Before being commissioned to do Post Impressions, Sinclair and Rutherford had never met. They come from very different backgrounds; Rutherford went to acting college, designed sets, then started his own publication in Britain before coming to Hong Kong.

He was art director of the Post Magazine and design director of the SCMP, responsible for giving the paper a completely new look in 2000. He now runs his own successful design practice. Sinclair is a newspaperman. When the two men look at the same picture, they see different things.

"Andrew's an artist," Sinclair says. "I'm a reporter. When I look at a picture, I'm thinking what it adds to the story. He's creative, thinking about how the image appears and what the photograph says.

"Andrew can sit for hours looking at a bunch of pictures, back and forth, back and forth. He's painstaking and meticulous. He can look at a photo and with different shading and cropping and printing create a picture with feeling. But as well as this artistic flair, he's also very knowledgeable about the technical aspects of production."

It was Rutherford who argued strongly and successfully for production in strong black and white to give the book a unified appearance and to make readers see content rather than colour.

As the tireless Prudence Lui produced pictures of the first trams (1904), a meeting of directors of the Po Leung Kuk (1903) and a typhoon that killed 30,000 people and lashed the SCMP waterfront offices with huge waves (1906), Rutherford contemplated some of the 100,000 images and Sinclair researched in-depth captions.

"Many items excited me," Sinclair recalls. "What great stories there have been over the century. Take piracy, which was rampant. It was a damn sight more dangerous to catch a river steamer in 1905 than to fly on a Russian aircraft in the 1990s.

"Pirates sneaked aboard ships disguised as passengers, then stormed the bridge, killed anyone who opposed them, captured the vessel, steered it to a fleet of waiting pirate junks, sometimes up to 50 boats, stole cargo, kidnapped any passenger they thought worth a ransom, disabled the ship so it couldn't pursue them, then sailed off.

"It happened all the time. Up to 300 passengers and crew could be killed.

"Then there were diseases like plague, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and other killers. I worked it out that you were 40 times more likely to die of plague in 1904 than you were to die of Sars in 2003.

"As I went through the files, there was a lot of laughter as well as grim news. The letters to the editor were a delight; some of the crackpots a century ago could be alive today ranting about the same subjects. I particularly liked one 1907 letter where some cantankerous old nutter demanded that women who wanted the vote should be locked up and birched -- and he sounded serious."

For many of his 35 years as a reporter in Hong Kong, Kevin Sinclair has covered the constant flood of refugees and illegal immigrants who risked their lives to reach the territory.

So it's little surprise that his favourite picture in the book is a photograph of a family on the banks of the Shenzhen River. It was taken in 1962 when the Chinese army mysteriously pulled back from its stations along the border. First scores, then hundreds then tens of thousands of people poured over the river. Police were rounding them up and sending them back at a rate of 8,000 a day; many more got in successfully.

One who didn't make it was the wife of a Hong Kong mechanic. She had come with her child amid the exodus from Guangdong to join her husband, who lived legally in Hong Kong. Caught by police on the frontier, she was being sent back. Her son could stay.

Sinclair muses: "On their faces, you can see the agony and desperation faced by so many Hongkongers whose families were torn apart by war or politics or famine. It's a picture of heartbreak. But it's so true and so touching that it was a natural selection for the book.

"Pru and I tried to trace the family in the photograph to see if they were ever again united. We couldn't trace them. I like to think there was a happy ending to this story. But somehow I doubt it."

It's just one of the portraits of Hong Kong over 100 years that makes Post Impressions a memorable volume.