Frances Wood

Frances Wood interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 15th January 2016
0:04:16 Born in Clapton, London in 1948; my mother's family seem to have come from the Welsh border area, they had shoe shops and were Quakers and Methodists, quite important people in places like Leominster and so on; my father's family were Catholics; his mother was Irish, Ryan, known as "Limerick Jim" as a child because she was a tom-boy; there was a nice complication in that family as they were mixed in with Bernals, who were Sephardic Jews who had come to Ireland and converted to Catholicism; one of the things I remember from childhood was having one grandmother and grandfather who were very plain and Methodist, and on the other side were Catholic; they went to very different churches if they were staying with us which was confusing; I think it made me an observer of inter-cultural exchanges; I remember my Methodist grandmother flouncing out of a church when incense was produced; I can't say it drew me into religion but it did leave me fascinated by the difficulties it produces; my father's father died when he was quite young; he was a solicitor in County Durham, and had gone to hospital for some simple operation and got tetanus as a result; he left a widow with three young children; we knew Granny Wood and I liked her very much; she was a gentle character and very good-looking, but we had more to do with my mother's parents; Granny Wood lived in Durham and I remember going up with my father on the Pullman train to see her and various aunts; my mother's parents lived in Reading so we saw more of them; they were very good people but quite boring; my father, who was a very intellectual character, when they came for Christmas would pray that it wouldn't snow so they would not have an excuse to stay; only a little of them was enough for him; my father was fascinated by everything and very witty; he went to Oxford on a scholarship, studied French, and was thinking of doing research in Medieval French; he didn't do so but went instead to the British Museum as a French specialist; this was before the War, at a time when they still lit coal fires in the offices in the morning, and some people still wore wing collars; he worked all his life in the British Museum library, working his way up through the administrative levels, in order to keep a family; he ended up as Head of the Department of Printed Books; I think he was a very good administrator; I was very touched when I was working in the British Library when he died, that so many said that my father had been so wonderful with people and treated them all exactly the same, making no distinction between a Cabinet Minister and a cleaner; I think he was quite depressed when he retired but two years after retirement he went back to the British Museum Library to work on a big cataloguing project called The Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, because he knew where all the little caches of C18 books were; the library was an oddment as far as organization was concerned, but as he had worked there for so long he knew where things were; he worked with a team of young people and he absolutely adored it and was fantastically happy doing scholarly work with books; my mother was not quite the first generation of her family to go to university; her father had started medical training but that was interrupted by the First World War; he became a pilot in the Flying Corps and eventually a prisoner-of-war; when he came back his wife had already had their first child and he felt he could not carry on studying; my mother also did French at university; my parents met after the War but because of it, because both of them had been in Bletchley; my father was seconded as a linguist from the British Museum and my mother was in the WRENs; she acted as secretary to Angus Wilson who had also been at the British Museum Library, and was a great friend of my father; after the War he introduced them at one of his many parties

8:52:04 My father had a small circle of very close friends; he was very witty; I used to enjoy family suppers; I had one brother who was two years younger than me, and supper was a time of laughter; my mother was not as witty and I think she felt a little left out of conversations like that, but was fantastically energetic; my father was quite happy reading but my mother was always wanting to be doing things; she is now ninety-three and is unstoppable; she is very small and wiry although not speeding around quite as fast as she used to as her balance is not as good; she gave up any idea of a career when I was born so was a housewife and mother for about ten years; she then trained as a teacher and taught, first in Primary schools, then Secondary schools teaching French; I think she quite enjoyed it and it was a good thing as she wasn't the sort of person who would be happy doing nothing all day; I have two early memories of sunshine in the back garden; we lived in a little house in East Finchley with a tiny but nice garden with a swing at the bottom which we changed to a trapeze when we got older; my memory is of being in the garden on a sunny Sunday morning, with nobody else there, and me hanging upside down on the trapeze; I was probably about six at the time; I have another memory of being in hospital surrounded by brightly coloured bowls; when I was two I managed to climb out of my cot onto the top of a wardrobe where there were some aspirins, and I ate them; I was rushed to hospital and stomach pumped, and I think the bowls were there in the hope that I might be sick; I remember them as coloured but they must have been white enamel with a blue stripe; what I probably remember is the panic in others and me absolutely failing to understand what the panic was about

