The Dunwiddie Post – A record of storms survived and horizons still calling

Alan Whicker Filmed my Two Futures

October 28, 2026 / Dunwiddie

YouTube knows what it is doing.

I had recently been writing about China, overnight trains and the life that movement had made possible. Alongside those travel posts sat another piece born in Shanghai: Gresham’s Law of Courting, clarifying the dating and relationship world I grew up in.

Then the algorithm reached into the past and returned two old films by Alan Whicker. One connected directly to the trains. The other connected so precisely to Gresham’s Law that it might have been waiting there for me since before I was born.

The first was Whicker’s World: Aboard the Orient Express, filmed in May 1982 on the newly revived service from London Victoria to Venice.

I remembered it.

Not perfectly. I remembered the feeling of it.

My father liked Alan Whicker and I watched him too. Whicker was old-fashionedly pleasant: immaculate, conversational and interested. He could enter somebody else’s world without becoming subordinate to it. People wanted to talk to him. They frequently told him far more than they intended.

The Orient Express film came from a Britain which no longer exists. The passengers are white. So are the train staff, the porters and the audience gathered at Victoria to watch the departure. Porters carry luggage through the station. Passengers settle into restored carriages as the journey from London, across the Channel to Boulogne and onward to Venice, prepares to begin. That journey no longer leaves Victoria. The British leg has gone and the train now begins in Paris. Back then, continental Europe is not reached by airport security, retail corridors and a plastic seat at 35,000 feet. It begins at a railway terminus in London.

The whole thing seemed impossibly exotic when I was young. Sleeping on a train. Dressing for dinner. Crossing countries during the night and waking somewhere with another language outside the window. It belonged to Whicker’s world, not mine.

Then YouTube returned it to me at 55 and I realised that I had become the man who does it.

Not in a dinner jacket on the Orient Express, but on overnight trains through Europe and Asia, travelling towards cities whose names once sounded impossibly distant. The luxury was incidental. The movement was the thing. A railway carriage at night, a border crossed while sleeping, and another place waiting in the morning.

A small part of my father must have understood the attraction. He had once considered joining the Merchant Navy. Instead, he met a woman worth surrendering that possibility for. He married her, built a family and spent much of his life improving the house in which that family lived. His journey became a fixed construction. The horizon was converted into a home.

I tried to make the same exchange.

I did not avoid households, marriage or fatherhood in favour of travel. I constructed several and produced five children. I invested much of my adult life in precisely the bargain my father had made. I believed in it strongly enough to keep allocating years, work, money and loyalty to it.

Those constructions did not hold. Much of the capital had already been spent by the time I accepted that. What remained—time, money, movement and authorship—was placed elsewhere. The life my father considered and relinquished became open to me only after I had spent decades attempting his alternative.

That was the first recognition YouTube gave me.

Then it offered another Alan Whicker film.

The Starter Culture

Swingles Inc. was broadcast on 16 June 1969, more than two years before I was born.

Whicker presents America’s unmarried young adults as a curious new economic force: millions of people with earnings, freedom and few apologies for being single. He visits the Catskills, where men and women gather at a resort to meet one another. He examines a computer dating bureau. He talks to women who intend to work, enjoy themselves and postpone marriage. He talks to men who are beginning to calculate their value differently.

He thinks he has found an unusual American subculture.

What he has actually found is a starter culture.

It sits there in one corner of America like bacteria in a dish, apparently localised and faintly amusing. But the entire new sexual economy is already present: female earnings, contraception, hook-ups and casual sex outside marriage, abortion as the backstop when contraception fails, mobility, weakened supervision, computer records, commercial intermediaries and a growing population whose lives no longer pass directly from the parental home into marriage.

Sexual access is being separated from courtship, childbirth and permanent settlement. This culture will not coexist harmlessly with marriage. It will consume the scarcity, restraint and consequence on which marriage depended.

Once those conditions spread, the culture will convert everything around it into more of itself.

Whicker does not know that. The people he interviews do not know it. They believe they are describing a new American lifestyle.

They are describing the next sixty years.

Before I Was Born

That article owns the full currency argument. What Swingles Inc. added was the date.

I had written about a boy born in 1971, the year the United States closed the gold window. Whicker showed me that the sexual currency was already circulating two years before the boy arrived. The unmarried were a recognised consumer class. Businesses were courting them. Women were deferring marriage. Men were recalculating their value. A computer bureau was storing their preferences and reusing the data for matches, cocktail parties and further events.

I was born after the new system had begun, then taught the rules of the previous one.

Tinder did not invent this market. Smartphones did not invent it. The internet increased its reach, speed and opacity, but the operating system was already running in 1969.

The Catskills weekend was Tinder with physical friction. The participants had to travel, dress, enter a room, dance and speak to one another. Their reputations still existed in a recognisable social world. Opportunities were limited by geography and time. Even the women presented as daringly modern in Whicker’s film likely accumulated fewer partners over years than many women on dating apps now accumulate in months.

The printing press was working. It had not yet been automated.

The Man Who Understood

One man in the film sees further than the others.

He appears to be British, in his thirties, and explains with cheerful simplicity that as he gets older he makes more money. The money increases his appeal and seems to attract younger women.

He laughs.

In 1969 he has already identified the male counterstrategy.

Men and women do not carry the same assets through time. Women begin adulthood holding youth, fertility and sexual desirability. Men commonly begin with little status, limited resources and no demonstrated capability. The woman’s valuable asset is present early and depreciates. The man’s must be constructed and may appreciate for decades.

The old settlement joined those different curves. A woman selected a man whose capability could support a family. A man selected a woman whose youth, fertility, vitality, restraint and character made her worth building that family with.

Once marriage could be delayed, the consequences of delay were not equal.

Whicker remarks upon the glances of women over 25 searching for a man, and men over 30 searching for a woman. The age thresholds sound astonishing now, but they reveal a society which still understood the different clocks. A woman over 25 was consuming reproductive time. A man over 30 was expected to have completed enough economic construction to support a household.

