The process of colonisation of a territory requires not just the construction of practices of legitimacy by the coloniser, but, prior to that, the methodological construction of representation itself. This representation is not necessarily drawn from the terrain, but often pre-applied and forced upon observation. It is within this messy, partially fictive compound that perceptually unstable, social and spatial identities are generated. Yet how do such pieces get assembled?

This chapter will reconstruct how the Anglo-Chinese colony on Hong Kong Island was first presented to itself in the year of its colonial birth. This reconstruction will be grafted upon the spine of two excerpts of a now lost early Victorian travelogue, a book entitled Hongkong and the Hongkonians (1841/42), together with an assemblage of archive and published original sources – cartography, building surveys, China art, construction-method studies, and newspaper tirades. This book first played simultaneously to a British home audience, employing techniques of literary drama, it then was refracted through newspaper extracts back to a colonial one, forcing the colonists to confront an imported vocabulary that described their miniscule but rapidly changing social, urban and architectural cosmos. The chapter will show that this very representation was, in part, borrowed from earlier British representations of China, India and the wider world, employing a mixture of genres, from tropes within early Victorian novels to tableaux within late eighteenth-century Oriental prints.

Such a realisation presents a challenge for those attempting to recover a history from the account, since it involves a disengagement from the material as simply one kind of evidence, of eyewitness testimonial, and a re-engagement with it through a set of different questions: questions that ask if historical reconstruction is even possible let alone desirable; if the author's intentions towards the audience is recoverable let alone their constituencies knowable; while all is affected by the nature and purpose of one's own scholarly engagement as a researcher. For instance, are we interested in a genre history of the travelogue or in a history consequent upon the contents of that travelogue? Or are we willing to position ourselves uncomfortably between the two?