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MORE ON LOUIS DE SAN
PAUL BOLDING
Young and keen for adventure, Louis de San was 29 in 1939 when he found himself in Chungking as a Belgian diplomat at the court of the nationalist Chinese government as the Japanese seized more and more of the country.
Through a family connection I met Louis de San in Syria in 1988 where he had retired and where he later died. I have recently acquired a fascinating letter he wrote to a friend from Chungking and some family photographs. In addition, his own recollection of how he set an Asian gliding altitude and duration record in Chungking in 1940 has been published.
The letter describes how he arrived in Hong Kong en route for his new post. 'I knew absolutely nothing about China. It took me three days to find out what was happening, buy supplies (bed linen, underwear, radio, wines and spirits etc) daily lunches and dinners, packing and repacking my stuff, making a thousand demarches, in short an absolute killer of a regime.'
He took the 900-tonne steamer Canton for Haiphong, a three-day journey. Hanoi he found ‘a small French provincial town replanted in Asia; the Japanese will find it easy to swallow it when it takes their fancy.' He caught a train to Kunming and waited there for a plane to Chungking. After five days, French fliers got him a place on a flight on a Douglas.
'A lunar landscape with nowhere to land in case of accident; these poor planes are flying 10 or 12 hours a day!' he wrote of the trip.
He was immediately put to work by colleagues and the next day was at the French embassy when air raid sirens sounded.
'In a few seconds, everyone was underground in the shelters with admirable discipline; then the wait with a note of anxiety and mystery... one did not know if one would still be alive minutes later... that lasted half an hour.