Her urgency came from biology. His clock was different, but his urge to find a woman was not merely convention.

Most men want to find a worthwhile woman in whom they can invest, who will bear their children and give direction to the work of succeeding. The male reproductive window may remain open much longer, but the desire to build, provide, protect and pass something forward is not a social decoration. It is one of the forces which turns male capability into a household and a future.

The market can frustrate that drive without abolishing it. When the probability of finding a worthwhile woman falls while the cost and liability of choosing badly rise, the real-life game offers less reward because effort and outcome are no longer reliably connected. Some men redirect the same competitive and constructive energy into activities where the rules are visible, progress must be earned, competence produces results and the ledger cannot pretend that everybody paid the same price.

Even video games have become more rewarding because the real one has abandoned the fairness of hard currency.

The modern dating market has inverted the presentation without changing the underlying facts. Women in their thirties and forties place “would like children” on profiles as though it were a durable lifestyle preference. The same interface permits them to dismiss men for frivolous reasons, including men for whom fatherhood remains biologically possible. Meanwhile, they fail to realise how much the cheap issuance in earlier years has really cost them.

The boxes are identical. The clocks are not.

The Englishman at the Catskills has already realised this. If his productive value continues to rise and attracts younger women, time is not forcing him towards the same settlement at the same moment. He can continue accumulating and transact later with a younger entrant.

He thinks he has noticed a pleasant personal advantage.

He has articulated one of the governing asymmetries of the future dating market.

The Database Is the Business

The computer dating bureau may be the most extraordinary part of the film.

This is 1969. Personal details and preferences are being entered into a computer so that men and women can be selected for one another. But the bureau already understands that the database has uses beyond a single introduction. The same people and information can be organised into cocktail parties and other events.

The data is the asset.

Acquire unattached people. Record their characteristics. Sort the inventory. Manufacture encounters. Keep the participants circulating.

The contradiction inside modern dating platforms is already present. A permanent successful match removes two customers. Continued searching preserves the inventory. The intermediary earns from circulation, not settlement.

The resort understood the same market physically. Gather single people in one place, sell them accommodation and entertainment, and offer the possibility of romantic success. Their unmarried state is no longer merely an absence awaiting correction. It is a commercial category.

What makes the film historic is that the new machinery is already operating while the old expectation of eventual marriage remains visible. Whicker has caught the two systems occupying the same room.

Two Futures

Alan Whicker’s manner makes the evidence unusually clean.

He does not arrive to condemn the singles or to celebrate them. He is polite, curious and faintly perplexed. He allows people to disclose the system in their own words. The women describe optionality. The men describe delayed male value. The businesses describe the commercial power of the unmarried. The computer promises more efficient selection.

Whicker thinks he is recording a novelty.

He is standing at the source.

YouTube placed two of his films beside one another for me. The first showed me a future I eventually entered. The second showed me a future which had already begun before I was born.

On the Orient Express, I saw the overnight journeys which once appeared impossible and later became part of my life. In the Catskills, I saw the relationship market into which I would be born two years later: the warnings already present, the currency already circulating, the databases already filling and one perceptive man already explaining why time increases rather than destroy his options.

My father saw a worthwhile woman and exchanged the horizon for a home.

I attempted the same exchange several times. Eventually I withdrew with what remained and recovered the horizon. I will find more Orient Expresses and take the exotic journeys I dreamt about as a child, and the only baggage I carry will be my own.

Whicker saw an American curiosity.

The participants saw opportunity.

The businesses saw a market.

None of them could yet see the world it would reproduce.

But there it is, fully alive in 1969, waiting to spread.

Inspecting the Colonies: Shanghai Revisited

October 24, 2026 / Dunwiddie

After nearly four weeks travelling across China, I returned to Shanghai for one final night. It seemed appropriate that an expedition which had begun in Shanghai, inspecting the remnants of the British colonial world, should also end there.

And having spent the intervening weeks examining the German, Russian, Japanese and other European settlements across China, I decided to finish in some style.

I booked myself into the magnificent Moller Villa.

A Night at Moller Villa

Built in the 1930s by the wealthy Swedish businessman Eric Moller, the villa is an extraordinary piece of Shanghai’s colonial past. With its turrets, steep roofs, elaborate woodwork and lavish interiors, it looks more like a European fairy-tale castle than a house in the middle of China.

And unlike so many of the buildings I had encountered elsewhere, this one had survived remarkably intact.

It reminds me greatly of Villa Villekulla from Pippi Langstrømpe. A house I’d also seen in real life, on a visit to Sweden some years ago.

Inside, the opulence continued. Beautiful timber panelling, grand staircases, period furnishings and the sort of craftsmanship that modern hotel developers would struggle to reproduce at any price.

Among the photographs was one suggesting that Moller was rather well connected, including to British royalty.

Moller reportedly left Shanghai in 1941, demonstrating remarkably good timing considering what happened that December. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent occupation of Shanghai’s International Settlement brought the old European world crashing down almost overnight.

Perhaps having friends in high places helped.

Whatever the circumstances of his departure, his extraordinary house remained.

And now, more than eighty years later, I was sleeping in it.

Further coincidence comes when you learn that the last of his children is buried in Ireland and only died last year. There’s another story behind that too, which may get investigated some day.

Dinner Above the Bund

Having stepped up the accommodation, I decided to step up dinner as well.

Shanghai’s Bund contains some of the finest commercial architecture of the colonial era. Its great banks, trading houses and hotels were built by men who expected their institutions to remain there for centuries.

I found myself dining on the rooftop of one of these magnificent Art Deco buildings, looking out across the city.

Norwegian salmon. German Riesling. French Bordeaux.

It occurred to me that the old colonial trade connections were still flourishing rather nicely.

The flags have changed, the empires have disappeared, and the political arrangements that created Shanghai’s extraordinary commercial district have long since been swept away.

Yet here I was, sitting atop a former colonial building, enjoying European food and wine in one of the world’s great trading cities.

