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OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES PEKING

10 JANUARY 1972 CR

We arrived late last night and the first Bag [diplomatic bag through which all our private correspondence came and went] goes tomorrow so I am scribbling this by the light of my plastic lamp and to the sound of a million lorries hooting their way through the dark streets of unlit bicycles. We are well but tired. A 22 hour flight from London to Hong Kong with no sleep. Three frenzied days in a very seductive-looking Hong Kong and then a day’s journey to do the 60 miles from HK to Canton. Our onward plane from Canton to Peking was cancelled so we were sent to the celebrated Dong Fang Hotel of grisly proportions and comforts. We had time the next day to wander round a zoo where we were more of an attraction than the animals, especially Jamie with his blonde hair. Four large Mao badges had been pinned to his jacket by the end of the morning. We eventually took off last afternoon in our Russian turboprop to the accompaniment all the way of revolutionary music and were served by a large red cheeked lady in khaki. Jamie stood up on his chair and said ‘One milkman, two milkmen’ and was then stunned into silence when he realized the whole plane was full of milkmen (i.e. men in caps). We are in a grim hotel for ten days. Very rough and very noisy but have been cheered by our flats which are cosy at least though they stand in a bleak compound with bare leafed trees and dirty snow. The Great Masses seem friendly too and Michael is delighted to be able to use his Chinese and to have a job at last.

I haven’t focused on Peking yet. It is too early for detailed impressions and I am a bit stunned. Jamie talks about you all the time and from here Christmas takes on magical proportions which indeed it was.

OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES PEKING

24 JANUARY 1972 MJR

We have now been two weeks in the Celestial City and yesterday moved from the Hsin Chiao Hotel to our flat in the Diplomatic compound. We share this habitat (in Chinese Wai Jiao Da Lou – literally Diplomatic Big Building) with people of varied races and creeds, from multitudinous Pakistani families, to squat Bulgars, graceful Africans and elegant French. It is heavily guarded by members of the People’s Liberation Army; no Chinese may enter without a proper pass from the authorities (at present the Peking Revolutionary Committee). The danger of contamination by such a concentration of foreign devils is thought to be very great. It is built round a huge rectangular space full of trees, bare earth and paths framed by the main block of flats (of Russian inspired monolithic pretentious ugliness unequalled in the western world). Our own flats are smaller, three storey blocks in the middle of this space. We are about a mile from the centre of Peking in a quartier where many embassy buildings are, including our own. It is at least quiet. Too much to hope that the flat should be even remotely adequately furnished but I will have to let Celia elaborate on that in her customary pithy way.

To re-cap a little on our journey, we crossed the border into China by foot from one train to another with a great sense of occasion; looked after faultlessly by China Travel who deal with all visitors from HK. We spent three hours going through customs, having lunch and hanging around waiting rooms full of thick chairs covered in anti-macassars. We reached Canton in a magnificent train only to find our flight to Peking had been cancelled. We rattled around in the desolate 800 bed Dong Fang hotel where the number of guests were 6. Jamie quickly became familiar with the large busts and photos of the Chairman, calling out Mao! excitedly whenever he sees one: to much good effect if people are looking on which they nearly always are. We are objects of great curiosity here.

We haven’t been able to leave Jamie much so we have been launched gently onto the diplomatic swings and roundabouts. It’s the cosmopolitan-ness that’s oddest. I was at lunch a few days ago with a Nepali, two Indians, an Egyptian, a Russian, a Canadian and a Scot. Last night I was with Swiss, French, Russian, Malian, Cameroonian and Algerian. I have called on my Chinese counterparts at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and they were very friendly. Everyone looks very proletarian since they all wear ill-fitting baggy jackets and trousers of blue cloth.

We haven’t seen much of Peking yet but there are many wonders. The Great Gate of Heavenly Peace [entrance to the Forbidden City] is awesome as is Tien An Men Square in front of it where one million people can gather. Behind the walls either side of the Gate, the parks and courtyards of the Forbidden City unfold one after another.

Foreigners are treated with caution and elaborate deference to the ludicrous extent that Chinese children back away when Jamie goes near them in the park to play. This is partly because they are frightened of him as a small foreign devil but also because they want him to have preferential treatment on the swings and slides.

Work is very good indeed but much of it. I do some reporting on internal Chinese affairs and deal with Sino-British relations. I am also H.M. Consul. A romantic title of dubious worth since it mostly involves signing birth certificates, issuing visas (breathtakingly complicated) and comforting 95-year-old British citizens, bedridden in places like Tientsin and Shanghai, who are the flotsam of the British in China.

