Green Lake: Reflections from the Surface of China

Addendum

Links      *    Contact Us    *    Author profile     *   Extended TOC     *  End Note

Some links of interest

Yunnan Explorer      Yunnan map     Green Lake museum     Yunnan food series      Temples
Yunnan military academy     Zhu De's residence     Flying Tigers museum     Songshan 1944
GoKunming      Yunnan provincial museum         Kunming eco-friendly      Chatwin on Dr Ho
Kunming museum     Yunnan railway museum     Contemporary Gallery Kunming
Bird & Flower market      Dinosaur Valley      Xishuangbanna      Learning online

Contact Us

Our email address is chinagreenlake@ and then gmail.com Place just the one word "Advertising" in subject line, for offers and inquiries thereabout. Or "Questions" or "Comments".       Cheers.

Author profile

Hardy is the son of a well-regarded photog for the Chicago Tribune and a very well-read school secretary who once dreamed of being the first blonde flamenco dancer of Nordic extraction. His good fortune was to benefit exceedingly from the providence of scholarships: B.A. Stanford, PhD Princeton, J.D. Yale Law, Fulbright Scholar, Oxford. He ended up in Washington, DC, pursuing public interest law, eventually in the form of the conservation of biodiversity, beginning with a then diminutive organization none of his friends had heard of, The Nature Conservancy. He learned taxonomy and computer technology and was on a team which developed and propagated the Natural Heritage Program/Conservation Data Center network, planting the programs permanently in state governments, all fifty of them (plus Canadian provinces and parts of Latin America). He then launched out in new directions, one of which was setting up a new organization to extend the network to China and perhaps other parts of Asia. See biodiversityconservancy.net for more. Inspired by his author wife to put thoughts and experiences together into a book, he realized during the process that from the very first day he learned of it, he had wondered: What is it like to be in China?


Venice                       Yunnan                   Burma, with Ernest
He has just published a new book, this one about birds, available here: 30 Birds . The Pursuit, The Bird, The Place -- for 30 different birds in North America. Just as with the book here, there's a companion website for the book: 30birds30.com

Extended Table of Contents

Preface    Prologue

1/ Around the Lake

Grannies with swords, 1902 photos by Auguste Francoise, Qi Gong red fans, seagull bread, Hansel-and-Gretel brooms, koi, Wu Sangui ("heads fell to his blade"), lotus, steel balls rotated in hand, tangos, castanets, hookahs, caged Crested Mynas, croquet, badminton. Impressions of China. Mosquitoes. Settling in with our dog, finding a school for our daughter. Autumn Moon Festival. CB Noodles. Kunming kids. Beijing visit, the Forbidden City narrated by Roger Moore. The SARS epidemic. ~ Around, a year later: meaning of the balls. Peter Zhou, in his eighties, friend of the Flying Tigers. Doctor Briggs visits a remote village. Is the Chinese economy a bubble? Theroux on the Iron Rooster.

2/ Through Chinese Eyes

Arthur Waley, independent translator of Chinese, Japanese. Commissioner Lin, the mandarin the emperor sends 1838 to deal with the opium problem. Lin at Madame Tussauds v. Lin in his diary. The complications of European mentality. Imperial expense account, cost-control. Jardine villain. Letter to Victoria. Rhubarb. Footbinding, prostitution, opium. 20,283 chests of opium. Lin demands a killer, but who? Extraterritoriality. First shots fired, Chinese navy lies to the emperor and to Lin. War breaks out. Another mandarin arrives. Chinese victories (not). A poet reports. Lin ends up in Yunnan, with its fields of opium poppies.

3/ Transformations

Back at GL. Infrastructure upgrade. Clerk with abacus. National Day. More Peter and WW2. Alley, overpass. A visit from the US military. Students from CityU HK here to help. Visit from UNESCO. Chinese TV. Yunnan's water problem. Ceremony 60th anniversary of student deaths. Famous English academic here WW2. Mao's war against nature and Green Lake. Drought. Documentary on Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China (1937).

Images 1

4/ Three Explorers

Shaemus Anderson (Anglo-Irishman at Chinese Maritime Customs); failed scholar lucky to find employment in faraway China with foreign-run-created-for-emperor CMC, just as emperor overthrown, WW1 breaks out, warlords battle (dodges bullets), Japan seizes China. Father of two very famous professors: Benedict (born Kunming) and Perry Anderson. // John Fairbank (dean of American China scholars); son of SD lawyer, U Wisc, Harvard, Oxford. In China '32 - '36. Starts Area Studies program at Harvard, teaches Teddy. Back to China, starting in Kunming, as info-gatherer for OSS. Late in life authors The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985, best short intro, abstracted here. // Joseph Rock (Austro-American botanist and anthropologist), poor kid, autodidact, from Vienna to Hawaii. On to China for National Geographic and Harvard's Arnold Arboretum. Grand, gold-plate expeditions in search of plants; beset by brigands. Local royalty. Becomes foremost expert on Yunnan's Naxi people. Flees Mao.