Commerce, it seems, has a rather longer memory than politics.

One Last Shanghai Morning

The following morning began with an enormous breakfast buffet at Moller Villa.

I must have spent an hour and a half over breakfast, quite possibly the longest hotel breakfast of my life. There was no particular reason to hurry. My flight was not until the evening, and after thousands of kilometres of railway travel, ferries, hotels and colonial ruins, I was beginning to run out of energy.

There were also things waiting for me back in Ireland.

A return to ordinary life. Some unfinished business. My own kitchen.

And, frankly, the prospect of a huge steak, homemade chips and a decent bottle of red wine after weeks of MSG-laden Chinese food was becoming increasingly attractive.

I took the day slowly.

Before leaving, I made one final visit to the magnificent former Shanghai Race Club, another surviving monument to the extraordinary wealth and confidence of the city’s European residents during the 1930s.

China tea in the Shanghai Race club. A fitting end.

It seemed a suitable place to conclude the expedition.

Inspecting the Colonies: The Verdict

After travelling through Shanghai, Qingdao, Yantai, Dalian, Port Arthur, Harbin and Tianjin, I had formed some fairly definite conclusions.

Shanghai is the great survivor. The British-led commercial world that created so much of the city’s colonial architecture has disappeared politically, but its physical and commercial legacy remains remarkably alive. The Bund is still prosperous, its magnificent banks and trading houses have found new purposes, and the former International Settlement remains one of the most impressive urban environments in China.

The old colony is not merely preserved. It is financially successful.

Qingdao is buzzing. The Germans built an extraordinary city, and much of their architectural legacy survives. The brewery still produces beer, the streets remain recognisably European, and the place has a vitality that many of the other former colonial settlements lack.

The German colony has survived remarkably well, although it is now almost entirely free of Germans.

The Russian colonies are a different story. Harbin in particular has rediscovered its Russian heritage, with restored buildings, churches, restaurants and Russian visitors. Yet the enormous Russian population that once made the city famous has vanished. What survives is increasingly a recreation of a world that no longer exists.

The Russians are returning as tourists, not settlers. Their old colony has become a temporary destination rather than a permanent community.

Tianjin was the greatest disappointment. Its former concessions survive largely as scattered architectural remnants, often buried beneath modern development or transformed into artificial tourist attractions.

The Italian concession has been given a particularly ridiculous coating of decorative kitsch, with beautiful old villas surrounded by inflatables, fountains and assorted Italian-themed nonsense. At least Dalian’s artificial Venice never pretended to be the real thing.

And the fake Irish pub I encountered there seemed an appropriate symbol of what had become of Tianjin’s old European settlements.

The colony was extinct. What remained was largely scenery.

Dalian and Port Arthur offered their own fascinating contrasts. Magnificent Japanese buildings, Russian remnants, extraordinary military history and, in places, some thoroughly depressing attempts to turn serious architectural heritage into theme parks.

The Japanese Art Deco banks and civic buildings were particularly impressive. These were not temporary structures. They were built with permanence in mind, by people who plainly expected to remain.

Port Arthur, meanwhile, revealed an altogether darker history of imperial competition, war and military ambition.

Yantai had been another unexpected pleasure. Its old consular buildings, Mediterranean-looking coastline and remarkable wine industry made it one of the genuine surprises of the journey.

There were wonderful discoveries throughout the expedition. There were also disappointments.

But that was precisely why I had come.

I wanted to see what actually remained, not what the tourist brochures claimed was there.

Goodbye China

By the time I reached Shanghai’s airport, I had travelled more than 5,000 kilometres by Chinese railway in approximately three weeks.

That is roughly twice the length of the entire railway network of the island of Ireland, north and south combined.

An extraordinary distance, covered largely in comfort, through a country whose railway engineering and organisation repeatedly impressed me.

I had seen cities I had wanted to visit for decades. I had walked through the remnants of vanished empires, inspected magnificent buildings, visited old battlefields, travelled through Manchuria, crossed the Bohai Sea by ferry and followed the railway lines that had helped create these colonial settlements in the first place.

Some places exceeded expectations. Others were disappointing. A few were almost unrecognisable from their historical descriptions.

But I had finally seen them for myself.

And it seemed fitting to finish where I had started, in Shanghai.

Four weeks earlier, I had set out to inspect the remains of the British, German, Russian, Japanese and other foreign settlements across China. More than 5,000 kilometres later, I was back where the journey began.

Shanghai had survived better than any of them.

The empires had gone. Much of their architecture remained. And in Shanghai, at least, the commercial world they had helped create was still very much alive.

Goodbye China.

Inspecting the Colonies: Tianjin

October 24, 2026 / Dunwiddie

Tianjin left me with the feeling that a great deal had gone missing.

The city opened to foreign trade in 1860. Over the following decades, nine countries acquired concessions: Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, Belgium and Austria-Hungary. Each secured its own patch of China. Banks, consulates, churches, clubs and houses followed.

For an inspection of the colonies, it was a promising address.

Walking around, I found only scattered remnants in their original condition. Elsewhere, it was often difficult to tell whether I was looking at a new building or an old one that had undergone extensive refurbishment and refitting. I kept wondering how much more there must once have been. I wanted to see the streets before the gaps appeared.

The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 did serious damage to Tianjin. It does not explain everything. Neglect, demolition and redevelopment have also had their turns. An earthquake cannot account for all the decisions made afterwards.

The former Italian concession was possibly the best preserved of those I visited. It was also one of the most disappointing parts of the visit. Lovely Italian Art Nouveau villas had been given a layer of tourist kitsch. Inflatables decorated some of the buildings. Modern fountains and assorted Italian flourishes completed a version of Italy that I doubted had ever existed on those streets.

At least Dalian’s imitation Venice did not pretend to be the real thing. It was an openly invented attraction. Here, genuine Italian buildings had become props in a contrived version of Italy. That was a much more ridiculous kind of fake. The history was already there. It did not need inflatables.