12:53:13 We first went to a nursery school called Brookfields in Highgate where my mother taught for a bit; it was a privately run kindergarten which I didn't much enjoy; I remember they used to put the little bottles of milk that we got in front of the gas fire to warm them, and warmed milk was absolutely horrible; I went to Highgate Primary after that; it was not actually the nearest school and we had to get a bus, but my parents chose it because the Headmistress was a progressive teacher who was a member of the Labour Party, and that was terrible important to them; Mrs Jobson was a very nice woman and I think she was quite enlightened for the 50s; I didn't like the Infants' year as I remember having to wear a blazer which was much too big for me, but also the food, which was ghastly; there were evil dinner ladies who would just make you eat everything; they would stand over you until you learnt very quickly to cram your food into your blazer pocket to make it look as though you had eaten it; my brother made a similar fuss about school lunches and because he was always indulged, he was allowed to go back to Brookfields for lunch; books were my complete and utter passion; I can remember engaging with one of the second-hand bookshops on the Archway Road to sell books that I'd read so that I could buy more books; I played a lot with dolls and liked making clothes for them; my brother and I had very complicated games together; we were quite good friends and used to play games which involved building cities all over the sitting room floor; we would put the piano stool upside down and that was Battersea Power Station; my mother says that we used to speak in horrible squeaky voices for our little people; my parents were terribly good at steering me towards books at the right sort of age; I remember reading Gosse Father & Son and Lark Rise to Candleford and Raverat's Period Piece about 11-12; we read Rudyard Kipling but weren't allowed Enid Blyton or comics, but I read Noel Streatfield; I still like Just William; I remember going to a children's exhibition at Olympia to meet Anthony Buckeridge and get him to sign my book; I remember listening to Children's Hour on the radio where they talked about Ernest Shepherd's memoirs, and going out specially to buy that; I suppose I read quite a lot of biography and factual stuff; I liked Arthur Ransome except for the pictures which I thought were terrible; I remember being ill once and one of them read to me, and that was much more satisfying than having to avoid the pictures yourself

19:23:00 I went on to North London Collegiate school; in those days you did the 11+; I went to the City of London Girls School as well for interview but in those days it had to be by scholarship given by the Girls Public Day-School Trust; I remember City of London as utterly dismal; the school was then on the banks of the Thames but there was nowhere to play and at the middle of the day you just went down to a basement surrounded by radiators and boilers where there was one table-tennis table, which I thought was no fun at all; North London Collegiate was in a great grassy area surrounded by fields, so I went there; it is between Edgware and Stanmore in a very nice old house, Cannons, which was the home of the Duke of Chandos for whom Handel was music master; part of it was this very beautiful old house with a new bit stuck on with fantastic grounds around; I wasn't terribly good at music when I was there; it was an all-girls school; the academic standard was very high; our Headmistress at the time was Dame Kitty Anderson who had been on the Robbins Report and so on; she seemed an extremely old lady to me, though very nice; she retired when I was about halfway through my time there; I did not find any inspirational teachers at the beginning, and I wasn't brilliant; the worst thing was maths and every time there was a new lower maths division I slipped down into it; when it came to 'O' levels they didn't put me in for maths as it wasn't worth the money; the thing about North London Collegiate was that when I got into the sixth form or just before, there was a sudden influx of young teachers, particularly for languages and art and things that I liked; these teachers were only five or six years older than us; they formed a tight bunch and still meet quite often; one of them lives round the corner from my mother and I see her quite often; she used to teach me English; it was a complete revelation at the time to have teachers who seemed almost like friends and it just changed everything completely, and I found myself engaged with learning; I suppose I got on particularly well with Miss Finley who taught Spanish and Miss Harrison who taught English; also there was the wonderful Miss Threlfall who was a potter; before them we had had teachers who just expected us to copy down notes; with the new teacher of Spanish we were writing plays and having fun

