Webinar
Friday, 5 March 2021, 12:00–13:30 PST
Recording Hong Kong: The Oral History Collection of the Hong Kong Heritage Project
Amelia Allsop, The Hong Kong Heritage Project
via Zoom

A City Archived event
Details: hksi.ubc.ca

Oral history is a powerful tool that can empower those marginalised in both history and historiography. But what can it tell us about Hong Kong? In this presentation, Amelia Allsop discusses the creation of one of the largest oral history collections in Hong Kong. Part corporate archive and part community heritage hub, The Hong Kong Heritage Project holds over 500 filmed interviews with individuals from all walks of life. This presentation will take us on a journey from the capture and recording of interviews to their use in exhibitions, museums, and online. Amelia will discuss how the Project confronts “difficult histories” and the ways in which interviews can reveal diverse understandings about Hong Kong’s past. In the process, Amelia will describe the Project’s methodology and share tips about how to create a successful oral history programme.

Amelia Allsop moved to Hong Kong in 2007 to help establish the Hong Kong Heritage Project (HKHP), the archive of the Kadoorie family. In her role as Collections Manager, she worked closely with the Project Archivist to set up the archive, now a major repository and an important driver of new scholarship about Hong Kong’s history. Amelia has recorded over 200 oral history interviews, helping to create one of the largest oral history collections in Hong Kong. She enjoys “opening up” the archive and telling its untold stories using a diversity of platforms, from websites to heritage-themed boardgames, exhibitions and short films. In 2015, Amelia returned to London to pursue a part-time PhD in history at King’s College London while continuing to work for the Project. Amelia has written several corporate history books for Kadoorie businesses, including, most recently, Tai Ping: An Artisan Tradition since 1956 for Tai Ping Carpets, published in 2019.

This webinar is organized by the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative and is co-sponsored by: Department of Asian Studies, Department of History, Centre for Chinese Research, Asian Library, and the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster.