I have been enjoying exploring the deep range of sources to information about the pre-war history of Hong Kong opened up by the gwulo.com site, especially this page about where to find Hong Kong’s history.
I’ve also been subscribed to the daily emails based on extracts of people’s diaries from the site detailing day by day the doomed defence of Hong Kong 74 years ago which culminate tomorrow in the surrender to the Japanese. They make for harrowing reading and certainly help explain the intensity of my mother’s feelings about the Japanese.
I also found another detailed description of the defence in “Disaster in the Far East, 1941-1942 : the defence of Malaya, Japanese capture of Hong Kong and the fall of Singapore”