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.
