Battle for the Peak: Childhood, the Great War and Cultural Heritage in Asia

Abstract

Racialised visions of childhood shaped and defined the post-colonial development of places associated with heritage in Asia today. How have such 'difficult histories' been explored and remembered today? Focusing upon the case of the 'museified' Peak in Hong Kong and the funicular tram dating from 1888 linking it to the city below this lecture engages with such questions. After 1997 the Peak became, as the Government puts it the “must do” tourist attraction in Hong Kong. But how has the Peak Tramways Company repackaged the controversial history of racial segregation - and the important role ideals of childhood played in it - for public consumption by millions of visitors? This article examines the wartime acceleration of efforts to utilise childhood as grounds for racial exclusion in order to investigate which aspects of such difficult histories are broached and which neglected in the marketing of history as cultural heritage today. Doing so, it locates the Peak within a wider market for colonial nostalgia currently burgeoning in Asia. And it raises questions over whose interests this form of heritage, with its exaggerations, inventions and blind spots, might serve.