I would rather find one battered original than an entire street of modern imperial fancy dress.

The Astor Hotel was a welcome survivor. Founded in 1863 in the British concession, it had been receiving important visitors almost from the beginning. Ulysses S. Grant met Li Hongzhang there in 1879.

Former street names in the British concession. Nice to see a Tyne Road there.

The museum was well worth visiting. Through the history of one hotel, the old international city became easier to picture: the arrivals, the business, the diplomatic encounters and the extraordinary collection of people who had passed through it. The building had witnessed several different versions of China.

An old photograph I saw there showed the German Club in its original state. It looked magnificent. Its present appearance left me wondering how much of the original I was seeing and how much had been altered through refurbishment and refitting. The photograph made me want to see the building it recorded.

Nearby I found All Saints’, the old Anglican church. Its present building was completed in 1936, following a fire the previous year.

That date stayed with me.

Japan had already taken Manchuria. Within little more than a year, Tianjin itself was being bombed. Yet here were people still commissioning work and rebuilding a church for the years ahead.

A church is a substantial investment in continuity. Its congregation expects to return next Sunday, next Christmas and for many years afterwards. In 1936, they were still making that investment while the world around the concession was becoming steadily more dangerous.

The permanence of buildings can encourage a dangerous assumption about the permanence of the arrangements beneath them.

Reading the signs is only half the task. The other half is acting while departure remains voluntary and the ordinary machinery still works. Waiting for certainty can consume the interval in which a decision is still affordable.

Better five years early than a day too late.

Leaving early has an obvious cost: the years that might still have been enjoyed. Leaving too late can cost the ability to leave at all. Those are very different mistakes.

I took a walk along the Haihe, but by then I was no longer in much of a sightseeing mood. There were more buildings to find and more streets to photograph. My attention had moved towards the future.

After several weeks travelling through China, I wanted some time to consider what came next. Where I wanted to spend my time. Which plans still interested me. What deserved further investment, and what had already received enough.

The river provided somewhere to walk while those thoughts arranged themselves. I had no particular need to fill the remaining hours with another attraction.

I checked out early for the final railway journey of the trip.

Tianjinxi was enormous. After the surviving fragments of the treaty port, the scale of the modern station brought me firmly back to the present. Ahead lay roughly 1,200 kilometres south to Shanghai.

Tianjinxi railway station. Tianjin West, yes there are 2-3 other huge stations in the city

I had spent weeks examining what remained of other people’s plans.

There would be time on the train to consider my own.

Inspecting the Colonies: Harbin

October 23, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I had wanted to see Harbin for a very long time. Ever since reading its history, the idea of a Russian colony in China had lodged itself in my imagination. Eventually, I was going to have to inspect it.

At its peak in the 1920s, Harbin had at least 120,000 Russians, probably more. Schools, churches, businesses, families and a cultural life of their own. An entire Russian city had grown up in Manchuria.

The railway explained it. From 1898, the Chinese Eastern Railway brought Russian imperial ambition across northern China, connecting the Siberian system towards Vladivostok, with a southern branch towards Port Arthur. Harbin became the junction and administrative centre.

A railway requires workshops, offices and people willing to live beside it. Those people then require rather more than a platform.

They built a city.

Railway employees, merchants and families from across the Russian Empire established themselves alongside Chinese workers. Revolution and civil war supplied another wave of inhabitants, with considerably more urgent reasons for being outside Russia. Harbin offered a familiar language, familiar institutions and somewhere to begin again.

I had worked my way north through Shanghai, Qingdao, Yantai, Dalian and Port Arthur. The great Russian railway colony was next.

My ankle, which had been restricting imperial inspections since Dalian, would have preferred somewhere smaller.

I strolled out of Harbin station after an early-morning arrival on the overnight train and went straight to the hotel. It was pleasant and comfortable. Its Russian credentials were less convincing, but I could live with that for the sake of a decent stay.

Today seemed a good day for Unit 731. For those not in the know, the secret Japanese experimentation centre of the 1930-1940s, for biological warfare, frostbite effects and other associated experiments on human beings that would be unlikely to be agreed to outside of coercion on threat of death. I would go there first, return to the hotel, then take an afternoon stroll and begin finding the city.

I turned up with my passport and was surprised to be admitted free of charge.

I had expected a grim place. I had not expected to become quite so conscious of the people arranging my response to it.

The museum felt like a theme park. The film, the tightly defined route and the emotionally charged plaques explaining each set scene left very little for the visitor to do independently.

Had I been about twelve, I would have come out demanding a machine gun to kill Japanese people and avenge the spilled blood of my ancestors.

I felt thoroughly instructed.

“If something is free, you are the product.” The application was becoming clearer. Admission cost nothing. The desired return appeared to be a visitor carrying away the prescribed history and the appropriate hostility.

Then came the railway-line installation.

I dislike emotional railway theatre in Poland too. A line of track is a powerful image, and this one seemed to be working considerably harder than a line of track ought to. The visitor was being invited to complete the scene, supply the associations and arrive at the required feeling.

After the film, route and plaques, the railway struck me as the final check that I had received the message.

It felt fake. Whatever the history of the original railway, the presentation had the quality of a theme-park set. I wanted more of the surviving place. The production was getting in the way.

There was another difficulty. Much of the place had gone.

Clues at the site suggested that a good deal of the destruction might belong to the 1950s onwards. The Japanese had blown up their camp in 1945, but demolition had continued after they left. Historical research records further dismantling of the ruins during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

That made the surviving emptiness rather more complicated than an illustration of Japanese destruction. Chinese rule had contributed its own losses.

Preservation had arrived after several other priorities.

The Russians were another awkward part of the story. From the presentation I encountered, I could have come away thinking the victims were ninety-nine per cent Chinese, with an occasional Korean or Russian around the edges.

The Japanese writer and investigator Seiichi Morimura estimated that up to 30 per cent of the prisoners experimented on at Pingfang were Russian. Close to a third. People from Harbin’s Russian community, as well as Soviet captives.

