Letters From Peking. Michael Richardson

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.