eileen Chang would ride the bus to visit her mother at Repulse Bay. Descriptions of the roadside scenery and the feelings it evoked are mirrored in her works. On Robinson Road in the Mid-Levels lived the family of Xu Dishan, a multilingual master and the University of Hong Kong’s second professor of Chinese origin. Taking up his post in 1935, his tenure was cut short six years later when he died of heart attack. Another prominent literati was Xiao Hong, who moved to Hong Kong with her second husband Cao Jingping (known by the pen name Duanmu Hongliang) in 1940 and died there in 1942. But her novel Tales of Hulan River, completed in Hong Kong, remains a literary classic.
Old Version
