In a tiny flat in Peking I heard a 105-year-old Chinese man explain how he was responsible for the capital of China being called Beijing. The centenarian, Mr Zhou Youguang, was the founder of Pinyin, the system of phonetic transliteration for all the Chinese characters. It might be argued that he is one of the most influential men of our age, for he has made it possible for foreigners to speak Mandarin without writing the characters and dramatically improved the literacy rate of the Chinese population. Chairman Mao had asked Stalin for advice on the gloomy 80 per cent illiteracy rate in China in the 1950s. Comrade Joseph thought that the only way forward was for China to use phonetics to substitute the complicated Chinese characters. Mao listened and in 1958 Mr Zhou’s Pinyin system was adopted by the nation. Today, each street name and every other Chinese sign is accompanied by what seems like pidgin English, but is in fact Pinyin, invented by Mr Zhou as an artificial language. It’s not dissimilar to Esperanto. It’s a howler to believe that the name of the capital of China has changed from a English word to a Chinese one. Beijing is a Pinyin word, one that is perennially mispronounced, even by the BBC.
Mr Zhou (whose name would have been transliterated as Mr Chou before Pinyin) spoke excellent English with Stephen Fry, who was interviewing him for a documentary on world languages. ‘Please excuse my English for it is a bit rusty!’ said Mr Zhou, charmingly. ‘I am 106 by Chinese counting; God must be very busy because he has forgotten me!’ It was, incredibly, Mr Zhou’s first television interview, and we all felt we were witnessing one of those rare moments in history. And it was rather poignant that this extraordinary sage should be living in a very modest flat, incognito and all but forgotten.
Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters. I have never been convinced of this, and my generation in Hong Kong finds it very difficult to read the simplified characters that are used on the mainland — just as mainlanders find it difficult to read our classical script. So it is not true that the Chinese characters are common to all Chinese.
The Chairman also made sure that the entire population of China spoke Mandarin, the sad consequence being that rich dialects such as Cantonese have been marginalised. This, I must say, is a cultural folly. Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese. Many of the famous poems written during the Tang dynasty would only rhyme in Cantonese. There have been very strong demonstrations in Canton (Guangzhou in Pinyin) against the closure of the last Cantonese-speaking television station. It’s understandable. Like biodiversity in nature, we need diversity in culture, especially if you consider the richness of the Chinese language.
I arrived in Urumqi, home of the Muslim Uighurs in China, some of whom have blue eyes, in order to see my wife from Essex complete her ultra-marathon race across the Gobi Desert. She’s mad enough to have done two others in Namibia and the Sahara. So I was proud to see her sprinting the last 100 yards across the finishing line, carrying her laden backpack, sweating like a sow, full of grime and greasy hair, but all of which I was prepared to hug in celebration. It was a serious bit of exercise running in the sands and up mountains and down ravines over 250 kilometres in five days. I wish I had enough mettle to do something like that, but I am too fat and cowardly to try. Instead, I settle for the cross-trainer and steam bath at Mark Birley’s Bath & Racquets Club behind Claridge’s.
I was very lucky to have been given the use of Johnny Depp’s boat Vajoliroja on the Med for a few days. When we went ashore and were asked where the megastar was, I said that he was sleeping. I didn’t mention that he was sleeping in Hawaii where he was filming — no doubt another silly pirate movie. Vajoliroja was far from silly: it has a magnificent funnel, de rigueur on any proper vessel, and is surrounded by enough teak and mahogany to fill a Rothschild library. Vajoliroja is a smaller replica of the beautiful Savarona, once Mustafa Atatürk’s floating palace and for a long time the largest private yacht in the world. My wife could scarcely have been happier sleeping on Mr Depp’s bed as it hummed along the Côte d’Azur.
I had invited Frederick Forsyth, Stephen Fry and Andrew Roberts to come to Hong Kong for its annual book fair, which amazingly attracted a million visitors. My English friends were duly impressed by the vast crowd, and managed to entertain a couple of thousand visitors at an open forum on ‘How and what and why do writers write?’ The report in the local South China Morning Post started off with: ‘Thunderous applause and rounds of laughter filled the theatre...’ That wouldn’t happen at a comparable event in Britain. I have always thought the British underestimate the global influence of their language. Stephen Fry is a master exponent of the English tongue. Some people might think that he is the most irritating man in Britain, but my wife and I love him all the same. And we feel the same way about the Duchess of York, arguably the most ridiculed woman in Britain, which goes to show that not all of us are comatosed by the Daily Mail.