Harvard-Yenching Library’s 1,019 Hong Kong negatives, of which 555 are from 1946 – 47, were taken by Morrison using her classic Rolleiflex and Rolleicord twins-lens reflex cameras. Almost all the negatives have middle ranges of contrast and density, but some are underexposed and ‘flat’ (defects later overcome by superb compensatory printing at Harvard). Virtually all of the negatives are in close to pristine condition. Throughout her life, Morrison kept her negatives in airtight trunks with silica gel, and for decades maintained a weekly ritual of drying out the silica gel. Her Hong Kong images cover the entire range of local life – in all, they present the most complete pictorial record of the community between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s.    James Cheng, Librarian of Harvard-Yenching, and Raymond Lum agreed that the project – leading to a book and this website – should be based on the negatives, not on additional prints. This was because of the negatives’ much greater number and the benefit to reproduction quality from using original negatives. Thus, the initial task was to catalogue the negatives by location and year, since besides her 1946 – 47 stay Hedda Morrison later visited Hong Kong in 1959 and 1967.    The negatives were first grouped according to the years in which they were taken. The dating was assisted by Hong Kong’s topography, with its panoramas that reveal the development between 1946 and 1959, and between 1959 and 1967. Prominent buildings and harbour reclamations, completed in known years, greatly assisted the dating. Indicating the 1946 – 47 dating were the very small number of vehicles, the still widespread use of Chinese clothing and footwear (or bare feet), hard living and the absence of consumer items. The change to Western dress, metal-band watches, ubiquitous rubber thongs, moulded-plastic shopping bags, zip-up windcheaters, and many more vehicles reflected the Hong Kong of 1959. (By 1967 Hong Kong had been physically transformed, and the dating was immediately obvious.)   A small proportion of the negatives could not confidently be dated from their context. A fortunate discovery assisted with these. Of the 1946 – 47 negatives that could be definitely dated by distinct urban features, many had a tiny shadow line across their top sky edge. This was caused by a minute hair having lodged in Hedda Morrison’s camera shutter, and so casting a shadow onto the film at the moment of each exposure. In the definitively context dated 1959 images, this shadow never appears. Thus its presence was used to reliably date, to 1946 – 47, some of the otherwise uncertain negatives.   The negatives at Harvard-Yenching Library have no original contact prints, so the editing could not take into account Hedda Morrison’s choices. (Photographers typically ‘cross’ their preferred images on the contact sheet prints.) Instead, the editing weighed and balanced each negative’s technical quality (definition, composition, contrast, density and physical condition); its historic or social content; and its visual or narrative relationships with other images.