J and C have had a difficult time adjusting to all the changes but now that we are under our own roof, if camping, things are easier. Our new Chargé [Chargé d’Affaires rather than ambassador for the reasons explained earlier] arrives early tomorrow and I must be up early to bow low at the station. It is a marvellous place. Great gleaming steam engines towing huge trains to Shanghai, Harbin, Ulan Bator and Moscow.

OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES PEKING

7 FEBRUARY 1972 CR

I am sitting at our dining table in the middle of the sitting room which the painters have just finished, surrounded by meagre pieces of furniture, and gazing out across the compound to a building opposite which looks not unlike a combination of Pentonville Prison and those Peabody Buildings with which I am so familiar. We have a wall around us and an armed guard at the gate. The buildings are grey but trees have been planted between them which should alleviate the drabness in the summer. This is our home for two years.

I will gloss over the journey which was as nightmarish as expected as far as Hong Kong. There we were warmly welcomed and had a lovely few restful days enjoying the place at its seductive best and seeing our few friends. Jamie was reunited with Ah Ling [the family’s amah when they lived in Hong Kong to learn Chinese] to whom he went with great joy and not a moment’s hesitation. We were there for four days and left from Kowloon station on Saturday morning very early on a 60-mile train journey which took us until late that afternoon. The Hong Kong train took us as far as Lo Wu, the border where we were escorted across the famous bridge to be greeted on the other side by smiling PLA guards in their green uniforms. We were taken to a clean and heavily anti-macassar’d waiting room, served with tea and then lunch, and finally taken to our train for the onward journey to Canton. The train was beautiful, and the countryside immediately resembled the landscapes of Chinese paintings one had tried so often to identify in Hong Kong without success.

We were due to take a plane immediately to Peking, but due to snow on the runway (or so we were told although there was in fact no snow in Peking that day) the flight was cancelled and we spent our first night in China in what must be the most desolate and terrible of hotels. Built by the Russians for 800 people and these days never having more than 12 guests. We were woken the next morning by revolutionary music and the hooting of lorries and filled in the time by visiting the local zoo, where we soon became more of an attraction than the animals. Parks and zoos are the main recreation source of the Great Masses – there is nothing else to do. Canton was a pretty city, but made drab by its buildings, and of course by the monotonous dress of the people, which however well one is prepared, comes as a shock. Every man and women in green or blue, and only the children adding a touch of colour here and there. The [revolutionary] posters and placards are another source of colour, dominating every street and building alongside huge pictures of the Chairman Mao. Our plane finally left late that afternoon after hours of inexplicable delay – a Russian Ilyushin turboprop (imagine my delight!) for 4 whole hours on a journey that would take a jet less than 2. No glamorous airhostesses here, just a huge fat rosy-cheeked girl in baggy trousers and the inevitable serge, serving us a truly disgusting meal of peanuts, sour bread, and sausage. Julia and Christopher Hum met us at the airport and we were taken to a slightly less horrific hotel than the one in Canton. It was good to see them. They are our upstairs neighbours now and have been a great help in all the confusion.

We were woken our first morning here at 5 am by the hooting lorries, and this continued every day for the fortnight we were in the hotel. Jamie screamed, I leapt from my bed to quieten him for fear he would wake the other people and was in and out of bed for the next two hours for the same purpose. There are few cars on the roads here, but literally millions of bicycles. None of them carry lights, which makes driving terribly hazardous, and produces this incessant hooting from lorries warning them of their approach. The noise begins in the dark and early dawn. Fortunately, the compound is quiet and that stage is past. My first impressions of Peking were of its flatness, greyness, the low buildings everywhere, the wide streets, the millions of people, and of course the dryness – so dry that each time you move to touch something or someone you receive a shock. My hands are already covered with sores, and I feel as though my face will crack in half when I smile. It is cold (about –10) but usually sunny too, so you get the clear crisp days reminiscent of the mountains.

Michael began work the very next day, leaving J and I to find our way around. Keeping J quiet and occupied in that hotel was my main obsession for two weeks. Not easy, but nothing to set beside other people who had been there for months and months. Julia was very kind and let us use her flat as a base. We borrowed a pushchair and spent an hour of each morning walking, and skating on the small ice-rink at the International Club. On one of the mornings we walked along Legation Street, past all the boarded and shuttered houses as far as Tien An Men Square, and saw for the first time the rooves of the Forbidden City shining in the sun. Michael returned for lunch and in the afternoon we would go to a park or have tea with someone in the Mission. There are no children of J’s age unfortunately, though I have since discovered some Canadians and Italians with two-year-olds. Julia gave a party for us to meet everyone else, about 40 people in all, a nice bunch including security guards, secretaries, wives and children, so we are a small group. I went to two wives’ coffee mornings and three dinner parties in that time. A baby-sitter came to the hotel and later turned up here as our appointed ayee. The parties were interesting – a complete mix of nationalities and Michael was able to use all his languages including Russian in one evening. A great bonus here is that everything ends by 11 and no lengthy drinking sessions beforehand either. I am so relieved and find I can manage much more as a result.