Accounts describe victims being rounded up from Harbin’s streets. Testimony identifies Russian women and children among those used for experiments. Soviet prisoners were also transferred to the unit.

The people whose buildings I had come to find had been taken into this place too. Their part in it deserved rather more than a walk-on appearance.

In the version presented to me, the Chinese state emerged spotless. I left wondering about the history which had failed to make the production. Where I could agree to some extent, was the anger towards how the perpetrators walked free and the whole thing was hushed up. Fine to say that now, but back then the experiment results and knowledge were considered way too valuable. Generally, there was huge denial for many years that this place even existed. The museum, mysteriously enough for the naive, doesn’t question this enough. I would suggest the complicity in keeping this quiet and using the knowledge gained was very valuable to many people, regardless of nationality.

Back at the hotel, I rested before going out for my first afternoon stroll.

It was cold. I was tired. Harbin initially did little to reward the effort. Russian remnants stood alone, detached from the streets and neighbours which might once have explained them. Too much had been obliterated.

Even the station proved to be a modern building wearing an older one’s clothes. Opened in 2018, it was an enlarged recreation of the demolished Russian-built station.

I had arrived in the Russian colony through a reconstruction of its railway station. Finding the originals was going to take some walking.

Further exploration improved matters. Old Russia was still there, but it had to be sought out. The remains extended well beyond the obvious tourist streets. Farther out, away from the cathedral and the presentation arranged around it, I kept finding relics of the city I had read about.

That mattered. A population of 120,000 had occupied rather more ground than a convenient photographic backdrop.

The cathedral had acquired women posing in Baroque costumes. History’s dressing-up department was doing its best. Apparently, the fall of an empire need not interfere with a good photograph.

Out in Majiagou, in Nangang, St Alexis—Alekseyev—was a genuine Russian church. Its parishioners had paid for the brick building, which was consecrated in 1935.

The date doesn’t necessarily fit established narratives and raises questions about how quickly populations and their long term investments can get smashed by subsequent events.

Harbin was already under Japanese rule. Here was a Russian congregation finishing a Russian Orthodox church inside Japanese-controlled Manchukuo. Architecture, nationality and political control refused to arrange themselves into one simple story.

The parishioners had been carrying on with their lives. Governments might change; there was still a church to finish.

The railway workers had encountered a less accommodating version of that arrangement. The 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement specified equal representation between Chinese and Soviet nationals in railway employment. Russians who remained stateless found their livelihoods under pressure. Some registered as Soviet citizens to preserve their jobs. Others had to find work elsewhere.

An early exercise in “diversity”. The wrong sort of Russian could discover how little his “white privilege” was worth.

In 1935, the Soviets sold their railway interest to Japanese-controlled Manchukuo. More upheaval. More departures. The buildings could remain while the arrangements supporting the people inside them were dismantled.

The railway bridge was a much happier discovery.

Beautiful engineering. I walked its full length.

Completed in 1901, the old bridge across the Songhua gave the whole enterprise its proper scale. These men had intended to move trains across a great river and connect an empire through northern China. Standing on what they had built made the ambition considerably easier to appreciate.

The bridge earned the walk. My ankle was entitled to its own opinion.

Harbin reminded me of Ipoh.

I had encountered a similar sadness there: buildings carrying traces of people whose lives were no longer readily visible. Here, the gaps were particularly difficult to ignore. Houses survived, but too much of the world around them had disappeared.

There was pain in the place. I also sensed relief. People had reached Harbin after leaving something worse. They had found work, made homes and begun relationships. There must have been happy children in those houses, and days when the great political catastrophe was somebody else’s business.

The residents had not spent every morning waiting to become history.

There had been good days too.

More had been lost long after Japan’s defeat. Russian-era buildings were damaged or demolished, including St Nicholas Cathedral during the Cultural Revolution. Later, the surviving foreignness became useful again, this time as heritage and an attraction.

More Decay with in-built historic Energy

The sequence was familiar by now. Remove much of the old city, then discover a market for what it used to look like.

Still, enough remained to justify looking. Cobbled streets. The Chinese Art Deco area. Buildings which rewarded the walk out to find them. Smoked sausage on sticks and Harbin beer supplied a more agreeable form of historical continuity.

I had finally found something of the Russian heart of the city.

A rare Russian restoration in the heart of the city. Dwarfed by a shopping centre.

On 16 October, I left on the 16:15 sleeper to Tianjin. Sixteen hours south. By five it was already getting dark, and the landscape was changing beyond the train.

Harbin went into the notebook. Tianjin was next.

There were still colonies to inspect before Ireland.

Inspecting the Colonies: Dalian

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I limped into Dalian with my suitcase.

Fortunately, the ferry from Yantai had provided a free bus to Dalian Station. This removed one stage of the evening’s transport arrangements, leaving me to reach the hotel and discover the best bed I had slept in for quite a while.

There were more colonies to inspect. They could wait until morning.

Dalian had been developed around the ambitions of two empires. Russia wanted a port connected to its great railway system across Asia. Japan inherited the Russian position after the war and built upon it with considerable confidence. Both left architecture which suggested that they expected to remain.

My ankle imposed a more modest timetable.

The following day I did not walk far, but I reached Russian Street. A few amazing buildings survived. Unfortunately, the street around them had been turned into a sad theme park.

There is a difference between preserving an old quarter and converting it into an attraction. The buildings may remain while the atmosphere which made them worth visiting disappears.

Hotel 1896 did the best job. Elsewhere, I found myself trying to separate the surviving Russian city from the presentation laid over it. The architecture deserved better than its surroundings.

The civic centre was more impressive. Grand Japanese-era bank buildings stood with the confidence of institutions which had not expected to become historical curiosities. Art Deco was part of the architectural language, but the more striking quality was permanence.

These were not the buildings of men planning to pack up the following season. They had established a city and built as though its future belonged to them.

History had other arrangements.