23:59:08 I believe I was christened but my parents were fairly militant atheists, particularly my father; he had turned against the Catholic church at the age of about seven; my mother, later in life, took to slight questioning, and wondered about things like Unitarians; she felt some belief in something whereas my father was quite happy believing in nothing; I never thought at all about religion; there was a nice boy living across the road in East Finchley called James, my great friend; when I was about nine or ten I used to go with him to his Plymouth Brethren Sunday School in what my father described as a "tin tabernacle" as it was a corrugated iron shed next to the tube station; I was too good at answering the scripture questions which I did find interesting, and they didn't want me to go any more; when looking after Chinese Buddhist texts in the British Library I was lucky to go for a year to a class at SOAS in reading these texts with a wonderful Japanese teacher; I did it with one other student who was doing it from the Japanese angle but we used to converge on the text itself; I found the sutras and subtlety of argument absolutely fascinating, and toyed with the idea of becoming a Buddhist; I used to go with Jim to meditation classes in the Buddhist Society, but I'm afraid I could never switch my mind off properly; I remember also sitting in a temple in China in the late seventies listening to a long Buddhist service, and longing for a leap of faith, but nothing happened; in general I think that religion is responsible for some of the worst things that human beings do; it shouldn't be but it is; religious divisions are just ghastly; I can't understand religious fanaticism but one sees it and it is a horrible problem; so I'm terribly against organized religion really; I think the Chinese are wonderfully pragmatic - the saying, "Confucian in office, Daoist in retirement, and Buddhist as death approaches", you use whichever bits are best at the time and are not tied into an organized religion that can make you do dreadful things; I remember a friend of mine saying his grandmother was a Buddhist, and during the Cultural Revolution when she couldn't have any Buddha figures she used to say her prayers in front of the portion of the windowsill where the Buddhas used to be; I think their attitude is generally very good; there are all sorts of wonderful practical things, like ancestors, who are worshipped for three generations, and then the tablets go into the ancestral temple; that is to do with living memory; it makes you see that you don't need come kind of creed which tell you how to be good and how to be bad; you can pick from everywhere and yet society works perfectly well; I agree with you about China that it's not anti-religious but not too religious a place; Confucianism is the reason for this, much as I dislike Confucius the person as he seemed a fussy old thing, but I think he is supremely pragmatic and suggests how things should be without having to invoke the almighty

29:59:06 Music has been quite important but not as much as drawing; I played the recorder a lot and then took up the oboe; I used to play in a wonderful children's orchestra from about 13-18 which was run by Kay Hurwitz, the wife of Emanuel Hurwitz, the leader of the English Chamber Orchestra, in King Alfred's school which was quite near where my parents had moved to; we used to go there every Saturday; that was music making for pure pleasure; Kay was fantastic; there were lots of very talented musicians and not so talented musicians; we had the Hurwitz's son playing cello and he was terrific, but everybody enjoyed it; I can remember doing 'Dido's Lament' with him brilliantly playing the cello and me the oboe, and it was great; I have to say sadly that Cambridge was completely different, and I gave up playing the oboe when I got here; I went to see about the Newnham orchestra, having had such fun with Kay, where what we did was really make music; we weren't always aiming to perform but were just doing it together; the Newnham orchestra did sound to me like twenty-seven cats imprisoned in a sack, but they were frightfully sniffy and said I would have to have an audition and they might not take me; I just thought, where is the fun, so I didn't join them; still music remains important to listen to - classical music, plus people like Georges Brassens whom my father adored; I was never hugely brilliant on pop music though I like Bob Dylan; I do listen to music when writing, or some sound from the radio

33:09:16 I have never been any good at sport; we had a teacher called Miss Lewis who would run up and down beside the netball court saying "throw up! throw up!" which we used to think was about right; there was an open-air swimming pool and can remember Miss Lewis's knees in my back just edging me in; I did win prizes for breast-stroke style so I can swim elegantly but not fast; one of the things that was quite good about North London Collegiate was that they weren't fantastically competitive; Frances Mary Buss had decided that in general girls education should be like boys, but the one thing that was wrong with boys' schools were this inter-house sport competition; so we didn't have houses or that kind of competition which was a great relief

