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Exhibits

By Yip Linfeng

Hong Kong Naturography 

The first edition (1958)
The University of Hong Kong Libraries Collection

Coloured edition (2017)
 

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New edition (2011)
 

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14 Jan, 1951
I found the book H.K. Countryside by former HKU reader Herklots at book store Kelly & Walsh today...The book was HK$25. I did not purchase it immediately as I am quite tight on money lately.

Books that inspired Yip

31 Jan, 1951
I bought Prof. Herklot's new book, The Hong Kong Countryside, I found it quite easy and interesting to read. The book consists of a lot of information that could be useful for the articles on ‘Plants, Trees, Insects and Fishes’


Excerpted from The Diary of Ye Lingfeng (2020)
By Yip Linfeng, annotated by Lu Weiluan

Yip started a newspaper column under a pen name, the hand-drawn illustrations were directly copied from Herklots’ The Hong Kong Countryside without mentioning the book. A collective of this column is later published as Hong Kong Naturography.

 

Besides infusing the western knowledge into his own essays, Yip had been translating many foreign-language literature at the time when many could not understand foreign languages or afford English books.

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Hong Kong Naturography opens with an article “Hong Kong’s Incense”, which talks about the origin of the name “Hong Kong”. Yip deliberately cited from Gazetteer of Xin'an County and Compendium of Guangdong.

Chung Hwa Book Company

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The Gazetteer of Xin'an County, a rare first Jiaqing edition in his collection, was posthumously donated to the Sun Yat-sen Library of Guangdong Province. The book was later edited and reprinted as the Xin'an Xianzhi 2017 Edition by Chung Hwa Book Company.
 

The Jiaqing edition of Gazetteer of Xin'an County, 2017

Hong Kong Naturography (2011)
By Yip Linfeng

By Geoffrey A.C. Herklots

A collection in The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library

Yip Linfeng Book Collection: The Hong Kong Countryside (1951) 

When Yip first came across The Hong Kong Countryside, he mentioned in his diary, “The book was HK$25. I did not purchase it immediately as I am quite tight on money lately.” Seven years later, Yip’s Hong Kong Naturography was published at a price of only HK$1.2. This showed that English books were indeed quite expensive at the time.

On January 31, 1951, after receiving his salary, Yip finally bought Geoffrey Herklots’ The Hong Kong Countryside. “I found it quite easy and interesting to read. The book consists of a lot of information that could be useful for the articles on ‘Plants, Trees, Insects and Fishes’.” After his death, his widow, Chiu Hakjun (趙克臻) donated Yip’s collection of more than 10,000 books to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, including a considerable number of reference books on natural sciences. However, only in this book can one find Yip’s notes, showing that he was particularly devoted to understanding Herklots’ work.