Hedda morrison, the highly regarded photographer, was born in Germany in 1908; she died in Australia in 1991. Trained in photography during 1929-31 at Munich, she left for China in 1933. There she found her vocation, as a documentary photographer of great sensitivity and range, thus beginning decades of memorable work. Edward stokes, an award-winning photographer and writer, was born in Australia. He grew up in Hong Kong and returned there in 1993. He is the photographer and author of various books on Australian history and exploration, and on Hong Kong's heritage and landscape. Stokes' previous works have all been keenly received.

In September 1946, when the photographer Hedda Morrison reached Hong Kong, it remained little changed from decades earlier. Acclaimed for her images of China taken in the 1930s and 1940s, Hedda Morrison delighted in recording the patterns of everyday life. Now, captivated by Hong Kong and its people, she embraced the colony's diversity. For six months, cameras in hand, Morrison roamed its districts, streets, coasts and valleys. This book presents the people and places she encountered.

Within years, much of what Hedda Morrison witnessed in 1946-47 would be swept aside. Yet when she was there Hong Kong's life still had its old feel and traditions - with colonial precincts, tenement streets, bustling markets, itinerant hawkers, fisherfolk and rice farmers. In this book, Morrison's memorable images are complemented by Edward Stokes' essays that portray the postwar years.

Hedda Morrison's photographs are the work of a masterful, artistic photographer. However, fewer than thirty of this book's reproductions have ever been seen before. It was those images, first sighted in a 1946 government report, that led Edward Stokes to begin searching for Morrison's original negatives - which later were discovered a the Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard University.

This is a unique record of a now vanished Hong Kong - the most complete pictorial account of how the colony looked during the decades from the early 1930s to the 1950s. Hedda Morrison's photographs will appeal to all who value documentary images, Asian history, and the ethnography of urban trades, crafts and rural life.