I had noodles near the hotel and returned to the excellent bed. The first day’s inspection had been limited, but Dalian had already justified the crossing.

The next morning I was up early for Port Arthur.

Lüshun deserves its own post. The forts, harbour, Japanese monuments and Russian railway remains made it far more than a day trip from Dalian. I returned exhausted, had evening noodles again and went back to bed.

The colonies were proving easier to inspect than to walk through.

On the final day I went to Nanshan, where the Japanese quarter presented much the same problem as Russian Street. Another sad theme park, with most of the restaurants closed down. Whatever the intended effect, a street of closed restaurants does not convey much life.

The better discoveries were off the main streets. Beautiful Japanese Art Deco remained, away from the part which had been arranged for visitors. As in Shanghai, the surviving city became more interesting once I stepped away from its designated presentation.

I also found a lovely Chinese park and sat in the sun.

For a while, there was nothing to inspect. Just a place to sit, some sunshine and an ankle which appreciated the interruption.

Then I went to Venice.

I had not expected to include it in a single day’s exploration of Dalian, but the city had supplied a kitschy version of Italy alongside its Russian and Japanese remains.

Venice was at least straightforward about being an imitation. It had not lost an earlier life in the process of becoming a tourist attraction. The attraction was the whole point.

Japan, China and Venice in a day. Quite an itinerary for a man who had arrived limping.

Back at the hotel, I collected my luggage and successfully left behind my power bank, pen and Hugo Boss T-shirt.

Never mind.

The next stage was an overnight train north to Harbin, following the old imperial railway corridor. For the Russians, it had been a connection into the Trans-Siberian system. For the Japanese, it became the route of the Asia Express.

It depended which empire we were talking about. Tonight, China was providing the sleeper.

Then Dalian supplied one final discovery.

After settling into my carriage, I looked out and spotted the old Russian railway station, tucked away in the far corner of the modern station complex.

There it was.

After the tourist streets, the closed restaurants and the imported Venice, an original piece of the Russian city had appeared beside the railway which explained why it had been built.

I had spent part of the day walking through imitation.

Dalian ended with an original.

Inspecting the Colonies: Lüshun

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

Lüshun was somewhere I had wanted to visit for years.

I first discovered it as Port Arthur while reading about the Russo-Japanese War: a conflict almost forgotten in Britain and much of Europe, but certainly not forgotten here, in Japan or in Moscow.

The war announced the arrival of Japan as a modern great power. Much of the world expected Russia to win. Russia was a vast European empire with seemingly limitless reserves of men. Japan had emerged from feudal isolation only a few decades earlier.

Japan went for it and won.

At the centre of the struggle was one of the finest natural harbours in northern China. The Qing government had begun developing Port Arthur as a naval base in the nineteenth century. Russia leased it in 1898, expanded the harbour and fortifications, and connected it to the Chinese Eastern Railway and the wider Trans-Siberian system.

Then Japan attacked.

The siege of Port Arthur anticipated the industrial slaughter of the First World War. Trenches, concrete forts, barbed wire, machine guns, mines and heavy artillery turned hills into killing grounds. Infantrymen were repeatedly sent against positions designed to destroy them.

The figures vary, but the scale does not. The Japanese Third Army suffered about 58,000 battle casualties during the siege, while roughly 34,000 more men became sick. Russian land casualties ran above 30,000, and tens of thousands of survivors entered captivity when the fortress surrendered in January 1905.

It was victory by industrial attrition.

More than a century later, I arrived at Lüshun station and immediately knew that I had entered minor tourist territory. A man intercepted me outside and began trying to sell me a taxi tour.

I declined.

It must be getting difficult for the traditional guides. A foreign visitor can now arrive in an unfamiliar Chinese town having already used artificial intelligence to identify every site, place them in order and obtain their Chinese names. A taxi-hailing application will then summon a private driver directly to the pavement.

Mine carried me to the East Jiguanshan battlefield for 9.5 yuan.

The visitor centre had a large car park, so the place must become busy at certain times of year. On that particular day, beautifully, it was almost empty. I bought my ticket and walked uphill towards the North Fort, one of the positions around which the final destruction of the Russian defence took place.

The Chinese have done a good job of maintaining the site without polishing the life out of it. Essential work has been completed, paths made safe and several Russian guns preserved. Yet much of the fort has simply been left where the battle abandoned it, slowly ageing on the hillside.

That is as it should be.

The concrete remains pocked with bullet and shell damage. Underground passages lead into ruined chambers. The Japanese mined their way through the defences and blew open a breach before forcing an entrance. Walking through the place where they broke in, with almost nobody else present, conveyed more than another immaculate military museum ever could.

The most sombre point was the casemate where a Japanese 280-millimetre howitzer shell made a direct hit on 15 December 1904. General Roman Kondratenko, regarded as the heart of the Russian defence, was killed there with members of his staff. Port Arthur surrendered eighteen days later.

The Japanese later erected a granite monument at the place where he died.

It is still standing.

I was also surprised to find that the main Japanese war monument within the fort was still standing and appeared to be well maintained.

That surprised me. China and Japan do not enjoy the easiest historical relationship, and I have repeatedly noticed that Japanese buildings in China tend to meet a more brutal fate than Russian or European ones. Yet here the Chinese had retained not only the Russian fort, but the monuments erected by the Japanese victors—including their memorial to a respected Russian enemy.

Most of the time I wandered alone. I encountered one small group of Russians who had evidently come to inspect their own country’s imperial remains. They were the first white people I had seen for several days. Then they moved on and the fort became quiet again.

Barracks, but very reminiscent of El Jem Amphitheatre in Tunisia

The sun appeared briefly. From the high ground, the military logic of the place became obvious. Russia had invested heavily in these forts because they commanded the approaches to a superb harbour. The height, the field of view and the complexity of the defensive system turned the landscape itself into a weapon.

I had intended to continue up to the Wangtai Battery. Unfortunately, an injured ankle made the climb unwise, and the courtesy buses did not appear to be operating. I therefore summoned another private driver for the princely sum of about ten yuan and continued into central Lüshun.

