Short Biography

Wai-Yip Ho was François Chevalier Fellow (2021-2022), Madrid Institute for Advanced Study; Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS); Fellow, Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies; Intercontinental Academia Fellow, co-hosted by Institute of Advanced Studies of Nanyang Technological University and the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Birmingham. Currently, he is the Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is the author of Islam and China’s Hong Kong: Ethnic Identity, Muslim Networks and the new Silk Road (Routledge: London, 2015, paperback).

Project

This research attempts to understand Dawoodi Bohra community, as an Ismaili branch of the Shia Islam, its trading role as a foreign community and interregional connection between Gujarat of South Asia and Hong Kong in East Asia. Since the mid-nineteenth century, there were number of foreign communities present in South China. As a crown colony of the British Empire in East Asia, there were diverse communities and merchants in Hong Kong. To name a few, there are Germans, Jews from Baghdad, Parsees from Calcutta, Bombay and Isfahan, Armenians from Macedonia and Portuguese from Macau, Sindhis and Sikhs merchants from India. Among all foreign communities, Bohra traders from Gujarat played a significant role in the formative history of colonial Hong Kong. Though Bohra community has been one of the earliest communities contributing the economic success of Hong Kong from the British colonial rule till the postcolonial Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of People’s Republic of China (PRC), they remain a relatively unexamined group in the existing literature.