What a forgotten murder revealed about the uneasy world of Edwardian Hong Kong.
On 14 December 1906, Hong Kong’s China Mail reported one of the colony’s most shocking murders.
The victim was my great-grandfather, John Craik, Chief Clerk at the Whampoa Docks, brutally murdered in his own home.
The explanation? Mistaken identity.
Three generations later, that was still the story I had been brought up with. But it never satisfied me. If you wanted someone bumped off anonymously, why not make it look like a botched mugging? Why break into a family home, risk witnesses, and potentially kill an entire family?
It was all too specific. Too deliberate.
Spectacle was the aim.
Questioning that convenient explanation led me into sixteen years of research, uncovering the political and commercial tensions of colonial Hong Kong — and a much larger family story.
Read the full story on The Missing Pages.
