Hong Kong independent bookshop Have a Nice Stay (留下書舍) closed on August 30, its last day of business, after police seized books from the Kowloon shop in a July national security raid. Buyers crammed into the narrow 17-ping shop on Sai Yeung Choi Street for its clearance sale while more queued from the stairway down to the street, PTS reported. A note on the wall read "江湖再見", a farewell promising to meet again, though many knew that independent bookshops like it were gone for good.
Five journalists who had left their jobs founded the shop in 2022, and, drawing on their past work, it stocked mostly books on journalism and reportage literature. Another wall bore the slogan "news is the first draft of history," setting out what its operators hoped the shop would be. One Hong Kong resident said it was "a place where people can exchange different ideas," and so "an important part of Hong Kong's civil society." A retired nurse said: "It feels like so many things have disappeared and won't come back, and my heart is heavy. Many people have felt this way over these years."
Having survived lean trading through the pandemic, the shop struggled to breathe under Hong Kong's national security law and pressure from Beijing, PTS reported. In July 2026 the Hong Kong Police Force seized a large number of its books, citing seditious intention and violations of the National Security Law and the national security ordinance. On August 14, after the raid, the shop announced that August 30 would be its final day. Another independent bookshop, 田園書店, announced at the end of July that it would close when its lease expires.
Hong Kong's independent publishers are in a worse position still, a sociology professor at Taiwan's Tunghai University told PTS. Publishing in Hong Kong "has drawn comparatively little attention, but the suppression it faces is more severe," the professor said, adding that the city's so-called independent publishers can barely keep operating and are "even worse off than the independent bookshops."