34:53:13 I did English, French, Spanish and Art for 'A' level, and I considered that I was a terribly good linguist; I have since discovered I am incapable of learning German and Japanese or anything that has a rigorous grammar; I thought I would do a language and to do one that was as different and as difficult as possible; I chose Chinese completely out of a hat; I didn't choose Arabic for which I am eternally grateful as I think being in any Arab speaking country would be tragic and very difficult if you are female; I didn't choose Japanese because Japan in the sixties was still very anti-women; so I chose Chinese and am terribly glad I did; I had in the interim gone to Liverpool Art School for a year but I hated it at first, so studied for Cambridge entrance and went back to school to take the exam; the only places to do Chinese then were Oxford, Cambridge, London and Leeds; I went for interviews at all except Oxford where there were only two people teaching Chinese, so there was no Faculty; Leeds was building itself at the time and the Chinese Faculty was a little house in a sea of mud and bulldozers; at London, the Professor was just about to come here - Professor Twitchett - and Cambridge was definitely the best place of all at the time, with Michael Loewe and Piet van der Loon, and Denis Twitchett just transferring, also David McMullen; I think Needham is an important point as he gave us a couple of lectures which were fascinating; it was great fun to study then; Professor Twitchett was absolutely brilliant and a fascinating lecturer, but he obviously didn't much like lecturing and used to make excuses for not coming, like his car falling down a hole, and at another point was suffering from St Anthony's Fire; he would then do a whole term's lectures in a morning but they were fantastic so it didn't really matter; afterwards you had the wonderful difference between Piet van der Loon and Michael Loewe who were so utterly different in their approach to language; you had to remember who you were preparing a text for because they had their idiosyncrasies and Piet van de Loon would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you used a Loeweism

39:34:18 In 1967 when I came Michael Loewe was very conservative; it was slightly a pose with him; he used to moan that young people didn't read enough Greek; I remember having tutorials with him; they had just finished the James Stirling History Faculty building and every week he would say how hideous it was; I liked it so we didn't really agree on anything very much; he had been at Bletchley and even my mother found him a bit baffling; he told me to say to my mother, "Bletchley Station", so to him it was obviously a treasured memory; I went home and said "Bletchley Station" to her and she looked completely blank, and couldn't understand at all what the romance was; I have huge admiration for him now because I did quite a bit of work on the first Emperor of China and used all sorts of things that he had published, so we have grown closer together; David McMullen taught us mainly history; he was very young and very shy and seemed really rather terrified of us; I suppose it was a more difficult time with the 'Garden House' riots and occupation of Senate House; we were not particularly involved because doing Chinese you had to work so hard; it was more like being at school as you had to go in every day to learn the language; also taught by a distant cousin, Martin Bernal; in his autobiography which he published just before he died he particularly felt that Denis Twitchett didn't like him; Martin was very left-wing but also tainted by his father [J.D. Bernal], who I remember as a very nice old man, but was considered a hopeless "red" and fellow-traveller; Martin taught us an absolutely fascinating late Qing text about the Boxers, and his lectures were great and one began to learn bits about twentieth-century history; I remember writing essays about the May 4th Movement, really important things, whereas the others were really rather bogged down in the past; he was interested in the unresolved argument of why did the Communists win; how did a peasant army sweep aside a Russian and American supported army of the Kuomintang

44:02:08 We were terribly busy so it wasn't easy to go to other places; I did go to history of art lectures but I was absolutely appalled by those; we had Needham give us odd lectures; at one point we had a stunning time because David Hawkes came over from Oxford to give us lectures on The Dream of the Red Chamber because he was in the middle of translating it; that was absolutely riveting; he was the most wonderful lecturer; I remember him saying that with China what was difficult was to disentangle the historicization of myth or the mythicization of history, which is fantastic when you think of people like Guan Yu who is a real person who becomes a god; the whole of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is both god-like and human; he used to come over in a rather sporty little car but unfortunately he crashed somewhere between and that was the end of the car and of our lectures; otherwise, I cooked, especially in my second year when we moved into the new Strachey building at Newnham where there were kitchens; this was mostly for friends, many of whom were architects, whom I would help with making models; one of my parents' neighbours was Claudia Roden who brought Middle-Eastern cooking to the world; I used to earn money in the summer holidays babysitting her children while she was writing; I used to cook Middle-Eastern food and remember frightening poor David McMullen with a dinner of lamb meat balls with prunes; I was also quite keen on dyeing the rice different colours; it all seemed terribly avant guard at the time

