The Man Who Loved China (43 page)

⁴⁸
The United States finally bowed to reality on this issue in 1971. Since then, Taiwan has been excluded from the UN, and it is regarded now as a part of the People's Republic, which has the single Chinese seat in the General Assembly and on the Security Council.

⁴⁹
Britain was not so rigid in its approach to China as America during the cold war. London had recognized the People's Republic almost immediately after its inception, but had exchanged diplomats—junior officials sent as chargés d'affaires—only from 1954 onward. This halfhearted approach, which nonetheless managed to survive the Korean War, finally evolved into the sending of a full ambassador in 1972.

⁵⁰
Cort was told to leave, and suspecting that he would be arrested if he returned to Senator McCarthy's America, settled in Czechoslovakia instead.

⁵¹
The vastly admired
Dictionary of National Biography
(DNB) was begun in 1885–under the editorship of Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell–and sought from its inception to include essays, some decidedly opinionated, on anyone of significance or notoriety in British life since Cassivelaunus, the chieftain who tried to oppose Caesar's second invasion in 54 BC. The present edition, which runs to sixty volumes, includes 55,000 lives. Queen Victoria's entry is the longest; among the many more obscure biographies is that of an eighteenth-century wrestling harpist, the Welshwoman Marged ferch Ifan.

⁵²
He also kept a hookah, which he had bought at a Uighur market in Chinese Turkestan. Though the device lies today in the Caius archives it is not known if he ever smoked it, either privately in his room or, even less probably, among the other fellows in the relaxed coziness of the senior combination room.

⁵³
By now he had sold the magnificent Armstrong-Siddeley and had replaced it with a rather more prosaic car, a Ford Cortina. But had Mao known he would have approved: Needham had ordered the vehicle painted
jingtailan,
a word now taken to mean cloisonné, but in fact meaning an exquisite Chinese shade of pale blue.

⁵⁴
Played by Peter O'Toole in Bertolucci's film masterpiece
The Last Emperor
(1987).