Escape from Hong Kong：Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, 1941

On 25 December 1941, the day of Hong Kong’s surrender to the Japanese, Admiral Chan Chak – the Chinese government’s chief agent in Hong Kong – and more than 60 Chinese, British and Danish intelligence, naval and marine personnel made a dramatic escape from the invading army. They travelled on five small motor torpedo boats – all that remained of the Royal Navy in Hong Kong – across Mirs Bay, landing at a beach near Nan’ao. Then, guided by guerrillas and villagers, they walked for four days through enemy lines to Huizhou, before flying to Chongqingor travelling by land to Burma. The breakout laid the foundations of an escape trail jointly used by the British Army Aid Group and the East River Column for the rest of the war. Chan Chak, the celebrated ‘one-legged admiral’, became Mayor of Canton after the war and was knighted by the British for his services to the Allied cause. His comrade in the escape, David MacDougall, became head of the civil administration of Hong Kong in 1945.

This gripping account of the escape draws on a wealth of primary sources in both English and Chinese and sheds new light on the role played by the Chinese in the defence of Hong Kong, on the diplomacy behind the escape, and on the guerillas who carried the Admiral in a sedan chair as they led his party over the rivers and mountains of enemy-occupied China.

Escape from Hong Kong will appeal not just to military and other historians and those with a special interest in Hong Kong and China but also to anyone who appreciates a good old-fashioned adventure story.

Tim Luard is a former Beijing correspondent for the BBC World Service.

"Tim Luard tells this exciting and little known story with great skill. Some of us departed from Hong Kong much more comfortably! But we missed this extraordinary adventure." — Chris Patten, governor of Hong Kong, 1992–97

"Escape from Hong Kong is a crisp and comprehensive account of one of the epic untold tales of the Second World War - a unique Chinese-led British escape, under fire, from the Japanese invaders of Hong Kong." — Tony Banham, author of Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941.

"The great Christmas Day breakout of 1941, when British and Chinese officers teamed up virtually for the fi rst time to escape from Hong Kong as the Japanese Army engulfed it, is one of the most dramatic episodes in Hong Kong’s history. Up till now the story has been diffused in a mass of individual diaries, letters and memoirs. Tim Luard has drawn this material together (Chinese as well as British) to produce a unifi ed narrative that is as full and balanced as it is enthralling." — Philip Snow, author of The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation