Peng Chau

This guide to Peng Chau in Hong Kong opens in 1939, when Shanghai match magnate Lau Hung Sang was turned away from building a factory on nearby Cheung Chau and brought his plans to this smaller island instead. It follows the factory he built into the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia, the porcelain workshops that grew up alongside it hand-painting ceramics for export, and the population boom that briefly made this tiny island one of the colony's busiest manufacturing centres. Walk the old shophouses on Wing On Street as you listen.