Passport to Peking by Wright Patrick

Author:Wright, Patrick. [Wright, Patrick.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-07-17T03:01:16+00:00

17

Popeyed among the Tibetans: The

Undiplomatic Rapture of the

Cultural Delegation

‘There it sits . . . four square, ruled and patterned, bang in the

middle of a sepia landscape.’1 It was ‘the colour of milk chocolate’

and seemed ‘as self-assured and inexplicable as a dog biscuit on a

beach’. Seeing no river ford, harbour, or mountain pass that

might explain Peking’s position on the North China plain, the

airborne Hugh Casson portrays himself wondering ‘Why is it

there and not somewhere else?’ In truth, he already knew the

answer from the Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen, whose

study Towns and Buildings (1949) opens by evoking Peking as a

temple city that owed its position to necromancy and ritual rather

than to ‘common-sense’ or the demands of trade.2

By the time the plane landed outside this fabulous settlement

where ‘the ideal city became reality’,3 every member of the cultural delegation surely understood why Stanley Spencer had likened

them, as they braced themselves to walk out into the streets of

‘grey despairing Prague’, to death-watch beetles trapped in their

boreholes and condemned only to go forward. It was Friday,

24 September and the six exhausted men peered out of the fuse-

lage to see a guard of honour waiting with a dais and even a brass

band. Their leader, Professor Leonard Hawkes, muttered in disbe-

lief and, so Casson also claims, ‘vanity and alarm’ shuffl ed for

supremacy as the rumpled cultural luminaries straightened their

ties and prepared to step out into the blinding light. A. J. Ayer

would turn the moment of disembarkation into a mock-heroic

joke centred on himself. Claiming to have been fi rst to emerge,

he was ‘astonished to hear a band playing and to see what

I thought I recognized as the leaders of the Chinese Government

waiting to greet us’.4 As he began to step down, however, ‘the

band stopped playing, the dignitaries retreated, and our aero-

plane was hastily shunted to a remote corner of the aerodrome

Popeyed among the Tibetans

305

where fi ve men in horn-rimmed spectacles stood waving small

union jacks’. Two planes, it seemed, had arrived in the wrong

order: ‘We had usurped the place of the Rumanian Government’s

delegation.’

It’s an amusing story, which would surely go down well over

lunch at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street after Ayer returned to

London. It also disregards the facts as recorded by other observers.

‘Brilliant Sunshine’, wrote Rex Warner, whose diary records that

a band and troops were indeed on hand to welcome the ‘Ruma-

nian Parliamentary delegation’ and also that the British cultural

delegation were in fact met on board their plane by members of

a committee who treated them with ‘the greatest courtesy’. After

descending into their own more modest ‘battery of cameras’5

they sipped politely offered lemonade in a newly decorated

reception room and were then driven into Peking, their cars

raising the same dust as the Attlee delegation’s had done a month

or so earlier. No doubt they also passed the ‘endless rows of

donkey carts’ that the Birkbeck physicist J. D. Bernal, who had

landed in Peking only one day earlier, found ‘very reminiscent of

Ireland’. 6

Casson looked out to see blindfolded donkeys circling endlessly

around wells, and cabbage fi elds that ‘surged’ right up to the

‘new factories and offi ce blocks crystallising behind their bamboo

scaffolding’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.