47:10:08 We did four years for Chinese and in the fourth year I took Chinese art and archaeology for my special subject with Cheng Te-k'un; I liked him very much as he was an extraordinary and eccentric teacher who had been a major archaeologist in China, whose wife had a wonderful collection of little pots - she collected miniature pieces which we could handle; I did a dissertation for him on the fascinating subject of the kind of relationship of the Yangshou and the Longshan, in terms of pre-Shang ceramics at the very beginnings of Chinese civilization, so neolithic; I quite enjoyed it because I did lots of little drawing of pots; I got a 2:1 as I certainly didn't work hard enough to get a first; in my year there were a lot of firsts - Tim Barrett who went on to be a professor, Tim Wright who went on to be a professor, another who went on to be a professor in New Zealand, and I was definitely much more social than any of them; I didn't really know what to do though I really wanted to work in a museum with objects, but there was a job in the library of the British Museum on the information desk; I applied for it and got it; that was very good fun, nothing to do with Chinese but enquire within upon everything that a reader might want to know; there was a job at the Bodleian specifically in the Chinese section of the library, but I hated the new Bodleian building and didn't think I could face working there; then a job came up at the School of Oriental Studies in the Chinese section of the library and I got the job and moved to SOAS; though I made many valiant attempts to get a job in a museum over the subsequent years I never managed, so I stayed with books, first in SOAS library and then in the British Library; I think you can now treat antiquarian books as a sort of museum object; I went to SOAS in 1972 and stayed until 1977, with a year off in China in 1975-6; one had a sense when learning Chinese that it was a bit like learning Latin as you were so distant from China; I had had a chance to go to China with Tim Wright in 1971 on a so-called young people's tour which was organized by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding; I was able to do that because my maternal grandmother had died and left me a little bit of money, something like £250, which was enough to go on the Trans-Siberian to China for a month because it was heavily subsidised; I think Tim and I scraped onto that tour by the skin of our teeth because the society really wanted to send young workers, young Maoists, and we weren't considered Maoist enough; it was a revelation speaking Chinese in China, absolutely amazing and wonderful; we were controlled and we weren't; China seemed very fine as long as you were "on message"; we were shown happy peasants and went to all these extraordinary places like the Red Flag Canal which had been dug bis y young ladies swinging on ropes off cliff and planting dynamite, very exciting; the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai was very boring, just sitting in a room for days listening to a blow by blow account; there were odd things, for example, near the Red Flag Canal, one of the people on the tour was ill and the group had to move on to Nanjing; he couldn't really move so I said I would stay behind and look after him as I knew Chinese; he slept in the hotel and I wandered out in the village and there was nobody looking after me then; I spoke to all the villagers and had a great time; so sometimes you were very strictly controlled and sometimes weren't; how much did one learn? There were lots of things about barefoot doctors which I thought was a very good thing; when we went to villages we were asked who we wanted to speak to; I used to say I would like to speak to the carpenter because I was interested in architecture; it was quite funny as carpenters tended to be dumbstruck as they had never been asked to speak to foreigners before, whereas the barefoot doctors were fluent speakers; we would have nice times with them showing me their tools, but we didn't know about people being locked up, or about the Great Leap Foreward or the Cultural Revolution; when I went back in 1975 I had realized that I must learn to speak Chinese better; the British Council had been running scholarship groups to China since 1973 so we were the third batch to go for a year with British Council support; it was very interesting and generally speaking, enjoyable; one became much more aware of the iron hand in the velvet glove; you then end up very much with babies and bathwater; there were certain things about the Cultural Revolution that were good, with the extraordinary equality for people; nobody had more bicycles than anybody else, and there was a sufficiency; but you did begin to get a sense that people were getting a bit bored by control; political movements were coming too thick and fast; you used to watch people going to mass meetings taking their knitting with them; people were not coming back from the countryside and education only started again the year after I left; in the year I was there you could sense that things needed to change but they weren't going to; it wasn't until Mao died, three weeks after I left, that things changed almost immediately; some of my fellow students were able to stay on for another year and the second year was just completely different from the first; the experience reinforced my interest in China and Chinese; I have always found both absolutely fascinating; it is such an extraordinary culture and so different, and everything you learn is so terribly interesting; I love the way things are put, the way that colours are divided differently, the way that the word for an owl is a cat-headed eagle, which is such a good description, or a cat purring is a cat reading the sutras; I find the Chinese way of putting things endlessly interesting and Chinese history and culture, just boundless; I have some very good Chinese friends whom I have had for thirty years, particularly scholars who have worked on the British Library collections, and those really long friendships are very important; when I was there as a student I shared a room with a very nice girl, but it was impossible really to keep in touch at that time because it would have been too dangerous for her; but now things are very different, and once you are known and they know what you know, then they trust you; trust is important and takes time to develop, which is as it should be

