Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner , Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This documentary adopts a traditional historical approach, drawing on published sources and archival manuscripts from both Hong Kong and London. It explores five key themes: 1) water, infrastructure, and the environment; 2) water and society; 3) water, culture, and foodways; 4) water usage and management and 5) water and industries. By weaving these strands together, the documentary offers a timely and original contribution to the environmental, political, social, and economic history of Hong Kong. It also resonates with global conversations on climate change, highlighting how past strategies were developed to cope with water crises in a rapidly urbanising city with limited welfare provisions and a narrow tax base-conditions still mirrored in many regions today. Through historicising natural disasters and water emergencies, the documentary deepens academic discourse on environmental change and urbanisation, while offering valuable lessons for contemporary challenges.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Florence Mok is Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong, modern China and British colonialism, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She is the author of Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97, published by Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series) in 2023 and the co-editor of A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945-1997, published by Hong Kong University Press in 2025.  

Sahil Bhagat is Research Associate in the History Department at Nanyang Technological University. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of St Andrews and a joint master’s degree from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. His work pertains to the transnational labour and environmental histories of plantation-based communities in British Malaya and Singapore

Fiona Williamson is Professor of Environmental History at the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. Her latest book, Imperial Weather: Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2025. She has also worked on histories of flood and drought for colonial Malaya and Hong Kong.

Stefan Huebner is Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and the President of the Society of Floating Solutions (Singapore). He is working on the history and present situation of ocean industrialization. His monograph on “Earth’s Amphibious Transformation” will be released by Cambridge University Press in July 2026. Recent articles were published in Climate Risk Management, Ocean and Coastal Management, and Channel NewsAsia.