COMMERCE AND MANNERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 13

COMMERCE AND MANNERS

CONFESSIONS OF A CHINA HAND, by Ronald Farquharson; Hodder and. Stoughton. English price, 12/6. N 1924 Mr. Farquharson went to China as a representative of Imperial Chemical Industries, serving in Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow and Dairen. He learned much about the Chinese and the way they liked to do business, particularly in the remoter parts of the country. His anecdotes of the activities of both Chinese and British traders in a big way are written in polished style (this comes out most forcibly in his chapter on. "face"), and he shows that business deals involving huge sums of money, when discussed with representatives of powerful Chinese concerns, were more often than not models of courtly deportment and finesse. Of the less ex- } (continued on page 15)

BOOKS (continued from page 13) alted Chinese, he refers sympathetically to the devotion of an amah, or children’s nurse, who was "no ordinary person; and in common with so many of her countryfolk whom I have been less privileged to meet, she had a rather high sense of duty, too." One of the author’s best chapters describes his meeting with a War Lord to whom he hoped to sell a few experimental tons of surface-harden-ing material, and who in turn was trying seriously to interest him in the purchase of eighty thousand square miles of Central China. This book is a record of customs in a land of age-old tradition and of a people whose only desire, it seemed to Mr. Farquharson, was to go their own

way, undisturbed.

E. R.

B.