208 Peking Hotel
Peking
Sun. 6th. July, 1952

Darling Pipit:

After breakfast with Rewi and a charming and beautiful old Indian, Gurbaksh Singh, this morning, I’ve been in my room all day struggling with not unpleasant lassitude due to the hot climate. It's quite like Chungking after all, but of course much drier.

Gurbaksh Singh was descanting on the socialism of the founder of the Sikhs, Nanak Guru. Once at some small place two people invited him to stay, a landlord and an artisan. He took the bread which the former offered him and squeezed it, whereupon blood dripped out, so he declined with thanks. At the artisans, milk dripped out, so as GS said, he found it "very acceptable" and stayed with the worker!

All morning I made some good notes on a standard textbook of medical entomology, which will be useful also eventually for my medical chapter. The parasitologists here, Feng Lan-Chou [Feng Lanzhou 風蘭洲] and Hoeppli, are going to give me a number of reprints of works on the history of that subject in Ch med [Chinese medicine]. In this connection, yesterday morning I spent with Li Thao [Li Tao 李濤], the leading expert on this, in the Ch. dept.[Chinese department] of the CUMC [?] Library, where there is an unequalled collection, formed largely by Li himself, of Ch. med. bks [Chinese medical books]. From the horse’s mouth, therefore, I heard and learnt a number of key things regarding the literature. Afterwards we lunched together at the TASC [Dongan shichang 東安市場] market, where we ate fried crayfish balls, pork balls, potatoes in thread-sugar, and some other northern delicacies.

Yesterday evening RA [Rewi Alley] and I went out to a party at the Czech Press Attaché’s, which was very interesting. He and his Ch. [Chinese] wife live in one of the real old-style Peking houses, with courtyards, etc., which they have restored and painted. The 1egendary Ma Hai-Tê [Ma Haide 馬海德, George Hatem] was there, who was one of the chief medicos at Yenan, by origin a Syrian, but long sinified, and married now to a beautiful Ch. [Chinese] filmstar.

The most part of Friday was taken up with a day-long visit to the Pei Ta Medical School [Peking University Medical School], now enormous enormous [sic]. There was a very informative speech by the Director, and we then visited all the departments. The general tendency is to concentrate research in the AS [Academia Sinica] institutions, so that the universities do almost all (say 85%) teaching. If you should see [David] Keilin tell him that one of his former pupils, Liu Ssu-Chih [Liu Sizhi 劉思職], is in the Biochem. [Biochemistry] lab. [laboratory] there (he a1so worked chez Warburg); there’s too Ting Yen-Chieh [Ding Yanjie], pupil of Sumner at Ithaca. It’s rather paradoxical that now when at last they are pretty well provided with all sorts of apparatus, including Warburg manometer sets, etc. they have to concentrate so much on teaching, but; this is regarded as a temporary thing, since everyone realises the absolute necessity of making superhuman efforts to increase the number of qualified doctors in the country to 500,000 or more. Immense progress is being made, though I won’t bother you with figures now.

Thursday was a very nice day. With my charming entomological friend, Chu Hung-Fu [Zhu Hongfu 朱弘复], I spent the morning at the Liu Li Chang [琉璃廠], one of the famous booksellers streets. We located a copy of the Wu Ching Tsung Yao 武經總要, (the great Sung compendium of military technology, (and I hope to get it); also we found a nice copy of the work of Lin Chhing [Linqing 麟慶] on river control technique (which I got). (By the way, did you find time yet to read the civil engineering chap.?). We looked in to a special shop where they only make a kind of cold plum soup, with a very strong and delicious taste, then went off to lunch together.

You can see from this that I have been getting about a good deal, apart from all the meetings of the committee.

----Interruption caused by the appearance of Eppy [Israel Epstein] and Elsie [Fairfax-Cholmeley] and Rewi for T [tea]. They work on China Reconstructs . . .