Image credit: Acting Governor, Sir Henry May and guests at Lo Wu for the opening of the Kowloon–Canton Railway on 1 October 1910, Hong Kong Public Records, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Dr Adonis Li, 10 September 2026 15:00 BST Online

REGISTRATION WILL OPEN SHORTLY

Based on archival fieldwork facilitated by an RSAA Travel Award, this lecture will explore how colonial, international, and inter-imperial concerns affected the planning and construction of the Kowloon-Canton Railway in the first decade of the twentieth century.

European and Asian powers competed over Chinese railway rights, and the local stories of a 22-mile railway connects to a broader, global tale of trade, modernity, and colonialism. The lecture will look at the ‘scramble for concessions’ over Chinese railway rights, the fears of British businesses in Britain and Hong Kong, and the difficulties involved with building the longest tunnel in China at the time. Engineers, colonial governors, merchants, labourers, and even mosquitos and bullocks are characters in this story of imperial railway construction.

Adonis Li is a Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Lincoln, and received the RSAA Travel Award in 2025. He is a historian of twentieth century Hong Kong, China, and their links with the world. His research and teaching interests include Hong Kong and Chinese history, migration history, and Sino-British relations. He is currently working on his monograph on the international, regional, and local dimensions of the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Other projects relate to topics such as Chinese migration to the UK, local level Sino-British relations, and diplomatic narratives of those relations.