William Hamilton-Dalrymple

Pass the Sikh Back, Sarah

Chinese Characters

By

Collins 272pp £12.95 order from our bookshop

The Chinese view of the West came sharply into focus for me when at a railway station in Xinjiang I was shown an English language textbook by a student I had befriended. The booklet was entitled A Survey of Great Britain and its findings included the following: the five biggest mass organisations in this country are the TUC, the CBI, the NUS, CND, and the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding; to send a boy to public school costs ‘very much – about £90’; the Conservative and Labour parties both represent the landowning classes. London, apparently is a city beset by pollution problems. These are due, it says, to a combination of marsh mists sweeping in from the east and ‘the citizen’s love of open smoke fires’, the combination of which means that he can seldom see a yard in front of him.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • RT : Founded in 1979, is a trusted independent source for reviews of new books across a variety of genres. A… ,
    • RT : Here we are - "Shelf Indulgence" by Ed Potten, a wonderful read, well worth your time: @Lit_Review,
    • 'Like going to a party hoping to get away as quickly as politeness allowed and at 4am finding myself still engrosse… ,
    • 'Neville never shed his sense of being the junior, and perhaps least-deserving Chamberlain.' From the archive, Mic… ,
    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    Follow Us