59:44:24 I went back to the same job, and about a year later moved from SOAS to the British Library, to the Chinese section there; at first it was a temporary job, but that became permanent; it was always important for me to stay with Chinese and in SOAS a lot of my work was with everyday sort of books, and I wanted to get closer to the book as object and the more antiquarian collections of the British Library; the British Library has by chance got part of the world's earliest paper archive, the documents from Dunhuang that were found by Aurel Stein in 1909; we have about a third of the collection but that is 25,000 items, absolutely massive, and includes the world's earliest dated printed book, The Diamond Sutra, in Chinese, dated 868; it is a really stunning and fascinating collection; all that paper, Chinese paper is so beautiful, and with that mass of paper really still largely untapped; there are so many ways that scholars want to look at it; not only is it a fantastic collection which happens to be in London but it attracts enormous numbers of Chinese scholars, so it made the British Library a very lively place for Chinese studies; the other two-thirds of the collection are in Paris and Peking, and there is a bit in St Petersburg; the Paris collection was collected the year after; Paul Pelliot dallied on the Northern Silk Road and Aurel Stein swept in and sneaked away with the first bulk of the collection; then Pelliot took a similar amount to Paris; then, finally, the authorities in China realized that they should rescue the remaining manuscripts from the cave and sent a series of carts to take away the rest; the Dunhuang Project grew out of the work that started really as I came to the British Library; in 1976 when I was still at Peking University I suddenly got a phone call saying that my father's boss is here; the head of the British Library had arrived with a delegation and he was made aware of the importance of the Dunhuang collection; when he came back to England he authorized the re-housing of the whole collection, special cabinets were made, I spent my first summer putting 7,000 manuscripts into these new cabinets, and generally beginning the re-housing; we were then aware of the fragments in the collection; of 7,000 fairly complete scrolls there were another 7,000 items which were scrunched up and needed really careful conservation before they could be opened up; so I spent the next twenty years getting money together to get this material conserved and then it was being studied by a team of Chinese scholars who came over; we had to get the money to support them because in those days China was very poor and scholars did not have access to money; it was a long fund-raising business, looking after the scholars and finding their accommodation, but making the Dunhuang material accessible; finally as technology developed, about twenty years ago we decided that it should be put up on the Web so it is much more easily available; I had always been working towards printed facsimiles which the Chinese still want, but the Web is another thing that needs to be exploited, so Susan Whitfield started doing that; she had been working cataloguing the material but she was very keen to put it up on the Web; it has all been part of a long development, and in a sense my whole career in the British Library has been to do with Dunhuang and making the material accessible

1:04:44:16 There is a contradiction in China between Dunhuang itself and the place where all the Dunhuang manuscripts in China are, which is Peking; people in Dunhuang are a bit cheesed-off that the great cache of manuscripts has gone to the National Library; I went to Dunhuang again just two years ago as a tourist, in the footsteps of Joseph Needham who had travelled there; that was absolutely fascinating; Dunhuang is a lovely place because it hasn't changed too much; I find much of China now has changed so much; one mustn't stand in the way of progress but it can be a bit distressing; Dunhuang, out there in the Gobi desert, surrounded by these wonderful sand dunes, low-rise, no tall buildings, is a lovely relaxed little place; I recommend going there, and the whole Gansu corridor is fascinating

