Cohen became the personal bodyguard of Sun Yat-sen. Sutton was made a warlord's general. Hacker became creative director in the Hong Kong colonial government's information service, and created the popular poster cartoon character Lap Sap Chung as the centerpiece of a decade-long clean-up-the-city campaign.

Cohen and Sutton went the way of all flesh, but the gravel-voiced Hacker, now in his mid-seventies, still has a consuming passion for collecting old photos, books, postcards, maps, anything about pre-1949 China.

Today, he's a Discovery Bay-based historian with one of the region's best pictorial records of several hundred years of Chinese history, mostly as seen through the eyes of foreign visitors.

``Collecting is addictive and the trouble began when I bought a few old postcards of Victorian buildings of Hong Kong. I needed them to reference an historical map of the colony that I was illustrating at the time,'' Hacker explains.

``One thing led to another and soon everything got completely out of hand, and I was hooked.''

Eight books have grown out of Hacker's penchant for the past, most peopled with characters like Cohen and Sutton - adventurers, fortune-seekers, gamblers, drunks, charlatans and the noble-minded too. People like Robert Hart, who organized and ran China's customs tax collection service for 50 years, netting more money for the Chinese authorities than corrupt mandarins had done earlier.

Hart, says Hacker, ``spoke excellent Chinese albeit with an Irish accent, and English with a singsong Chinese accent.''

Why was Two-gun Cohen so-called? How did Sutton lose an arm? Who went down with guns blazing defending Wan Chai against the Japanese? Hacker has the answers to these and many other questions about the mainland and Hong Kong's half-forgotten past.

One of his most colorful books is Arthur Hacker's Wanchai, in which he traces the rise of the district's red light nightlife and records the characters who fought to the last bullet against the invading Japanese army in late 1941.

They were in fact a bunch of aging British businessmen, Canadians, Indians and a few Irish. Sir Edward Des Voeux, for example, nephew of a former Hong Kong governor, died defending North Point power station after refusing to retreat, muttering: ``I'm far too old to go dashing about and I am very comfortable where I am, thank you.''

Some of those who survived the Japanese onslaught and were then locked up in a prison camp stayed alive with food thrown to them over the barbed wire by red light girls who became known as the Angels of Wan Chai.

Now Hacker has come up with probably his most ambitious book to date, a pictorial history of China from the 16th century to the 1940s.

The 300-page glossy coffee-table book China Illustrated: Western Views of the Middle Kingdom (Tuttle Publishing, HK$390) features a rare collection of drawings, engravings, paintings and photographs not previously published together, and is peppered with amusing and revealing vignettes built on the images.

Alongside a photo of Sun Yat-sen, for example, is his wife Soong Ching-ling and a hard-looking, stocky man in a white suit - gambler and adventurer Morris Cohen who found his way from London to Shanghai via Canada: ``One day he [Cohen] walked into Mah Sam's chop suey joint in Saskatoon to find a lone gunman staging a hold-up. Cohen fought him and knocked him out.

``The lucky punch changed Cohen's life. Mah Sam recruited Cohen to the Tsing Chung-hui Triad Society. This enabled Cohen to auction off the Chinese vote in the Edmonton elections to the highest bidder.

``When Sun Yat-sen toured Canada before the Chinese revolution, Cohen acted as his bodyguard and fell under the great man's spell.''

Which Chinese period does Hacker find most interesting?

``Historically, from around 1800 when China began to open up,'' the white beard growls, ``until around the 1870s when the telegraph began functioning and foreign powers were able, up to a point, to control their expatriates.

``But the most interesting time for me visually was the age of early photography, from 1860 until 1914.''

One of the most interesting times of Hacker's own life, however, was the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s when it would not have been hard to imagine him dressed in a leather Beatles cap and T-shirt displaying talk-of-the-town stick model Twiggy.

But Hacker's swinging times were curtailed by what he terms the then British government's ``socialist system which killed the London that I loved.''

He fled to Hong Kong in 1967 and, the day after he arrived, began his collection with a book, Hong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time by one of the leading China-watching journalists of the time, Richard Hughes.

``It's always been a working collection,'' says Hacker. ``After I published a book of drawings in 1976, I decided to do an illustrated map of the colony. To do this I needed artists' references of old buildings that had been demolished.

``Old postcards were a great source. When eventually I finished the map in 1983 I had thousands of old postcards of the place. As it was just the image that I wanted I didn't mind about their condition, so I was much loved by postcard dealers who could sell me otherwise unsaleable old rubbish.