The ordinary streets contained another layer of the old Japanese city. Houses from the 1920s and 1930s were still being used, but not appreciated. They remained recognisable beneath later additions, neglect and decay. I did not photograph them. They were not exhibits. They were simply old buildings being consumed by ordinary life.

The grander Japanese architecture had fared better. Several Art Deco buildings remained around the centre, including former Japanese banks which had become Chinese banks. Empires departed. Banking survived.

The square in Lushun. Unknown to me the local matchmakers are approaching…

I bought some lunch and sat in the square. Two Chinese women approached and began a conversation through translation apps. One told me that she was sixty-five. Her friend appeared to be about the same age.

They asked where I was from.

Then they asked my age.

Then whether I had ever been married.

Then whether I had children.

At first I assumed that this was ordinary curiosity. By the time they asked whether I would like to marry again, I realised that I was being assessed.

Chinese marriage markets are famously direct. Years of the one-child policy concentrated the future of many families into a single son or daughter, watched by two parents and four grandparents. Public matchmaking became family business. Age, education, property, occupation and income are not treated as mysterious matters to be discovered after six months of courtship. They are market information.

The women informed me that they could find me a good Chinese woman.

Then came the decisive question.

What was my monthly income?

My God. I had been placed on the Lüshun matchmaking circuit.

It was one of the few times in my life that I had encountered women who stated the market mechanism openly instead of hiding its terms behind words such as “romance”, “love” and “security”. In this respect, China is light years ahead of the West, where men have yet to wake up to the truth.

I had learned long ago that when women began asking about a man’s income and assets, it was never a good move for the man.

By now the conversation had become hilarious because it was proceeding exactly like the Chinese marriage-market videos I had watched before the trip. The only sensible course was to destroy my own valuation before somebody produced a suitable candidate.

I explained that five children had been expensive. So had the divorce. I had also just quit my job.

“Oh. What a shame.”

Their interest evaporated. Fortunately, I had finished my lunch. We smiled, I thanked them for the conversation, and I left the market with my freedom intact.

There was one more imperial monument to inspect.

Another private driver carried me up Baiyu Mountain to the great Japanese tower overlooking the harbour. Originally called the Tower in Honour of Loyalty, it was completed in 1909 to commemorate the Japanese dead of the siege.

It is an extraordinary imperial structure: 66.8 metres of stone, concrete, columns and calculated vertical power. Like so many imperial monuments, it reaches backwards into the architectural language of Greece and Rome while proclaiming the arrival of something aggressively modern.

The official explanation is that the tower resembles a memorial candle, with its pointed summit modelled on a 280-millimetre howitzer shell. Perhaps. The distinctly phallic alternative hardly requires a trained eye. Victorious empires do not normally choose their vertical symbols by accident.

Whatever its symbolism, the monument is magnificent. So is the view. From the summit, the harbour, naval base and surrounding coastline are laid out below. The strategic importance of Lüshun becomes undeniable. It controls a superb natural port near the approaches to the Bohai Sea, with the Korean peninsula and Japan beyond. The flags have changed, but the geography has not. The Chinese Navy has every reason to value the position as highly as the Russians and Japanese did.

The old Russian naval base is now a Chinese naval base

Again, I was amazed that the tower had survived. A large fortress-like Japanese building beside it had not been treated so well. Its entrances had been bricked up and the structure was being left to decay. The monument remained dominant over the town while part of the complex beside it quietly rotted away.

I ordered another private driver for the descent and entered what I believed was the local railway station as my destination.

It was the wrong station.

This proved to be the best navigational error of the day.

The car deposited me at the old Lüshun railway station, a beautiful Russian-style building of yellow walls, white timbering, green roofs and a domed tower. Passenger services ended in 2014, but the building has been restored and remains one of the finest surviving stations of the old imperial railway system.

Lüshun was the southern terminus of the Russian-built branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway, connected northwards into the Trans-Siberian network. The line joined the port directly to the machinery of Russian expansion across Asia.

Then I noticed a much smaller boarded wooden building on the opposite side. I assumed that it had been a temporary shop from the period when the grand station was built. Its survival seemed extraordinary amid the high-rise apartments surrounding it.

The truth was even better.

That modest building appears to have been the original Russian station, opened when the railway reached Lüshun in 1903 and later used by the railway police. The elegant station opposite was begun from a Russian design but completed under Japanese rule after the war.

The temporary building was the original. The building which looked perfectly Russian had been finished by Japan. Lüshun had compressed the transfer of empire into two structures facing one another across a road.

I had meant to find the railway station. By selecting the wrong one, I had found both.

After a few photographs, I summoned one final private driver to the correct modern station and took the metro back to central Dalian.

I returned to the hotel exhausted and deeply contented. Lüshun had existed in my mind for years as a place in history books: Port Arthur, the great siege, the moment Japan announced itself and the industrial battlefield which warned Europe what was coming.

Now I had walked through the breach, stood where Kondratenko died, looked down upon the harbour, been assessed by the local matchmakers and discovered the remains of two empires because I entered the wrong destination.

The wrong station had been the right ending.

One Billion Euros a Day

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I watched the European Union discuss its trade deficit with China. Then I went to Yantai Port and saw the answer.

This morning, before leaving my hotel in Yantai, I watched Euronews discussing the latest round of trade talks between China and the European Union.

The central figure was almost too large to absorb.

In 2025, the European Union imported €559.4 billion of goods from China and exported €199.6 billion in return. The deficit was €359.8 billion.

Almost one billion euros a day.

Okay, before I go further, it disgusts me to conflate the word Europe, a geographic entity, a continent and European Union, an ailing, sickly political entity. From now, the rest of this story will clearly refer to the EU, excluding other European countries like the UK, that have essential destroyed their manufacturing and productivity in a similar way.

