Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy

Governor, Traveller, Scholar, Spy traces the life and career of the talented colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who rose to become governor of Hong Kong in the 1920s at a time of revolutionary upheaval in China which brought the city to its economic knees and threatened Britain’s possession of the territory. This is the first full-length biography that examines Clementi’s career, with an emphasis on his service in Hong Kong. He championed the development of Kai Tak airport and the provision of Hong Kong’s water supply. Yet he resisted reforms to the controversial mui-tsai system under which Chinese girls served as housemaids to Chinese families on the grounds that it was a Chinese ‘tradition’. Through Clementi’s career, this book sheds light on how Britain administered the far-flung territories that formed its empire. 

Graham Hutchings is an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and an honorary professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He was a foreign correspondent based first in Beijing and then Hong Kong and was later director of analysis and managing director at Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and advisory company. His previous books include China 1949: Year of Revolution.

‘Cecil Clementi was one of the most extraordinary figures of empire – scholarly, political, and bureaucratic by turns, devoted to Chinese culture and yet fiercely opposed to that country’s search for nationhood. Drawing on rich sources and in compelling, lucid prose, Graham Hutchings tells the captivating story not just of a man, but of the rise and fall of imperial Britain.’

—Rana Mitter, S. T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations, Kennedy School, Harvard University

‘This is a beautifully written critical biography of Governor Cecil Clementi and a highly valuable addition to scholarship on how Hong Kong was governed at the heyday of the British Empire. Anyone interested in how it fitted into Britain’s East Asian empire and the dynamics between colonial Hong Kong and China’s Guangdong province will also find it illuminating.’

—Steve Tsang, Director of the SOAS China Institute and author of A Modern History of Hong Kong