``They also started me collecting old prints and antique maps and anything with a Hong Kong image, stereographs, and even lantern slides and antiquarian books. Although I collected mainly Hong Kong images I couldn't resist books like Thomson's China. I also collected photo albums that contained fascinating snapshots.''

Hacker's collections today extends to 4,000 books, plus thousands of postcards, photographs and other images.

He has 500 postcards just of old Hong Kong, and more than 100 pictures of Macau. Ironically, a lot of lore about Hong Kong and China was to be found in Britain.

``I used to spend three weeks in London every year and I would spend at least a week going round all the antique shops, the print dealers and antiquarian book shops.''

Hackers insists that his collections are not especially rare or valuable: ``It's having them all together which is important. Having them all in one place.''

Although Hacker has spent a lot of his free time burrowing in junk warrens and browsing through backstreet book shops, he has also traveled extensively on the mainland. But you might need two maps when you talk to him, given his penchant for 19th-century place names.

``I tend to visit places related to my writing such as Lintin, Wei Hai Wei and Treaty Ports like Port Arthur (Lushun), Tsing Tao (Qingdao), Chefoo (Yantai) and Dairien (Dalian). I have also been to Tibet.''

Many of the tales in his latest book relate to the so-called treaty ports that were enclaves of the Western powers up to the Japanese invasion.

There were 33 by the end of the 19th century and apart from Shanghai, Hacker reckons that the Germans' Qingdao has left the biggest lasting impression. Not only did the Germans bequeath a brewery now producing China's most famous beer brand, Tsingtao, Hacker says the colonizers created a fortified garden city.

``Even today it is dominated by its Teutonic architecture,'' he says. ``In spite of three decades of Japanese occupation and over half a century of Chinese rule, much is still visually a German city.''

And so why was Two-gun Cohen so called? While he was Sun Yat-sen's bodyguard in China he was wounded in the left arm during a shoot-out and became alarmed that if he had been shot in the right arm he - and Sun - would have been defenceless. So he learned to shoot with his left hand and bought a second gun. Word of this development reached Hong Kong and when Cohen next visited the territory he was made to pay for two firearm licenses.

Frank Sutton lost his arm in World War I in a hand grenade exchange with Turkish troops at Gallipoli. But it didn't impede his post-war adventures. He ended up in China after fleeing from civil war in Russia. Sutton was for a time an arms salesman and developed an arsenal for the northern warlord Marshal Chang Tso-lin, who anointed the British squire's son a general for finding a Great Wall gate left open during a local skirmish.

While Cohen successfully persuaded Sun Yat-sen's wife to get out of Hong Kong ahead of the Japanese invasion, both he and Sutton were captured and imprisoned.

Cohen's luck held; he managed to get amnesty and returned to Canada where he married a rich woman and lived happily until the 1970s.

Sutton was not so lucky; he died in Hong Kong from prison camp dysentery in 1944.

But it isn't all history oozing from Hacker's writing desk. He has also written and illustrated two ``little books for children of all ages''- the ABC of Hong Kong and the ABC of Dogs.

He is now working on a book of historical drawings.

You might think that an old historian would have a sentimental attachment to the surviving colonial architecture of Hong Kong. But Hacker thinks many of the city's colonial buildings were or are of poor quality.

Hacker reckons there were just three outstanding Hong Kong buildings: the old city hall (pulled down after becoming dilapidated), Beaconsfield House (disappeared probably during World War II) and Zetland Hall (``a beautiful classical building now the site of a power station'').

And what of today's mainland? Isn't it boring compared with the colorful past? Hacker reckons there are more spectacular fireworks to come: ``The major political aim of any Chinese government has always been to retain power at any cost and consequently China is permanently in a position where anything can happen and probably will.

``Chinese emperors and autocrats are, and were, terrified of losing the Mandate of Heaven, so I don't believe that the pendulum will carry on swinging in the same direction. Pendulums seldom do.

``History shows that on average China screws itself up every 12 to 15 years, so a monumental cock-up is long overdue.''

Is that why Hacker stays? To watch the pendulum swing?

``I find that if I stay in England for more than three weeks one tends to become enveloped in that grey mist that stifles the English, whereas in Hong Kong I feel alive every moment of the day. I love the energy of the place.''

graham.lees@globalchina.com