After seeing Air Raid shelters in the 2006 and 2007 Top Ten lists, they don't make a showing in the list for 2008. You don't escape my fondness for tunnels completely though - see number 4 !

#10 - Martin Booth's 'Golden Boy' : Further information (29,135 views)

In Martin Booth's final book - titled Gweilo or Golden Boy depending on the market - he re-lives his childhood in 1950s Hong Kong. His adventures and the colourful characters he meets are a very enjoyable read, especially for anyone who who has lived in Hong Kong.

This page on Gwulo is a chapter-by-chapter companion to that book, compiled by Phil to 'fill in the blanks for those locations / buildings that are no longer around, or more difficult to pinpoint'.

As a bonus, Martin Booth's wife got in touch to share some of their family photos from that time. eg here's a shot of Martin and his mother on the beach at Repulse Bay:

Next steps:

• Get a copy of the Gweilo / Golden Boy book
• Read it together with Martin Booth's 'Golden Boy' : Further information
• Bonus: Visit Phil's website, Hong Kong (& Macau) Film Stuff. He has built up a huge list of foreign / overseas movies made / set in Hong Kong. Then he shows screen shots from each movie, and carefully identifies their locations.

#9 - Chapter 6 : Dens, ducks, and dives (29,996 views)

The page talking about Chapter 6 of Booth's book also makes the Top Ten. Chapter 6 covers some of the <Read more ...>

Where: As the title says, we're looking at Kennedy Town, with the Peak and High West in the background.

Who & When: I believe that the photographer who took this photo also took the photo of Des Voeux Road Central (DVRC) we saw a couple of weeks ago, and at around the same time.

I bought both photos together from the same eBay seller. That gives us a hint but doesn't prove anything, as sellers often mix up photos from different sources. However, look at the two photos before I'd made any edits to them. <Read more ...>

There are more surprises in the 2007 Top Ten, starting with number ten itself:

#10 - 1950s Wanchai (14,328 views)

The surprise is that this was never sent out as a newsletter, so instead it has gathered its own views over the years. It is a great scene, and photos of trams are always popular. But I guess it's the discussion in this photo's comments that brings in the viewers. We got talking about when the trams in this area changed direction, and that would attract people asking Google about the topic.

Read more about 1950s Wanchai

#9 - Tunnels under Hospital Hill (14,399 views)

In 2007 I was still working through my curiosity about the old Air Raid Precaution (ARP) tunnels, and went looking for signs of the tunnels under Hospital Hill - the hill where the Ruttonjee Hospital stands today. It was a good outing, with several unexpected discoveries. <Read more ...>

While many of Gwulo's subscribers are stuck at home, I'm going to try sending out an extra mid-week newsletter as bonus reading material. I'll go back through the years the website has been running, and introduce the ten most popular pages from each year.

Our oldest pages are from 2005, all four of them! They first appeared under my pen name MrB, published on the Batgung.com website that I ran in cooperation with Mr Tall. After a slow start, I started writing about Hong Kong's history on a more regular basis in 2006. Here are the ten most popular pages from that year, based on how many times each page has been viewed.

#10 - Tunnels under Mount Parish (17,965 views)

The old tunnels dug as air-raid shelters in WW2 first got me hooked on investigating Hong Kong's history. After noticing blocked up entrances in Hong Kong's hillsides, I found maps and reports about the tunnels at the government's CEDD library that helped explain their background.

Here's one of the entrances to the Mount Parish tunnels you may have seen. It's on <Read more ...>