For those who don’t know, the University Services Center at CUHK is an amazing, globally unique collection of materials on 20th century China, much of which dates from a time that Hong Kong served as a sort of listening station for the mainland.

So it’s a sort of Mecca for China scholars, and a pretty common occurrence to see colleagues whether you wanted to or not. In this case, I really wanted to, because that colleague was Tia Thornton, who I first met many years ago at a workshop in Canberra, and who happens to be a truly lovely person, and somewhat more incidentally, also a very smart one.

Here’s us enjoying a nice evening of dim sum in Taipo market, which those of you who really read the hell out of this blog (anyone?), may remember as my old hangout during my semester at CUHK.