1:06:23:05 I think that if people understand about the cache of documents from Dunhuang they realize that from it we can learn, not just about Chinese Buddhism, we learn about paper, the varied uses of paper, the significance of paper in Chinese civilization and indeed in the civilization of the world; the earliest document from Dunhuang is dated 406 A.D. that is just under 1000 years before paper actually gets to Europe and is used in any way; so you have got paper, technology, the economy of China in the sixth to ninth centuries because there are fragments of censuses, tax returns, they understand the life of ordinary people, contracts of sale and barter, fragments of the legal system; from the Dunhuang cache, from these manuscripts that date from c400-1000 A.D. you get a complete spread of Chinese culture of the period; there are Confucian texts, dictionaries, Daoist texts, mostly Buddhist, but we can learn about everything; also, what is important about Dunhuang is that it has also brought the silk road into prominence, that it is one of the most significant places on the silk road; it stands just where the two roads divide, the northern and the southern routes going round the Central Asian desert, and people understand far more about the trade and life in that area from what's been found there; it is truly significant

1:09:15:03 Mostly what I have tried to do is to introduce aspects of Chinese history to an intelligent but not involved audience; the book that I am happiest about is the one describing my experiences in Peking as a student, 'Hand-grenade practice in Peking', which has just been reprinted yet again; it is personal, it reminds me of a very happy if slightly difficult time, and people don't realize what the Cultural Revolution was and we were there in its last year; I don't think that we should forget it as it had a very important role to play in many people's lives; you only have to think of the current government, for example; they were all young during the Cultural Revolution, they knew what that was; does it form them in a way that is antagonistic towards it or are they pro? it is a very significant period, a period difficult for foreigners to understand if you didn't see it; I think it is quite extraordinary how much didn't get destroyed; buildings were largely not destroyed, museums were locked up, things were shut away so that when Red Guards went on the rampage, what did they destroy? they destroyed people's personal belongings, things like photographs, and I find it funny now that often Chinese people get quite cross about albums of photographs of China being sold at Sotheby's and say they should be in China; you have to point out that actually foreigners preserved their photographs of China better than Chinese did; a lot of what one might call ephemera which of course was of deep social significance was destroyed; as for sort of culture as a whole I think it has bounced back a lot; it bounces back to some extent with the help of Taiwan where continuity has been stronger, but we also have to remember that Taiwan is very much a southern state so that things come back into China with a very strong southern flavour; physically I would have said that the changes to Chinese cities that have happened since the Cultural Revolution, the modernization, the skyscraperization of China, is much more damaging at least to the physical appearance of China as China; so many of these cities you could be anywhere in the world; you could say in some sense that the Cultural Revolution reinforces the past and tradition because people now, in terms of say texts, studying ancient texts, are much keener than they were than even before the Cultural Revolution; they gained a sense of urgency about their own civilization because you can say it might have been destroyed, but no, it is still here, we must do something with it

1:14:31:05 If you are trying to introduce China to someone who doesn't know they might have a concept of civilization; I would have to say that it is a very different civilization; I think it does feel to us a civilization that has grown up on the other side of the mountains; they are people, they are human beings who feel like we do, whose emotions are the same, but in many other ways they are different; their language is fascinatingly different; its amazing when you say to people there is no alphabet, they are at a loss without an alphabet, and cannot understand how the language can develop to such an extraordinary sense of sophistication, but it is completely different; one is in danger of sounding like Arthur Smith in his Chinese Characteristics, but to some extent he is right; they are people who do things differently, but they are still people and their emotions deep down are the same, but things look different; they appreciate things like writing (calligraphy) above painting; almost everything is looked at in a different way, and it is a way that is just fascinating; also one of the things about the endurance of Chinese civilization, that you can take a text from the time of the first Emperor and you can still read it now, whereas we have trouble with Chaucer and a bit further back we weren't writing at all; its old, its long, its different yet it is endlessly fascinating; I think its true that the individualism of the British does stand in too stark a contrast with feelings and ideas in China and that France is perhaps a little closer; the Chinese do have a strong sense of themselves as individuals but it is subsumed within and you have to fit in; English eccentricity is almost overprized here