We moved into this flat the day our predecessors left. The painters came too, so we have been living in indescribable chaos with one plate and a knife between us. Anything is better than the hotel and J seems slightly more settled. I hope that once the painters go and his familiar things are unpacked he will be happier. He talks a lot about people at home and spent the first two weeks trying to identify familiar faces in the street. He cried for Ah Ling and still does because of course the faces are the same. It is so hard at this age to make them understand what is happening and why everything is so different and all the people he loved have gone. Dr Spock says never ever travel with a two-year old, and I can see why. It is agony for them and of course for us. His second birthday was rather sad. No presents and no party because there was nowhere to sit. But we found him a baby guitar which he loves and took him to the zoo, and I shall have a small tea for him as soon as I can. Our luggage has arrived and is being unpacked tomorrow, so at least I shall have the equipment even if there is no birthday cake.

The flat is quite pleasant, long and thin like a railway carriage, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, a small kitchen, storeroom and a good-sized living area. The furniture and curtains (where they exist) are abominable – every colour clashing and everything filthy. Pale grey carpets covered in stains, no cupboards at all in the kitchen, and everything designed to make the battle we wage against dust quite impossible. We were presented in our first week here with an ayee who has never worked for foreigners, doesn’t know how to use a broom, and is the only Chinese woman I have seen who is not naturally affectionate with children. We have now been given a huge elderly cook who has just spent three years on the Russian border and cannot in fact cook! Neither of them speak any English, and I spend more than half my day gesticulating wildly to show the one how to wash a floor and the other how to boil an egg. Half our clothes have already been ruined in the washing, and most of our meals are unpalatable. I could do the work in half the time myself, and would like to do the cooking, but there is nothing I can do. They are allocated to us by the Chinese Government and we are stuck with them for two years.

Michael walks to work from here in his full-length coat and fur hat. The office is five minutes away and just next door to the Residence [Chargé’s house] – newly-built and furnished in execrable taste. The new Chargé arrived last week. We went to Peking station to meet him and J saw his first steam engine. The Chargé is a tall impressive man, a bachelor, and was Counsellor here from 1952–55. So he is delighted to be back. Michael incidentally has a beautiful piece of parchment signed by The Queen appointing him to be her Consul in Peking, of which he is very proud. The office has a tennis court and small swimming pool attached, and we are very lucky in having a small commissariat which is run by the wives and provides us with most of life’s necessities. I buy the rest of our food in a market for foreigners. It is rather depressing being faced with a counter of quite unrecognisable pieces of meat and limp dirty veg, but everyone seems to eat quite well here so I expect I shall get used to it and develop a large repertoire of recipes for pork, like the others.

We are not restricted at all within the city, and can go wherever we like, if we are prepared to put up with the enormous crowds that gather to watch us ‘foreign devils’ each time we walk down a street. Outside Peking, only the Summer Palace and Ming Tombs are open for visiting without permission. If you wish to go anywhere else you have to apply and very often permission is refused. We have been inside the Forbidden City, which is glorious. Palace upon palace interspersed with courtyards all beautifully carved and painted. The Summer Palace, about four miles from the city, is lovely too. Curling rooves of temples and palaces cling to the hillside, and all around a lake on which we skated last Saturday, almost entirely alone. One could occupy many weekends there quite happily.

The Ming Tombs are a place for summer picnics, and the Great Wall of course is now open again, but we are waiting for our car before going so far afield. Jamie is a magnet wherever we go with his blond hair. The Chinese are fascinated by fair children and he always manages to collect pocketfuls of fruit and sweets wherever we go. I often take him in the afternoons to a little park – the Altar of the Sun – where there is a small playground. The children are terrified and unfriendly, immediately leaping off the swings or slides when he approaches. He couldn’t understand this, and it saddened me, but I was determined to persevere, and gradually some of them are accepting his invitation to join him on the see-saw and are getting used to him. Only the younger children though, who are not wholly immersed in anti-capitalist/imperialist propaganda. Once on a Saturday when the older children were out of school, one small boy dared to smile at J from the top of the slide. He was immediately marched off by an older boy, sat under a tree, and was read a lecture from the ‘little red book’ [The Thoughts of Chairman Mao]. No child dared come near us again that day, but we are winning through slowly. The older people are more relaxed, less apprehensive now, and there is a general warming towards foreigners. Many of the anti-imperialist slogans have been changed in the last week, and the street names are reverting to pre-revolution names. Shops are beginning to show their wares in their windows and paint their names on their fronts. All this for the benefit of Mr Nixon [US President about to visit]. They are a more attractive looking people than the Cantonese, bigger and taller, with more characterful faces, and the women, although often indistinguishable from the men, have pretty, round and cheerful faces. We see English newspapers about five days late, and letters only get to us once a fortnight. So you can imagine how we look forward to the Bag.