5/ Three Types of Trip, and Trifles

Our family trip to tropical Jinghong, part of SE Asia. Splash. Kunming visit of German group recreating a 1930s dance band. Wagner's Ring Cycle on DVD. Wonderful birds, Mandarin duck and Hoopoe. Our sidewalks. A Chinese joke. Nervous about DVDs, pirated? A visit to the dentist. Another wonderful bird, the Silkie. The return of Shanghai to the US.

6/ Great Wall

Artist Graham Peck's first visit to China, thanks to Ivory Soap. His first masterpiece, Through China's Wall. Out of Peking Legation Quarter down tree-line street "under the icy peacock sky." Japan taking over north eastern China. Summer with Mongols in a yurt. Absence of toilet paper. Gobi. Chiang captured. Early Chungking. Frenchified Kunming, then Hanoi. Travel back to Peking. Outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Joins ambulance rescue team.

Images 2

7/ Eyes on China

How kids line up. Lake walk. A political bldg, the PCC. Prof. Shambaugh's Brookings talk. Chinese economic statistics. Blind soccer players. Eileen Power, British medievalist. Yunnan economy zooms ahead. Ezra Pound. Driving to tropical Xishuangbanna. An East German in Jinghong. Squirrels.

8/ Two Warriors

Zhu De, Mao's top army commander, trained in Kunming. Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers, based in Kunming.

9/ Clashes, Cars, Chengdu, City Ecological

After the snow in Kunming. Riots in Tibet. The Olympic torch and the effects, including those in Kunming. Kollywood? Rush hour. Inflation. Trip to Chengdu. Sichuan earthquake. Thousands of new trees. City planning. Bomb on a bus. US financial crisis and Ponzi schemes there and here. An interesting Finn.

Images 3

10/ Kinds of Time

Graham Peck's second visit and masterpiece, Two Kinds of Time. Smuggled through Japanese lines to wartime capital, Chungking; ransoms paid all along the river. Daily bombings. Picture of the foreign community in the capital. Where Red Cross's money actually goes. Portrait of Ma Yin-chu, fellow Yalie and Kuomintang's leading economist; Ma is arrested by Chiang; later, author of the one-child policy. Gung-ho trip; worker co-ops. Farmer's horizon is border of his plot, but feudalism is collapsing. Loyang, city battlefield. A second book is in this chapter, that by Paul Frillmann, chaplain to the Flying Tigers, written with Peck's aid. Hankow's Lutheran mission under occupation. Arriving Burma to minister to Flying Tigers, but fleeing enemy forces (in abandoned Buick) along Burma Road to Kunming. Incompetent Mussolini as patron to Chiang's original air force. French-flavored Kunming. After Pearl, FT becomes 14th Air Force; Frillmann becomes spy for Chennault. Infiltrate, identify targets for the 14th. Narrow escape. John Birch.

11/ Volatility

China buys the US. Bomb explodes in our favorite eatery. Cause of the earthquake. Julia Child in Kunming. Our Finn, again. Prof. Shambaugh again, and Brezhnev. 60th anniversary CCP. Our beggars. Vermeer and China. My new flat. Hurun list of China's richest. China's naked officials. How join PLA. China v. India in the US mind. Silver and China. Urban improvement knocks at our door. A trip to Jianshui.

12/ Teddy

Jimmy Stewart's only war movie. Born in the "ghetto of Boston." 6th grade, Miss Fuller's kids stage the First Thanksgiving, with Yiddish indians. Boston Latin. The Depression. Harvard, peddles newspapers, ROTC, Chinese studies, Fairbank's best. A journalist in Chiang's capital, Chungking. To Kunming and flights with Chennault's 14th. Eats pig. Boss Luce visits. Stilwell - Chennault. Into the Honan famine, horror reported. Sparrow shit and Stilwell out. Up to see Mao, Zhu De, Chou and the rest. Back home after the war, McCarthyism leads him to abandon his China career and concentrate on Europe, the Marshall Plan, then the Making of the President. Writes the novel that became Jimmy Stewart's movie.

Images 4

13/ Nanocapitalism

New sidewalks. 20th century-British violence (told by Marr) v. Chinese. Will China survive? Nanocapitalist-peddlers and their tables of goods each night. A real Chinese meal. To Dali and the Bai people festival. A Hoopoe. Dali history, the Muslim Sultanate. Out of Dali to Weishan, authentic and no tourists. Bicycle thief. The Modern Toilet Restaurant. Nanocapitalists and Arab Spring.

