This volume contains the refereed and edited versions of papers presented at the First International Congress in Algebra & Combinatorics, held in July 1997 in Hong Kong. Research work in algebra and combinatorics, which has never been published before, is introduced, along with expository papers in semigroups, groups, rings, general algebras, ordered algebras, graphs and combinatorics. The work should be a useful reference book for researchers and graduate students working in these fields of mathematics.