More than 1001 Days and Nights of Hong Kong Internment: A Personal Narrative

More Than 1001 Days and Nights of Hong Kong Internment is the wartime journal of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster, former attorney-general of Hong Kong and one of the three highest-ranking British officials during the Japanese occupation. He was imprisoned by the Japanese at the Stanley Internment Camp from 1941 to 1945. During his internment, he managed to keep a diary of his life in the camp in small notebooks and hid them until his release in 1945. He then wrote his wartime journal on the basis of these notes. The journal records his day-to-day experiences of the fall of Hong Kong, his time at Stanley, and his eventual release. Some of the most fascinating extracts cover the three months immediately after the fall of Hong Kong and when Alabaster and his colleagues were imprisoned in Prince’s Building in Central and before they were sent to the camp, a period little covered in previous publications. Hence, the book is an important primary source for understanding the daily operation of the Stanley Internment Camp and the camp’s environment. Readers will also learn more about the daily life of those imprisoned in the camp, and C. G. Alabaster’s interaction with other prisoners there.

David St Maur Sheil is the great-grandson of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster and has been conducting research into his family’s long history in Hong Kong and China. Kwong Chi Man is associate professor in the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University. Tony Banham has studied the Battle of Hong Kong for a quarter of a century and has written on the subject, aided in the production of television documentaries, and helped many children of veterans in their researches into their parents’ war years.