hroughout his adult life, Alabaster kept diaries. In 1987, they were donated to the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.2 For much of his career, the diaries list his daily appointments and meetings with only brief notices of personal events; for this he used Letts’s brand diaries, one day for each page. However, the first four volumes are different from the others. They are ordinary exercise books and in them Alabaster wrote about his world each night, or more sporadically if he was busy or otherwise distracted. These four, handwritten volumes, in excess of 50,000 words in total, are a unique record of life in Hong Kong from October 1855 to November 1856, representing 14 months of observations, cogitations, anecdotes, outbursts and reports.Alabaster was a deeply committed servant of the British Empire and was curious about what he saw around him. Unfortunately, for many foreign observers of China (not to mention Chinese authors), what was to be seen on the streets they walked each day rapidly became normalised or trivial or ordinary and not worth recording. For the newly arrived Alabaster, however, everything was new and strange, and in the diaries presented here he wrote without the jaded knowingness of the long-term expatriate. Thus, he records how the Chinese people around him ironed clothes, dried flour and threshed rice; how they gambled, prepared their food and made bean curd; and what opera, new year festivities and the birthday of Mazu – the Heavenly Empress – were like.