PS I think I am going to like it here.

OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES PEKING

21 FEBRUARY 1972 MJR

We are now rather more securely ensconsed in our flat than we were when Celia last wrote. We have organized the furniture and are almost at the picture-hanging stage. However, the painters are still with us, and until they go we shall not really feel the place belongs to us. Our fat cook [Lao Wang] improves by strides: he is jolly and friendly. We have sacked the ayee in an unprecedented move since we saw little point in continuing to employ someone who was so sour and did not seem to enjoy J. Not only that but she read me the editorial from the People’s Daily aggressively each morning as I emerged from the bedroom. This probably means that we shall have to wait weeks or months for another one. We have spent a nightmare time trying to fit all our accumulated junk into this tiny space: but with patience we shall make it quite habitable. But compound living is peculiarly isolating from the local environment. We sally forth on Wednesday afternoons and weekends and find Peking endlessly fascinating. It is such a strange mixture of the drab and the fabulous. We have now explored more of the Forbidden City, where in two draughty corridors is displayed the pick of the imperial porcelain collection (but no electric light so one has to go in daylight to see it!). Celia has been to see more of the treasures which are not normally open to the public, on a jaunt of the kind that the Diplomatic Corps is occasionally invited to at a few hours’ notice. But I was duty officer at the Embassy that week so could not go. They have some very lovely things indeed. And set among the golden-rooved palace complex the effect is stunning. The main throne room is in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and all barbarians tremble and obey.

We have consorted with an ever-wider selection of our diplomatic colleagues: our contact with the Chinese remains limited to interviews and occasional banquets. Crowds collect round us wherever we go in the city but any attempt at talking merely frightens them away: more so does the use of cameras, though using J as a decoy I have been able to take some film. We have explored shops where the masses shop: goods on display are fairly functional and unexciting – much as one would expect in a developing socialist economy. But basic consumer goods like radios, cameras, watches etc. are all available at a high price and are eagerly bought. It is still amazing to see the crowds in these places all uniformly in the ubiquitous blue baggy outfits or People’s Liberation Army (PLA) khaki. Their curiosity for Foreign Devils seems endless. So does ours for them: and it is a continuing source of frustration that opportunities for contact are so few.

I am greatly immersed in my work, leaving poor Celia to carry the brunt of making life tolerable at home and keeping an often-bored Jamie happy. We do not go out in the evening as often as in Hong Kong, which is a blessing: and at the moment we can do little entertaining. The British community as we said before is nice. There are plenty of other nationalities, and we are gradually getting to know some of them. But by force of circumstance we are limited to the diplomatic community and the few resident journalists. We had three of my consular flock here last week for three days: the two managers (one plus wife) of the Hong Kong and Shanghai and the Chartered Banks in Shanghai. The Chinese will not let them out until each has a replacement, so that in effect they are hostages for their two Banks’ continued presence in China (both want to close their offices but cannot). They live a miserable life in Shanghai – in great houses but with no recreation at all. They may never leave the city, in which almost no other foreigners reside, except at the spring festival – hence their being in Peking last week and can – only since last September – eat out at only one restaurant. The Chinese ignore them entirely. So their yearly outing to Peking is a great treat and we spent our own holiday giving them the sort of ‘good time’ that Peking, as opposed to Shanghai, allows!

My work involves three main strands: consular – mostly visas, passports, and white Russian refugees: Sino-British (and Hong Kong) relations: and as much China internal reporting as I have time for. This is a wide brief which keeps me extremely busy. But it is one of the most exciting jobs in the Mission so I am extremely happy to be busy. I have recently been involved in a series of negotiations with the Minister in the Chinese Foreign Office responsible for Western Europe and America. He is ultra-suave (he led the Chinese delegation to the UN when they were first seated) and positively Olympian in his dealings with foreign barbarians. One is made to feel very small (although he is personally charming) and tributary.

