Jan Morris, Hong Kong (1997)

In its last days under British rule, Jan Morris explores Hong Kong's complex past, present – and future.

"It is more than a city actually, being an archipelago of some 235 rocks and islands attendant upon a squat mountainous peninsula. Humped or supine, silent in the haze, to the south and west the islands seem to lie bewitched along the dim blue coast of China, and to the north a line of mainland hills stands like a rampart – the hills of Kowloon, or Nine Dragons. With luck the sea, when the mist disperses, will be a tremendous emerald green, and if one looks with a sufficiently selective eye it is easy enough to imagine the place as it was when it first entered world history, 150 years ago."

• Kowloon

Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (2006)

Photograph: Corbis

A powerful and haunting novel of love and loss that was long-listed for the Orange Prize.

"Out in the harbour, at the end of summer, fishermen feed the hungry ghosts. They float paper boats shaped like junks and steamships. One is double-prowed like the cross-harbour Star Ferry which plies its way back and forth between Hong Kong [island] and Kowloon, never having to turn around. The fishermen load each tiny paper boat with some tea leaves, a drop of cooking oil, a spoonful of rice, a splash of petrol, before setting it afloat. Boats for the lost at sea, for the drowned. They hire musicians to clang cymbals. Children throw burning spirit money into the waves."

• Victoria Harbour

Janice Y K Lee, The Piano Teacher (2009)

Photograph: Corbis

Fashionable Hong Kong … the arrival of war … an engrossing and detailed historical novel.

"To her surprise, she didn't detest Hong Kong, as her mother told her she would – she found the streets busy and distracting, so very different from Croydon, and filled with people and shops and goods she had never seen before. She liked to sample the local bakery goods, the pineapple buns, and yellow egg tarts, and sometimes wondered outside Central, where she would quickly find herself in unfamiliar surroundings, where she might be the only non-Chinese around. The fruit stalls were heaped with not only oranges and bananas, still luxuries in post-war England, but spiky, strange-looking fruits she came to try and like: starfruit, durian, lychee."

• Central

John le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

Photograph: Corbis

In this sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a UK agent is sent to 70s' Hong Kong on an important mission.

"The hills were slate under the stacks of black cloud bank. Six months ago the sight would have had him cooing with pleasure. The harbour, the din, even the skyscraper shanties that clambered from the sea's edge upward to the Peak: after Saigon, Luke had ravenously embraced the whole scene. But all he saw today was a smug, rich British rock run by a bunch of plum-throated traders whose horizons went no further than their belly-lines."

• The Peak

Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City (2006)

Photograph: Corbis

Mesmerising short stories, many set in pre-second-world-war and wartime Hong Kong, from one of China's greatest writers of the 20th century.

"The sky overhead was a dark purple-blue and the sea at the end of the winter sky was purple-blue too, but here in the bay was a place like this, a place teeming with people and lanterns and dazzling goods – blue-ceramic double-handled flowerpots, rolls and rolls of scallion-green velvet brushed with gold, cellophane bags of Balinese Shrimp Crisps, amber-coloured durian cakes from the tropics, Buddha-bead bracelets with their big red tassels, light yellow sachets, little crosses made of dark silver, coolie hats – and stretching out beyond these lights and people and market goods, the clear desolation of sea and sky; endless emptiness, endless terror."

• Wanchai

Han Suyin, Many a Splendoured Thing (1952)

Photograph: Corbis

Set in the Hong Kong of 1949-50, this passionate bestseller became a Hollywood hit.

"We are all here, bankers, businessmen, rich women, missionaries and squatters. Those that take off half a hill to build themselves a home and those that crowd on a mat on the sidewalk to sleep. Wanderers against our will, we are the refugees. And to me, a transient among so many transients, that is Hong Kong in April 1949: a refugee camp. Harbor of many ships, haven of people from China, squatter's colony, fun fair, bazaar and boom town. Hong Kong, where people come and go and know themselves more impermanent than anywhere else on earth. Beautiful island of many worlds in the arms of the sea. Hong Kong. And China just beyond the hills."

• Victoria Harbour

Martin Booth, Gweilo, Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood (2004)

Photograph: Corbis

Full of colour and incident, a childhood memoir that is also a history of Hong Kong in the 20th century.

"Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement … what until now had seemed a harmless saunter through just another warren of passageways immediately took on a sinister aspect. No one knew I was here. What, I considered, if this stone building with its substantial door was the headquarters of the evil Fu Manchu? … From here, I was afforded a panoramic view of the walled city. The shacks were so tightly packed, it was well nigh impossible to see where the Hutongs ran between them. Yet the real surprise was the few larger buildings tucked between them. One stood in a wide rectangular courtyard with a number of outbuildings close by; from another rose a faint cloud of bluish smoke which meant it had to be a temple. Three or four were in a row suggesting that, in olden days, they had stood upon a street. In the distance was Kowloon Bay, a cargo ship riding at a quarantine buoy."

• Kowloon Walled City

John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbour (2002)

Photograph: Corbis

The story of a young Englishman in Hong Kong in the 1930s.

"So that was it, Ming's brother was a star of Cantonese opera, an authentic celebrity in that rebarbative form. My grandson had even taken me to see him in a film, God help me, a comedy dominated by slapstick and the broad physical humour of what in Britain would have been music hall. Mung had not been on speaking terms with his famous younger sibling for the best part of half a century. It was a great topic of conversation on Cheung Chau island, where we both live."

• Cheung Chau island

Photograph: Corbis

Ninety-nine years of colonial history are about to end and west must finally meet east.

"Albion Cottage was off Lugard Road, on a bluff above the Peak fire station. The fire brigade was inside today with the windows and doors shut. Everything in the bungalow on a morning like this had a film of dampness and the dampness seemed to live in the mildew and gave the interior the ripe cheesy odour of a mortuary … Yet on a clear morning, like a hallucination from the east-facing windows, where heavy with blackflies and aphids there were nasturtiums tumbling from a window box, Betty could see China – Red China, as they used to call it. Shum Chun was an hour by train from the factory in Kowloon Tong across the harbour."

• Lugard Road

Timothy Mo, The Monkey King (1978)

Photograph: Corbis

This wonderful novel offers a Dickensian portrait of Hong Kong and the irrepressible Poon family.

"The cemetery was on the other side of the small mountain ridge that formed the spine of the island, on the Pacific Coast, near the fishing village where the first British naval landings had taken place. The graves were cut into the hillside in steeply ascending terraces, platforms so narrow that unsubstantiated rumour had it that coffins had to be slotted into the cheaper lots in an upright position … The architecture of the cemetery was itself a cogent reminder of the continuing power of the dead over the living. Mr Poon's ancestors were dotted in random, disobliging clumps over the entire hillside, thus attesting to Wallace that key characteristics of that irksome family were transmitted beyond death itself. Or, at the least, the Poons dies in character."

• Possession Street

• Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-Lit series, featuring some of the best writing on the world's favourite cities, including Berlin, Paris, New York, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin. St Petersburg is published on 25 October 2012