May Bo Ching is currently a Professor of History at the Department of Chinese and History, the City University of Hong Kong, and the “Distinguished Professor of the Pearl River Scholars” of Guangdong Province (Sun Yat-sen University). For the past eighteen years, she has been working at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. She has published extensively on a variety of subjects relating to social and cultural history of modern China. Her book Regional Culture and National Identity: the shaping of “Guangdong Culture” since the late Qing discusses changes in the articulation of regional identity against the rise of nationalism at the turn of 19^th and 20^th centuries. In recent years, she has been examining how the regional culture of South China took shape in a trans-regional context in terms of sound, colour and tastes from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.