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the team that formed around me to make sure that I did not leave everything to the night before we were due to leave. The team comprised Dr Peter Barker, Sarah Parnell and Michael Broom - and of course Elace, the representative from Swire Travel who was our contact point with the local agents and guides on the ground in China. In fact, there were further significant contributions from many of the tour members. I hope to have given full credit to all of them on the text that follows.
Peter's contribution was, in a way, the greatest. His heavy travel schedule meant that he could not attend any meetings that might have been called to discuss progress. However, this made him feel that he was always missing something, so every time he returned to Hong Kong he had the effect of reminding me that nothing more had been achieved since the last time he contacted me. Once real planning got under way, Mike, Sarah and I met a number of times, and we decided to take one area each for the purposes of research and itinerary setting. Mike volunteered for Tsingtao, Sarah took Chefoo and Weihaiwei, leaving me with Dalian and Port Arthur.
This arrangement worked well, and we each managed to put together some notes and extracts from various sources, which I put together as a handout for the tour members. A copy of this booklet, "Bits of Broken China," is available in the RAS Library and may be a useful source of reference for people planning a similar trip.
What now follows is a description of what we saw, from the perspective of the person fortunate enough to have been the tour leader. The notes below certainly do not pretend to be in any way a history of the places we saw; there are many far more learned and authoritative places to look and people to talk to in order to gain such information. Nevertheless, I hope this brief article shares with its readers some of the fun that was had in making the whole thing possible.
Getting Settled in and Briefed
The mid-day flight from Hong Kong got us to Qingdao in the late afternoon. Why is it that all travelling that is done by "a group" seems to be far more complicated and time-consuming than for the same number of people travelling independently? Be that as it may, by the time
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the team that formed around me to make sure that I did not leave ev- erything to the night before we were due to leave. The team comprised Dr Peter Barker, Sarah Parnell and Michael Broom - and of course Elace, the representative from Swire Travel who was our contact point with the local agents and guides on the ground in China. In fact, there were further significant contributions from many of the tour members. I hope to have given full credit to all of them on the text that follows.
Peter's contribution was, in a way, the greatest. His heavy travel schedule meant that he could not attend any meetings that might have been called to discuss progress. However, this made him feel that he was always missing something, so every time he returned to Hong Kong he had the effect of reminding me that nothing more had been achieved since the last time he contacted me. Once real planning got under way, Mike, Sarah and I met a number of times, and we decided to take one area each for the purposes of research and itinerary setting. Mike vol- unteered for Tsingtao, Sarah took Chefoo and Weihaiwei, leaving me with Dalian and Port Arthur.
This arrangement worked well, and we each managed to put to- gether some notes and extracts from various sources, which I put to- gether as a handout for the tour members. A copy of this booklet, "Bits of Broken China," is available in the RAS Library and may be a useful source of reference for people planning a similar trip.
What now follows is a description of what we saw, from the per- spective of the person fortunate enough to have been the tour leader. The notes below certainly do not pretend to be in any way a history of the places we saw; there are many far more learned and authoritative places to look and people to talk to in order to gain such information. Nevertheless, I hope this brief article shares with its readers some of the fun that was had in making the whole thing possible.
Getting Settled in and Briefed
The mid-day flight from Hong Kong got us to Qingdao in the late afternoon. Why is it that all travelling that is done by "a group" seems to be far more complicated and time-consuming than for the same num- ber of people travelling independently? Be that as it may, by the time
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