Tianjin to Hong Kong

Mike and I landed in Hong Kong last night, after a weekend in Tianjin where we attended the summer Davos - the World Economic Forum's get together of corporate leaders in Asia. Tianjin is the ultra modern face of China - a century ago the city was a trading port dominated by foreign concessions of the British, the Italians, the French and other western powers. Today the original port along the Hai River has long been supplanted by massive new docks at Tanggu, stretching out into the Yellow Sea on acres of reclaimed land. It's the closest port serving Beijing, now less than two hours away on a brand new expressway or even less by bullet train. TEDA, or the Tianjin Economic Development Area where the conference was held, couldn't be further from the winter Davos in the Swiss ski resort - this is a totally planned city, built at breakneck speed since 1984, on a scale that is difficult to imagine in Europe - efficient but soulless.

Tianjin is already the world's sixth largest port and has set its sights on overtaking Hong Kong and others in the top five. Right now, it doesn't have the unceasing traffic of the Hong Kong harbor but maybe the container ships are absorbed more quietly in Tianjin's vast expanses. Just as the conference participants seemed subdued in the cavernous new congress center, so different from the crush at Davos.

We were glad to get away, and reach Hong Kong, our home for two years from 2004 until 2006, for a week's stay before beginning a trip to a very different part of the mainland - the western region around Chongqing.

Let me explain what this, my first blog is about. As part of the research for a book I'm writing, I will be retracing a journey taken by my parents, Max and Audrey Oxford during World War II. They were a British couple who met and married in Chungking (as it was then known), the wartime capital of China. Each had reached the remote city, high up Yangtze river, by improbable and dangerous routes. My father, a former fighter pilot and RAF intelligence officer, landed in Chungking in January 1942 after escaping from Hong Kong under fire, on the day of the colony's surrender to Japan (more on this later in the week). My mother, Audrey Watson, who'd been a secretary for the SOE in London, decided in 1943 to accept a job at the British Embassy in Chungking and made a hair-raising eight week journey by sea and by air, skirting battle zones, and flying over the Hump of the Himalayas into free China. There she met my father, by then an air attache at the Embassy and after a whirlwind romance they were married in January 1944. My father was due to be posted back to England and in April 1944 my parents began another daunting journey, leaving Chungking by road to head south to Kunming in Yunnan province and then to fly again over the Hump and on to England. With my husband Mike, I'm revisiting Chongqing and retracing the 700 mile road trip to Kunming.