BiblioAsia - National Library Singapore

The Hall of Heavenly Records:Korean AstronomicalInstruments and Clocks,1380-1780 by Joseph Needham,Lu Gwei-Djen, John H.Combridge and John S. Major.All rights reserved,Cambridge UniversityPress, 1986.The George Hicks Collectioncomprises a collectionof publications byJoseph Needham.cultural history, can thus befound in the Hicks Collection.The two decades whichthe Hicks family spent inHong Kong from the 1970sto the 1980s saw George’sbusiness interests, as wellas his scholarly interests andlibrary, expanding greatly.Many of the China-relatedbooks which were acquiredduring this sojourn are includedin the collection donatedto the NLB, as are works hedrew on in writing his frequentcontributions to theInternational Herald Tribune,the Far Eastern EconomicRe view and the Asian WallStreet Journal. The economicstudies he had conductedregionally in the previous decadesprovided Mr Hicks witha powerful context and basison which the rapid developmentof the region during this period could beanalysed and described.The Comfort Women: SexSlaves of the Japanese ImperialForces by George Hicks.All rights reserved, HeinemannAsia, 1995.After coming to residein Singapore in the 1990s,Mr Hicks continued to travel(and purchase books) widelythroughout other parts of Asia,and began to increasingly concernhimself with Japanesedenial – described as eitheramnesia or concealment – ofWord War II atrocities. Hesubsequently spent five yearsof his life researching andwriting his famous study TheComfort Women: Sex Slavesof the Japanese ImperialForces (Singapore: HeinemannAsia, 1995).Over the same period hewas also engaged in publishing,through Select Books in Singapore, a range of studies onthe Chinese in Southeast Asia prior to World War II – OverseasChinese Remittances from Southeast Asia 1910-1940 (1993),Fukuda Shozo’s With Sweat and Abacus: Economic Roles ofSoutheast Asian Chinese on the Eve of World War II (1995) andChinese Organisations in Southeast Asia in the 1930s (1995).He also published A Bibliography of Japanese Works on theOverseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1914-1945 (AsiaKite-flying at Hae Kwan.Image reproduced from Allom, T. (1843). China, in a series of views, displaying the scenery, architecture, and social habits of thatancient empire. London: Fisher, Son & Co.42 biblioasia • April 2010