1:18:32:16 In my book on Marco Polo I suggest that it was a set of texts that were gathered together; I don't want to destroy the work, but it is a sort of Medieval database of what was known about China from different sources; you can demonstrate that clearly that in the age of manuscript, it you are copying out a text for some rich patron who wants a book about the marvels of the East and you find more stuff, you put it in; its richer, its a better text; you don't worry about whether what you are copying in comes from a sailor in Bordeaux in 1550 rather than Marco Polo in 1290; what happens is that the texts that people now use, the Penguin or Moule editions, are actually patchworks of up to fifty different sources written over a period, which is acknowledged by the compilers, from about 1300 up to 1550; so there is a huge discrepancy in terms of time, but what I feel is important is that the popularity, the continuing use of the texts just show how much Europe was fascinated by China, and that there was quite a lot of knowledge; but if you are using it to say that this is what Chinese did in the Mongol period you have to be very careful which manuscript you are using; I wanted people to be interested in the subject; why is there no mention of chopsticks or tea? it doesn't matter, but somehow it just didn't get in; on the tea bit I wondered whether a lot of it was based on Persian accounts because they were drinking tea and wouldn't have thought it necessary to write about it; to me it is an endlessly interesting subject to return to, but I don't want to throw everything out at all; there are such interesting books about Marco Polo, looking at Matthew Parris or people like that, it is such a fascinating period

1:22:02:04 Now I have just finished Sixty Best Chinese Books, ones that have been translated either in part or full into some European language, going from The Analects of Confucius to the 1980s, so that people get a sense of the spread of Chinese literature; I have tried to include technical manuals and geographical, magical and Buddhist texts; I am also just finishing editing a book about China in the First World War because it is a subject that people know nothing about; they don't realize that China was an ally in the First World War and was treated appallingly; I used to go to the Public Records Office and come back hopping mad at the treatment of China; on the Needham question of why China didn't develop science after the Sung, I slightly agree with the idea of why should they; China was going on fantastically well, and what it is about is the clash with the West; it is only the West that says they are really falling to bits while the West has been spending time developing amazing weapons and so on; all that treble cropping of rice and a sufficiency to feed people, do you need more? my aunt's husband, an Indian scientist, always claimed that one of the problems was to do with mathematics, that they never developed a theoretical mathematical basis that would enable them to do better engineering and things like that; that partly fits in with Mark Elvin's idea that they reached a sufficient point where things were going fine and they didn't need to go beyond; the clash with the West is to do with the Western greed for Chinese things and an insistence on getting what they wanted on their own terms; I think that self-sufficiency and not being too bothered by the outside world is a fine attitude to have; it was only the West pushing in that forces change; it does rather cripple China, the West with its tremendous sense of its superiority; the people on the Macartney Embassy were so convinced that the fact that they could bring a diving bell and a hot-air balloon and a telescope to China, demonstrated how much better they were than the Chinese; the arrogance of the attitude does seem to push the Chinese into corners that led them to despair rather than positive reactions; there were people who were positive, but it does seem to me that in the nineteenth century the only way forward can be through railways and technology and the West, and that shouldn't have been the case; now that China is strong, I don't think they will behave as we did because I think they are politer; you could say that they have every reason to repay the scores of the past, and occasionally there is a kind of rhetoric about the hurtfulness of the past which I hope they won't indulge in; China needs to go forward with its own confidence and not dwell on the past; I can imagine they might be quite tough commercially and so they jolly well should be; my only child came to China with me only once when he was about fifteen, and we went to Shanghai; he absolutely loved it but I think Shanghai was easier for him to love than other places; I had taken him to Japan when he was about nine and he didn't like that at all, partly because as a small child you are the centre of attention and people want to pat you; as a child he had Chinese au pairs and he was quite good at Chinese slogans and things like that, but he's not a Sinophile at the moment and is more interested in North Korea