I have attended two official ‘banquets’. These are lavish affairs to which one is invited at a day’s notice (and have to throw up everything else) where you sit at a table of almost totally silent Chinese who seem horror-struck that you should want to speak, even in their own language. You toast each other endlessly in fiery rocket-fuel (the local hooch called mao tai) and say nice things about ‘eternal friendship and satisfactory cooperation’. Small talk is limited to the fog in London (why is this an obsession with all foreigners?), where one learnt Chinese, and one’s family. At the worst of the two I was seated between a representative of the People’s Insurance Company (which only insures foreign goods belonging to people whose government is not beneficent enough to take losses as a write-off against the state) and a man from the Chinese Fine Arts Corporation who, I was told as a joke, painted signs, and that was in fact more-or-less what he did. We had a lot in common! The better one was a sort of dîner intime for the new Chargé d’Affaires given by high-ups in the Chinese Foreign Office. This was rather more relaxed and I was able to have a sustained argument in philosophy on marxist and non-marxist concepts of truth! Otherwise I talk feverishly to other diplomats and journalists and garner small quantities of knowledge on this amazing place. The Chinese have lost none of their historical disdain for foreigners, and here one is never allowed to forget it. But it is strangely impressive, provided one does not kow-tow too much in return.

And now today I must report a strange event. According to news reaching us from foreign countries, someone who calls himself President of some country called America has arrived in the Celestial City. We have heard little of this man except that as ‘chief boss of the imperialists’ he is extremely bad and commits terrible crimes against the peoples of the world (who are always heroic and win ever greater victories). But according to foreign news he is not all that bad, and is himself fighting all sorts of bad people in the name of freedom and democracy. So we are greatly confused. Anyway according to foreign news – the BBC which is said to come 10,000 li from England, called in this language ‘the brave country’ I don’t know why – he was to arrive in this city to-day. My wife, your respectful daughter and daughter-in-law, dressed herself in a smart suit for the occasion, and I left my office on what has now come to be known as a Nixon-hunt! Only we took no guns: only ourselves and cameras. What is extraordinary is that when other Important Foreign Personages (or Devils as we call them) come to the Celestial City to kow-tow before the Dragon Throne, several hundred thousand of our citizens are ordered into the streets and particularly into the great square in front of the residence of our Emperor to welcome them. On this occasion no such thing happened. All we saw was a long line of black cars, made by Number 1 Shanghai Motor Steam Car Factory of glorious memory, which passed by the glories of our city at great speed; one had flying from it two very small flags – that of our country and another with stars and stripes, very vulgar. We must presume that this [car] contained this man. To register this extraordinarily insignificant event in the life of our country many strange foreign newspapermen came and set up strange devices all over the city. And when the cars had passed they threw up their hands and said ‘They’re not going to believe this back home!’ and laughed, though at what I cannot say.

That, so far, is the Nixon visit: you will have seen much more of it at home than we do here. The Chinese have taken elaborate pains to make no display at all – he has come as a private citizen [this was because there were at this time no diplomatic relations between the US and China – the US still recognized the government of Taiwan as the lawful government of China]. We rely for scanty reports on what is happening on a few friendly journalists, who have much more access than we!

All this must seem rather rarified when you are on very restricted electricity and suffering innumerable hardships. We on the other hand have overpoweringly centrally-heated flats and endless good things to eat and drink. It is hard to imagine the problems caused by a major power strike but they must be very great.

I must finish this to catch the bag which leaves tomorrow and send you all our love. The winter shows signs of ending; it is no longer so bitterly cold. More thrilling instalments soon.

OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES PEKING

5 MARCH 1972 CR

Such is the time lag between all our letters that I have lost track and cannot remember when I last wrote but it seems an age. Daddy’s of the 19th posted direct reached us on the morning of the 28th and Mummy’s of the 16th via the Bag reached us on the 28th too along with all our others for that fortnight. There is a certain excitement in having post only once every two weeks – it’s just like Christmas when it comes! Some parcels arrived a few days before that too with a hand knitted jersey for J from Sybil and two more Beatrix Potter for him from Jonny and a book from his godmother Sue, so his birthday excitements seem to have been lasting for weeks.

J is asleep, M is busy clearing up the debris from last night’s festivities at the Office, a gambling evening for 150 people with the theme Guys and Dolls for which we had to wear suitable costumes. We managed to make a lot of money to help towards the new Club which we are all building and decorating with our own hands and it was quite entertaining watching half Peking’s diplomatic community huddled over roulette tables. They all enjoyed it enormously and one can’t help feeling a certain pride as the British are the only Mission who ever organize anything at all and it requires quite a lot of hard work and imagination to get the thing going. But not a single other Embassy ever do anything and it becomes rather wearying when they all depend on us to provide social distractions here without contributing anything in return. Anyway I am still cross-eyed from handing out chips all night and my lips smarting from their first covering of scarlet lipstick for many years. It is the second time we’ve been required to wear fancy dress since we arrived and I already feel my very tiny supply of artistic imagination in that direction has been thoroughly used up!