14/ Joe Alsop

Nabob Joe, so unlike Teddy or Graham. As journalist, settles in Georgetown, DC: Lindberg baby trial, the Neutrality Acts, meets Chennault. 1940, joins Navy, to Bombay! Leaves both, to Kunming by way of Chungking. Buddy of TV Soong (Harvard), Chiang's brother-in-law and finance man. Chennault needs administrators, Joe signs on, ends up in Toungoo, Burma, FT's first base. Sent to requisition solenoids in Singapore (Brits only have biplanes); Manila, meets MacArthur, who says Japanese regard him too highly to attack; HK Dec 6, arrested, poses as newsman, soon exchanged, returns to Kunming. White House connections: appointed lend lease coordinator. The Chiang-Chennault-Stilwell-Soong miasma -- Joe is back-room boy, promoting Chennault's air power v. Stilwell's ground troops, at 1943 Trident Conference with FDR (Harvard) himself. Second Stilwell crisis, Joe drafts message Chiang sends to FDR dismissing Stilwell. Joe names successor, Wedemeyer. My visit to Joe's Georgetown house.

15/ Bo

Bo Xilai story: murder, betrayal, corruption. At highest levels. Downfall of princelings: man and wife. Strike black, sing red. WikiLeaks. Seized assets, stashed assets. A western libertarian calls this all tommyrot. Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping's father. Body found of Jimmy Browne of Winnetka, whose flight from Kunming disappeared 1942. Jeremy Lin. Local author suddenly becomes media star. In search of Tea Horse Road. Trip to Midu. A gorge outside the city. Midu extravaganzas. Visit to an organic farm outside Kunming. Welsh. Herbert and Lou Hoover in China. James Joyce. Mutants in Yunnan.

Images 5

16/ JPD/Sledge

John Paton Davies, missionary's son in China, diplomat, China Hand, parachutes into Burmese head hunters, aide to Stilwell, McCarthy victim. Critical of FDR reliance on Chiang. Colonial policy interferes with war policy. Front row seat to Stilwell's troubles. My attempt to recreate Stilwell's walks to Fort Ord, CA. JPD's visit to Mao in Yenan with the Observer Team. After '49 attacked (and defended!) by Joe Alsop. JPD finds head hunters in DC. Eugene Sledge, US Marine, famous for With the Old Breed (used in Pacific sequel to Band of Brothers) is sent to China after Japanese surrender and wrote China Marine. Received in Peiping like a Roman Triumph. Friend Fu. Fresh food. Camels in the capital. A leftover German Shepherd. Dr. Soong (head surgeon) and family, devoted to Mozart. His first Chinese take-out.

17/ More Bo

Why Bo came to Kunming, Shanxi noodles. Old-fashioned, show-stopping trial: read all about it! Money, money, money! And endangered species! A Villa in Cannes! Brit murdered! Bo's Affair! Sensational End! Secret Love Affair! Glue and Paint! Shoes Found! My flight delay, passenger revolt. Orange County China. Truly vintage wine. New campuses, ghost cities. Jihad in Kunming. Beyond the Clouds, Phil Agland documentary. Visit to famous Lijiang; Black Dragon Pool. Cat and mouse: blocking internet sites, and ways to find them. Street maneuvers. Fall of an even bigger titan: Zhou Yongkang, Bo's ally. Mao and the other Generalissimo.

18/ Belden and the Revolution

American war correspondent supreme. Murder a landlord. The key role of women in Mao's victory. Gold flower. Kisses full of pain. Enter Dark Jade. Liberation of women as a weapon. Peter Rand's book on the China Hands. Belden's great book fails. Drives a cab in Paris. Reporters with 1972 Nixon visit to China find him in Beijing. Advocacy journalism.

Images 6

19/ Ceremony, Ice, Mangoes, Monkeys

Charms of the police station. Chinese funeral: Feng shui, a rooster, firecrackers. C.yberattacks, malware, Kunming -- and social media. Tambora explodes 1815: the Seven Sorrows of Yunnan. Opium for rice. Language, translators. Botanical science and state security. 1968 Pakistan gift of mangoes to Mao goes viral, affects Cultural Revolution. Dinner with wonderful, historical, Bingheng; 86, retired physicist with taste for fashion and art, father headed the university when Long Yun was Yunnan's ruling warlord and when the northern academics came to Kunming, fleeing the war. High altitude Monkeys!

Addendum

Links of interest.   Contact us.   Author profile.   Extended TOC.

Additional Postings/Notifications

Additional material may be posted. How notifications work.

Random Footnotes

These are not intended as documentation but are in the nature of supplements, included in the yin of this yin-yang because they will be added to (and perhaps even subtracted from) periodically and irregularly, all of which requires the flexibility of a website. Yang-people, purchasers of the ebook, of course have access to these footnotes as well, by consulting the website whenever they are curious about something they have read, in hopes that further comments are somehow available.