Abstract: The first series of the Compendium of Hong Kong Literature covers the period 1919-1949. Many academics cast doubts over this because given the culturally backward and literarily unproductive situation of Hong Kong in the pre-1949 years, finding enough pieces to fill up a literary anthology should be an impossible task. Yet the Compendium editors’ painstaking searches revealed that early Hong Kong literary creative works and other literary narratives exist in abundance. For example, the volume Literary Criticism shows that Hong Kong was a platform where various kinds of literary debates were held; it was also a focal point where foreign trends were imported. Using two concrete examples, this article illustrates that one can observe a silhouette of Hong Kong in the May Forth New Cultural Movement. Moreover, a literary magazine published in Hong Kong in the 1930s demonstrated an extraordinarily broad scope and introduced Western ideas from different places. We can thus see that Hong Kong, as a cultural space, has the ability of cultivating cultural workers who are new and progressive in their political and/or literary thinking. It is also a place where different cultural trends converge and collide.