It is a gorgeous day with the sun pouring into our flat and the outside growing less cold. Buds on the trees which any moment now will burst into leaf. The trees here are one of Peking’s loveliest aspects. The roads are all lined with them and the parks and zoos very heavily planted too. I know too little about botany to know what they all are but of course the willow is everywhere and the crooked fir you see in all the pictures and a type of silver birch and poplars along the roadside.

Last weekend we drove up to the Great Wall. It took about two hours through quite beautiful country framed all the time by the Western Hills which are still out of bounds. Glorious muted colours of brown fields, bare trees, small villages, hundreds of donkeys and oxen pulling carts, and eventually the cragged mountains up which we climbed until we hit the wall. No wonder it is a Wonder of the World – built in the 5th century BC it straggles across over 2,000 miles of mountain ranges and is wide enough for carts to be driven along the top. The communists have restored a small section of it for tourists but standing on one of the look-out posts you can see it stretching away in both directions as far as the eye can see. It really is magnificent and I suppose J is the youngest English child to have seen it which is something of a record!

On the domestic front we are hardly any further on than we were when I last wrote. The painters left yesterday and we are mighty glad to see them go. Our pictures are hung but no curtains and piles of possessions still lie about the flat. J’s room is complete, hung with Jonny’s Christmas Beatrix Potter pictures and he seems much happier as a result. He has a tank of goldfish too to keep him company. I have established that the French school here will take him as soon as he is potty-trained which I am afraid looks a long way off still. But it is a comfort to think there is a chance to mix with children of his own age when the time comes. He really has undergone quite a transformation in the last week, and I hardly dare mention it in case it is a temporary phase! He is consistently merry and gay! Lots of laughter and lots of chat goes on all day which is such a relief! I think that the fact that he can talk more-or-less properly now has removed some of the frustrations but most of all I think he feels secure and settled for the first time for many months. I wish you could all see something of him now because he really does seem to have a sweet and loving personality and I think these two years are when small boys are at their best. He grows more and more like Benjy to look at every day and of course talks about you all endlessly, sitting for hours poring over photos taken on our leave. Another great advance is that he loves books and we have half an hour reading time before bed each night and he spends a lot of each day looking at them too. So things are looking up and I feel a million times better as a result. Michael is going off to Tientsin on Wednesday to visit some of his flock and he continues to be very busy. He has been in on The Negotiations [to establish full diplomatic relations] since he arrived and has enjoyed meeting all the high ups in the Chinese Foreign Office and they in turn are very impressed by his youth and command of the language! We have lunched once with the Chargé [John Addis] and dined for the first time with him last night. He is rather austere. He has taken us round all the Commission Shops [where a limited selection of antiques are on sale] but there is nothing there to buy anymore and as he possesses the best collection of Chinese porcelain in the world he is very fussy. The absence of a wife and family make him rather insensitive to all our problems here and as the Head of Chancery is a bachelor too we are left very much without guidance or help.

Since writing the above all has been settled and by the time you read this you’ll know that we exchange ambassadors on Monday. It’s exciting for M to feel he is really making history and he and Richard Samuel [Head of Chancery] are spending all week with their two Chinese counterparts finalising the agreement. An impasse of over twenty years has been resolved and although as a cynic I do not see what difference it is going to make to anyone I suppose it’s a step in the right direction. Mr Addis anyway is pleased – he retires in two years and it has been his life’s ambition to be the first ambassador to Peking.

The ambassador to Ulan Bator has been here for a few days with his wife and children and we entertained them to tea yesterday – J in his element with a two and three year old to play with and we received the news [about the agreement] round the tea table when M dashed in to collect some champagne – probably the only celebration we shall have! My life continues to be full of toil as I am ayee-less and find the cleaning, washing and ironing in this dust ridden city a full-time task. I have had to give up my Chinese lessons and everything else but I hope it won’t last for long. Added to this is the fact that once again I am having trouble with my insides and I simply couldn’t believe it was possible that within four weeks of being in China I was being upturned on a table and gazed at by a fierce lady in blue serge in the Anti-Imperialist Hospital to boot! I started having severe pains in my tum one day after having spent the day before lugging heavy pieces of furniture around. I always remember Daddy refusing to let me carry heavy weights and muttering about my womb, but unless you do the work yourself here no one else will and I didn’t see what harm could be done. However the pains continued and the nurse thought I ought to be looked at much to my despair. They couldn’t find anything and I think I must have strained myself as they are slowly easing – though not fast enough with all the floor scrubbing and bending I have to do. The cook is a merry soul and as we have discovered that he has spent seven years with the Mongolians and six with the Russians it is small wonder his culinary powers are limited – I think when I have time he will be willing the learn some simple English dishes. We loved your letters about the power cuts and all your trials. Alas there are no tourist handouts here Mummy, and nothing at all along the lines the stuff you saw in the Communist shops in HK. The book shops contain nothing but the works of Mao, Lenin and Marx and thousands of propaganda pamphlets in Chinese – a few translations of Plato, Descartes and other western philosophers have appeared too in the last few weeks but they are snatched up the second they are put on the shelves. I’ll get you some things when we go down to HK for our mid-tour leave.

