A former senior Chinese Administrative Officer has at long last lifted another corner of the veil of half-truths which have shrouded many of the decisions taken under the long governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose.

David T. K. Wong — who started working life as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant at the age of 13 before becoming a journalist, teacher, bureaucrat, businessman, and then a writer of short stories and novels — has turned his narrative skills to producing a pungent, cerebral and revelatory insider memoir of his experiences in the upper reaches of the colonial administration during the 1970s.

He constantly struggled with a three-horned dilemma: how to serve the people of Hong Kong, who paid his salary; the wider Chinese nation, from which he was culturally and emotionally inseparable; and the demands of the British crown, to which he had publicly sworn his allegiance.

Hong Kong Confidential is a valuable contribution to the historical mosaic of a dynamic and paradoxical Chinese community living through turbulent times.