Chinese scholars at Cambridge

Ye Junjian wasn't the only wartime Chinese scholar in the UK with a connection to Cambridge University.

In 1939, Xiao Qian began studying at the university. In 1943, he became a war correspondent for Ta Kung Pao, a Chinese newspaper now based in Hong Kong. As an accredited correspondent, Xiao crossed the English Channel with the British army in 1944 and reported from the battlefields in France.

He also traveled to Berlin with the US army as the city fell to the Allies. As the only Chinese journalist in Europe during World War II, Xiao covered the major events, including the 1945 Potsdam Conference and the Nuremberg Trials.

In 1995, four years before his death, Xiao published a book called World War II Through the Eyes of a Chinese Journalist. "The attitude toward war should be: First, don't start wars; second, don't be afraid, because righteousness wins every time. May everyone turn away from war," he wrote.

Xu Zhimo was an earlier Chinese scholar at Cambridge, and was an associate of King's College for two years from 1920. He wrote Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again, a poem that every Chinese schoolchild knows by heart.

Xu's memory is marked by a two-ton slab of white marble set into one end of King's College Bridge and inscribed with four lines of poetry in Chinese.

"Very quietly I take my leave

As quietly as I came here,

Quietly I wave goodbye

To the rosy clouds in the western sky."

Alan Macfarlane, fellow of anthropological sciences at Cambridge, said the university's most enduring images are water-based; willows by the water, boats on the river, and clouds, bridges and buildings reflected in the water.

"Xu Zhimo's poem is the most famous expression of this," he said.

(China Daily 08/31/2015 page4)