THE BRITISH EMBASSY PEKING

18 MARCH 1972 MJR

For beleaguered diplomats in the Celestial City this last has been quite a month. We have had the visit of the imperialist boss Nixon and Britain and China have finally agreed after 22 years to exchange ambassadors. In an otherwise rather quiet city, two such events in such close succession are a great strain, and even veteran members of the foreign community have been seen to be suffering from the effects of so much drama.

The Nixon visit which I started to report in my last letter started as it meant to go on. All diplomats were excluded from everything with the result that incredibly we did not clap eyes on the man, nor on his éminence grise, Kissinger, who is brilliantly suited to such an adventure. After chasing his car for the first day or two we gave up, and thereafter relied on journalists for reports of what was going on. However, although the diplomatic community had squeezed the juice of very many sour grapes, it has nevertheless been a momentous occasion. The front page of the People’s Daily of 27 February must have been the most sensational issue ever: pictures of Nixon meeting Mao and also greeting Chou En-lai at the airport. Thereafter you will have seen much more than we on your television screens. One of the ironies however is that the welcome etc. was so subdued that our impression was that the immense array of commentators did not have enough to say and were reduced to padding for hours of the television spectacular. Certainly in Tien An Men Square that Monday when Nixon arrived, the camera crewmen, on seeing the minimal reception, exclaimed ‘they’re not going to believe this’. There are many legends already about Nixon’s reaction when told by walkie talkie by his secret service men on the ground as the plane came into land that there was no crowd. There are many epic stories of the visit, some of which you will have read in the mileage of newsprint. My favourite is when Walter Cronkite, who is apparently America’s most famous commentator, was covering Nixon’s visit at the Great Wall and broadcasting live. It was snowing and exceedingly cold. He suddenly put his hand over the microphone and exclaimed ‘goddammit the batteries in my electric socks just ran out’ and then went on broadcasting.

The banality of Nixon and his wife’s clichés surpassed belief! But perhaps they go down well in America. For all the absurdities it was a serious event and for fair reasons or foul has at least introduced a sense of reality into the relations of two major powers. The barbarians have been seen to kow-tow before the Dragon Throne. My favourite photograph is of Nixon eagerly greeting an impassive Chou En-lai as if to say ‘would you like to buy this car? We saw a little of the American journalists who covered the visit and who were housed in the Minorities Hotel which was immediately christened The Running Dog Hilton [the Chinese called the Americans and their allies ‘Imperialists and their Running Dogs’]. They had about 17 passes issued to them by the Chinese to get into their hotel and one had to give a password into the telephone if one wanted to speak to them. It was not clear who was being kept from whom.

Needless to say the visit has dominated Peking small talk ever since: a great bore, but an interesting commentary on the different nationalities here. The Russians profess that it is a good thing, in sharp contrast to their propaganda from Moscow. When taxed with this discrepancy they disarmingly say ‘you should not believe all our propaganda’.

The other main event has been our own exchange of ambassadors, meaning that this is your first letter from the British Embassy in Peking. ‘What’s in a name,’ said Shakespeare, and you may well ask. There is little to get euphoric about until we see the Chinese being less beastly to British citizens (4 still detained without trial for 5 years, and 3 not allowed to leave China), and other concrete proofs of the new ‘friendship’ which we all keep toasting each other about and welcoming. The agreement was signed after nearly a year’s hard negotiating last Monday, and we were afterwards entertained to dinner by the Minister who had handled the talks, the ultra-smooth Chiao Kuan-hua. It was a very amicable evening held, as was the signing, in the former embassy of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now a Foreign Office guest house, and rather fine; except that the exquisitely proportioned rooms were decorated by horrendous furniture. Much mao tai was drunk to celebrate the ‘developing relations between our two countries’ (what does this phrase really mean I wonder?) An interesting illustration of the Chinese mind was that during the dinner I casually said (because conversation at these affairs is hard going) that I thought it was a poor show that Roman Catholic foreign devils should be allowed to worship here and not Protestants (the oldest catholic church dating from the 15th century has recently been opened and mass celebrated for foreigners and a few showpiece ancient Chinese by a priest belonging to the rump of the Catholic Church who have severed links with Rome). The official nearest to me replied I thought rather impressively to the effect that he didn’t understand the complications of the Christian religion: one church was open and celebrating – wouldn’t that do? Why did I need a different one? So I thought no more about it – it had been a conversational gambit anyway. However, the next day Protocol Department (of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) rang us and a man present at the dinner said he hoped we had not taken anything amiss and would we please submit a list of those who wished to go to church and appropriate arrangements would be made. So there may be provision for our souls after all.

