South China Morning Post is the premier English language newspaper in Hong Kong. It was founded by James See (Tse Tsan-tai, 謝贊泰; 1872-1938) and Alfred Cunningham (?1870-?) in 1903, (History of SCMP, 2013, 2018, Penn State), owned by Alibaba Group since 2016.
My first encounter with it was in 1979 when I attending the England language school at Yitong. The English name for this 2nd floor, dimly lighted, with a couple of class rooms school was Eton. Of course I had never heard of Eton before, so the name totally lost on me at the time. The Chinese name was 易通 (?) IF I remembered it correctly, the Chinese name is pretty appropriate, which translates to easy learning.
The teachers at Yitong/Eton weren’t good. Their heavy Cantonese accent made learning difficult. One particular young male teacher had chips on his shoulders. He was small and skinny, wore a pair of glasses and always dressed like a white collar office worker. One good thing about him was he always arrived early and reading a newspaper. One day a student asked him what newspaper he was reading. He beamed.
“South China Morning Post.”
The lengthy name carried weight and impressed the student.
“Wow. Is it any good?”
“Don’t you know anything? This is the best newspaper in Hong Kong.”
He threw the newspaper onto his desk, “If you can read this, you’re graduated.”
Saying it’s the New York Times of Hong Kong, isn’t too big an exaggeration. I enjoy reading it, since I’m able to read in English.
Today, their Shanghai split in two as megacity looks down to fight Omicron variant surge caught my eyes. The host interviews a few who has very sympathetic views toward the lockdown, during the pandemic, even the general sentiment in Shanghai is very negative.
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