Willow Pattern Walkabout

By Kirwan Ward and Paul Rigby

Unexpectedly in 1958, an irreverent British journalist and Australian cartoonist duo were granted visas to visit Communist China at its most closed and inscrutable. They went, the saw, and they produced one of the great classics of China books, Willow Pattern Walkabout, a unique and sadly forgotten book, now resurrected. Emerging from the writin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Apr 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9789888107100

Book preview

FOR THE little green train from Kowloon this was the end of the line. From Lo Wu, where the train stops, to Shumchun is only a couple of hundred yards, and a child could pitch a stone across the innocent brown creek that separates them, but, this little stream is a barrier as significant as the widest ocean, or the tallest, cloud-draped mountain range. With utter finality it rules a rigid line between one world and another. For Lo Wu is in the New Territories of Britain’s Hong Kong, and Shumchun is in Red China.

Dead ahead the black girders of an ugly railway bridge made a solemn job of spanning the muddy mountain brook, beyond which a huge red flag, speckled with the five gold stars of the People’s Republic of China, billowed above the tower of a concrete blockhouse and sunlight suddenly pinpointed the glint of binoculars trained on us as we moved forward to knock timidly on China’s front door.

There is always a dry-mouthed tension when you cross a foreign border, and in this taut atmosphere it is fatally easy to over-dramatise the situation; but this was undeniably a big moment. It was the moment we had waited for during the seven edgy months it had taken Peking’s Foreign Affairs department to answer our letters and impatient cables. Our country, like America, still refuses China official recognition, so there were no amiable consuls in our hometown, or even in our own land, whom we could approach for visas. We had to apply direct to Peking and Peking, whether it is dealing with reporters or rajahs, just won’t be rushed.

Crunching along the gravel beside the railway line, following the track worn by the restless feet of the world’s transients, we could see khaki uniforms and steel helmets ahead. A tough little Mongolian soldier in a shapeless tunic, and over-large, sagging pants moved across to block our path, the blunt snout of a Russian sub-machine gun poking menacingly over his shoulder.

He looked grim and suspicious, but, surprisingly, he grinned, murmured Good morning, flipped casually through our passports, then stood aside like a gracious host inviting guests to come in. We were in China, just like that. And the step that moved us past that sentry was as startling as the one Lewis Carroll’s Alice made that drowsy summer afternoon when she stepped through the looking-glass.

It took us into an astonishing land where crime is almost extinct; where scrupulous honesty in small matters is palpably prevalent and where street urchins indignantly call a cop if you toss them a coin. A land that knows nothing about the mammary mountains of Mansfield, the ghost of James Dean, Lone Ranger or the horrors of hit parades. A land without singing commercials, blackboard jungles, Private Presley, Miltowns, and juvenile delinquents. A land where the old brass deities have been sternly pushed away into the shadows of museums, and replaced by shoddy gilded plaster casts of the new Buddha in a boiler suit … Mao Tse-tung. A land where 600,000,000 people swarming over a land mass as big as all Europe, and hopelessly divided by centuries of materialism and misrule, have in nine fantastic years been somehow blended into the world’s most dedicated, starry-eyed nation.

But there was no way of knowing all this as we stood in the sticky sunshine on the long, bare platform at Shumchun. All we knew was that we had just handed over our precious passports and all our money to an impassive stranger who had given us no indication as to when we would get them back, if ever. Temporarily we were stateless and bankrupt. We looked back longingly across the bridge and wondered how, a long seven months, or a bare five minutes ago, this journey could have seemed to be such a wonderful idea.

Presently he was back with passports, and a fistful of the curious little scraps of paper and aluminium coins which are the new China’s currency. (Less than a quarter of the population can read, so the smaller bills aren’t marked in figures, as fives, tens, twenties; instead they have symbols that the peasants can understand, tractors, trains, and ships.) He was courteous and efficient, he called us sir, not comrade, and the baggage men who hustled up to handle our gear were like all other baggage men the world over, except for one staggering difference; these incredible guys refused a tip as if it were a test-tube full of bacteria. We figured that there must surely be something awfully screwy about a country where baggage men treat a tip that way, and we caught the Canton express determined to discover just what that something was.

According to the standard script a Red agent should have slunk up behind us the moment we set foot in the dreaded Maomau territory. Right away some eager-Geiger should have been searching for our tiny brains, scheming to send them to the laundry and a secret service man should have tailed us like a shadow. It would have given the thing a nice touch of adventure, but, almost disappointingly, it didn’t happen that way. A young desperately busy, English- speaking Intourist man bought our tickets for us, checked our baggage aboard, shooed a couple of poker-faced peasants out of our seats, shook hands, and abruptly disappeared from our lives