Anyway, we now have a rather obviously temporary and hastily-erected sign outside the office saying British Embassy in Chinese and English; we have none of the right stationary or stamps; Mr Addis is delirious – it is what he most wants; our Chinese staff are rather proud and suddenly chatty. But revolutionary vigilance is still around. The weather has turned warmer and the PLA guards on our office and living compound have now changed from fur hats to caps. I greeted cheerily the ones at the office and said ‘is it nice to be wearing summer hats?’ They were absolutely horrified and exchanged panic-stricken glances, since they appear only to be trained how to cope with the courteous ‘how are you?’ which we usually greet them with.

On the entertainment field we have been to sundry dinner parties and been suitably amazed at how the enormous number of different nationalities behave. Also the British have given a party (our parties are by far the most famous and popular in Peking) – this time a gambling evening at which I was the croupier for Roulette. We had blackjack, roulette, bingo and a couple of other things; maximum stake the equivalent of two and a half pence, and we fleeced the diplomatic community of about £80. It was most amusing.

We have now visited the Great Wall, really an astonishment – snaking over great mountains for 2,500 miles; a beautiful drive for 60 miles out of Peking (one of only 2 roads on which you are allowed out of the city, and even on them you are not allowed to stop – the ambassador was arrested for two and a half hours the other day for stopping to look at a 15th century bridge, and lectured on the Chinese government’s graciousness in letting foreigners out of Peking to see the Wall and the Ming Tombs). The Wall faces the northern plains and you drive through wild gorges 40 miles out of Peking. At the Wall it is cold: the wind blows from Siberia and one can believe oneself at the pale of civilisation, which is what the Wall was for until the Manchu conquest of 1644. It was started in 400 BC and is a marvel. The Valley of the Ming Tombs, a great valley among the same stupendous mountains, is where all the Ming Emperors, except one, are buried. There are 13 tombs scattered over a huge valley; 5 have been restored and draw great crowds; the setting of all of them is stupendous. The remainder are decrepit and isolated, and one can picnic in them among sheep and wild shrubs – the furthest one can get from humanity in Peking. But one is guarded all the time by a little man on a motorbike who appears as soon as you park your car. And you are not allowed to leave the immediate area of the tomb (a small enclosed corral) to climb in the mountains. We went there the other day for a picnic with some French friends and if we can go to that fabulous valley every Sunday we shall never be bored.

I went to Tientsin, leaving Peking for the first time, on a consular visit to see two elderly British citizens who live pathetically there. We had to catch a train at 6.30 am, having been checked for travel permits, passes, and foreigners’ registration by the Public Security Bureau in a procedure which makes travelling anywhere an awful nuisance (if you wish to travel anywhere you apply a week in advance and have top check in everywhere you go). We travelled (Richard Samuel, the Head of Chancery, and I) in the Peking–Tientsin local train, and travelled ‘hard’ as opposed to ‘soft’ (there are 2 classes of travel in China), along with the ‘masses’ who were most amazed. Tientsin was quite different from Peking. It was, as our guide explained, a ‘semi-colonial and semi-feudal society’ before the Revolution; at any rate it was a real city with high buildings (albeit of unrelieved hideousness) in contrast to Peking with its more attractive low Chinese houses and courtyards. We saw the old ladies who came out of some weird novel. One lived alone, deaf, with a speech impediment, with no Chinese (though she had never left China in her life), in a flat full of Victorian bric-a-brac, and scrupulously clean, unbelievable in modern China. However, she was entirely compos, very sprightly, and lived on memories of Shanghai where she was brought up. It was really very odd. The other was Chinese by birth, married to an Englishman, long since dead, with a son in Britain who maintains only the most desultory contact with his mother. Her case is more pathetic because she is ostracised by her former Chinese friends for being a ‘foreigner’ and is paralyzed, so helpless. They were pathetically glad to see us. Curiosity about foreign devils in Tientsin reaches such proportions that it is almost impossible to move openly in the streets. I now know the meaning of real crowding. We were due to catch the Mukden Express back to Peking, thundering across Manchuria; but it thundered rather slowly because it was an hour or more late and Richard and I whiled away the time in a former Austrian patisserie, which is about the nearest you can get to a café in China. Much to our guide’s discomfiture (foreigners are invariably sat in separate rooms in hotels, restaurants etc) we sat in the main café part and had a coffee and watched the world go by. This must seem so ridiculously trivial to you that it must be hard to believe that this is hard to achieve in China.