Rachel Cartland came to Hong Kong in 1972 as one of just two female expatriates in the Hong Kong Government's elite administrative grade. Before she retired in 2006, her life was shaped by the momentous events that rocked Hong Kong during those action-packed years: corruption and the police mutiny, the growth of the new towns, the currency crisis of 1983, Tiananmen Square, the change of sovereignty and the devastation of SARS. The backdrop to her story ranges from Kowloon's infamous Walled City to Government House to the rural New Territories. This book is full of humour and incident and, at the same time, an accessible account of modern Hong Kong and the forces that shaped it.