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• First Person - Douglas Hurd
Douglas Hurd spent two years in Beijing in the mid-1950s, at a time when the British Embassy was in the Legation quarter. Here, he recalls another place in another age.
It felt like living on a different planet. We were, of course, connected by diplomatic wireless with London, but everything else took weeks. We were advised to take two years' supply of razor blades and toothpaste; much of our food and drink came up by steamer from Hong Kong.
Five years into the revolution we caught fading glimpses of the old China and began to guess what the new would be like. A few elderly British couples and forlorn businessmen still lived and tried to do business in the old treaty ports. It was part of my own job to look after them in their many troubles with the authorities. A few British communists and fellow travellers came out to sing the praises of Chairman Mao. Just a handful of daring businessmen, including The 48 Group, began to test the prospects of trade with the new regime.
The British staff was small and nowhere near filled the old compound in the Legation quarter where we lived. We read how the Boxers had besieged the compound 50 years earlier, but the painted inscription "lest we forget" on the outside wall had already been scrubbed out. Most of us lived in bungalows with verandas painted in scarlet set among lawns and splendid trees. The sparrows of Beijing liked our trees too, and this caused us trouble when the city authorities declared war on them for eating precious grain. Young pioneers with red scarves demanded the right to enter the compound and attack the wicked sparrows. We resisted, and to our surprise the point was not pressed.
Our position in those early years was certainly precarious. We were not a proper embassy. Although Britain under the Labour government had been among the first to recognise the new China, we had supported America in the Korean War and were not allowed full status. Our dealings with the Chinese authorities were at a low level, usually short and bad-tempered. There were occasional notes of protest one way and another, usually because of happenings on the border with Hong Kong.
Gradually the situation improved. Anthony Eden arr-anged with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference in 1954 that Humphrey Trevelyan should be accepted as the head of a proper diplomatic office, although not yet a full embassy. Our coming in from the cold was marked in a very Chinese way. We received invitations to a performance of the State Circus, and the colour of our identity cards was changed. Soon after we received our first VIP visitors in the form of the leader of the opposition, Clement Attlee, and Aneurin Bevan.
The most spectacular events of these years were the two great annual parades in front of the Forbidden City – on May Day for the workers and on October I for the Chinese Revolution and in particular the armed forces. The huge size and precision of the parades were impressive. Even more memorable was the sight of Chairman Mao, a small figure above the huge portrait of himself, on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. When the parade was over he moved slowly to one end of the long platform and then to the other. Each time he doffed his cap and presented himself to the roaring crowd below I felt that he was honouring, not just the revolution, but a much longer tradition at that very place, when the Emperor celebrated spring and autumn in recognition of the Mandate of Heaven.
Although diplomatic life in Beijing was cheerful enough, it was highly constrained and we spent most of our time trying to get out of the capital into the wider China. This meant long negotiation with the bureaucracy and a much-practised game by which one applied for a visit to, say, six places in the hope of getting four. I was lucky in being allowed to visit the traditional British consulate-generals from Kunming and Chongqing down the Yangtze to Hankou. We were not allowed to sell these highly prestigious buildings, nor to sack the staff who looked after them. But at least in 1955 I was allowed to go and check that they were still there. By then I had learned enough Mandarin to travel by myself.
Reading and writing was a different business and I was slowed down in this by the way in which the authorities were altering the characters month by month. They simplified by reducing the number of strokes in each character; but after I had learned say a dozen characters in advance of my next lesson it was disheartening to read in the People's Daily that in future each was to be quite different! At the end of my tour, with great difficulty, I got permission to climb the holy mountain Taishan in Shandong province along with Alan Donald, who was a language student at the time. Thirty-five years later Alan and I climbed Taishan again, this time as foreign secretary and ambassador. The Chinese humoured our strange wish but provided stretcher bearers in case these two eccentric old gentlemen should collapse during the climb.
My main pleasure of those days however was walking in the hills around Beijing. In those days the city hardly sprawled outside its walls and there was no pollution. As we explored the passes and valleys of the Western Hills we had to rely on old maps. We might find that a temple had been transformed into a barracks full of suspicious soldiers. Spring and autumn were best, spring because of the blossom in the valleys, autumn because of the astonishing clarity of the unvarying sunshine.
My favourite place was the valley of the Ming tombs before it was vandalised by the Red Guards and then restored. On an autumn evening the orange persimmons hung from bare trees and the peasants worked in the fields until the frost began to bite into their quilted jackets. We would picnic in one of the deserted tombs and walk round the valley until the sun began to set, then down through the stone avenue of beasts and warriors clasping their swords.
In the modern China these and many other revivals from the past are preserved and displayed to visitors. But they take second place to the extraordinary development of recent years now that Beijing has become the capital of a great power, Shanghai an amazing financial centre and Guangdong province a factory for the whole world. I can understand the excitement of this transformation; but I am glad to have spent two years when the old China was still much more visible than the new.
Lord Hurd served in the office of the British charge d'affaires, Beijing, 1954-56. He was secretary of state for foreign affairs between 1989 and 1995.
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