Where I would praise my historic homeland is that there’s still some kind of structural belief dating back to the Victorian era, in free trade. I see the EU putting up desperate barriers everywhere, to the extent that even receiving a parcel in Ireland from outside the EU now attracts at least 2 fees, possibly more, depending on how many items you dare to order. The audacity of anyone who doesn’t just buy it from Amazon. I digress. Back to what was on the TV.

The discussion was about what China might concede, what the EU might restrict and how the relationship could be “rebalanced”. There was talk of subsidies, market access and unfair competition. All of these may form part of the calculation.

But nobody appeared willing to ask the more dangerous question.

What has the EU done to its own ability to produce?

The Cost of Making Things

the EU has spent years making reliable energy expensive.

Germany closed its last nuclear power stations. Coal was burdened before dependable replacements were ready. Cheap Russian gas disappeared. Taxes, carbon costs, regulation and political indecision accumulated on top of one another. The result is not theoretical. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity for energy-intensive industry in the European Union cost more than 50 per cent more than in China in 2025.

Then the EU expresses surprise when energy-intensive production moves elsewhere.

China is not sentimental about the energy required to run a civilisation. It burns coal, builds nuclear power stations, dams rivers, covers enormous areas with solar panels and erects wind turbines at scale. The energy source may change. The governing principle does not.

The power must exist.

The EU increasingly treats energy as a moral performance. China treats it as an industrial input.

The same difference appears in labour.

The EU has made work expensive and non-participation viable. It pays people to be useless, sometimes for generations.

At the same time, it imports large numbers of people from dubious countries without regard to intelligence, usefulness or cultural fit. Many become useless drains on the society that admitted them, consuming more in welfare, housing, healthcare, policing and public services than they produce in tax or useful work. That is not labour supply. It is parasitic immigration.

The EU taxes the productive economy twice: first to support non-contribution, and again to absorb the damage produced by bad selection.

Several Chinese people I spoke to were genuinely baffled by this.

“Why are you doing this?” they asked. “We would never accept it.”

They were not presenting an elaborate political theory. They simply could not understand why a civilisation would penalise the industries and people that sustain it while subsidising those who do not.

It is a fair question.

At Yantai Port

Then I switched off the television and went to the port.

The answer was waiting there in steel.

Yantai Port was full of ships: cargo vessels, ferries and working craft of every size. Cranes moved above them. Goods were being loaded, passengers processed and routes maintained across the Bohai Sea and beyond.

This was commerce. Not commerce as a paragraph in an EU communiqué. Not commerce as a political slogan. Goods, machinery, labour and capital were physically moving.

Yet the great ships were only half the scene. Along the water were smaller oyster and shellfish beds, tended by ordinary people operating at an entirely different scale.

The port contained both ends of a functioning economy: immense industrial capacity and small productive enterprise sharing the same stretch of water.

The sea was not scenery. It was working.

A Cabin to Dalian

My own place in this machinery was a first-class private cabin on the ferry to Dalian.

It was clean, comfortable and mine for the six-hour crossing. I could close the door, lie down and sleep while the ship carried me across the water. The equivalent in the EU would either not exist or would be priced at a level I would refuse to pay.

China is not frictionless. The procedures can be opaque. The ticketing can be peculiar. Translation can become an expedition of its own. The efficiency is not always polished.

But it works.

When a practical problem appears, somebody usually tries to solve it. The passenger is moved, the cargo is loaded and the ship leaves. The Chinese system can be clumsy at the edges and formidable at the centre.

The EU has become increasingly skilled at the opposite: polished presentation surrounding declining capacity.

The Wrong Negotiation

China certainly supports its industries. It protects parts of its market, directs credit, builds infrastructure and uses the power of the state to advance national production. The EU may reasonably respond to those things.

But they are not the whole explanation.

A subsidy cannot load a ship. A tariff cannot manufacture competence. Political protection cannot substitute indefinitely for abundant energy, trained labour, functioning ports, industrial scale and a culture which still expects systems to produce a result.

The EU wants China to buy more of their goods while steadily making their goods harder and more expensive to produce. It wants Chinese prices without Chinese scale, Chinese infrastructure or Chinese seriousness. It wants the output while rejecting many of the inputs.

So the officials fly to Beijing and ask China to rebalance the result.

The imbalance was also made in the EU.

Tariffs may slow the ships. Regulations may obstruct their cargo. Trade negotiations may purchase time. None of them will make energy cheaper, rebuild a closed factory or turn subsidised non-participation into productive work.

By evening, this ferry will reach Dalian. Six hours across the water, with a private cabin in which I can sleep. Beyond the port waits the Russian and Japanese history of the city. Behind me, Yantai will continue loading ships and tending shellfish beds.

Brussels will continue talking about China.

The real question is not why China sells so much to the EU. It is why the EU chose to make itself so expensive, so administratively heavy and so tolerant of non-contribution that buying from China became the rational decision.

The deficit is not merely something China did to the EU.

It is the invoice the EU writes to itself one billion Euros at a time.

What China Remembered About Drink

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I came to China expecting bullet trains, smart factories and the remains of old empires. I did not expect to find Europe’s drinks cabinet waiting for me.

Everyone else had left the cellar when the woman came over with a single glass of red wine.

“Please taste our best red wine,” she said. “This is the one that won the awards.”

The Chinese visitors had gone. I was the only person left. She had not poured it for the group. She poured it for me.

It was excellent.

Perhaps she had watched me tasting the earlier wines and decided I knew what I was doing. I had taken a wine course once. One of my best investments in choosing wines appropriate to the food. Or perhaps Changyu’s marketing department had simply identified an open flank.

That should have been the end of the tasting. It was not.

Later, I discovered that my entrance ticket included another tasting in the 1892 House. I had not expected a second tasting at all. More glasses appeared, properly arranged, with small snacks between the wines to clear the palate. The whole thing was controlled, informed and generous.

I had never been treated to a wine experience like it in Europe.

This was becoming a pattern. Alcohol was one of the discoveries of China that I had never expected to make.

At the Source

Modern Qingdao was a German creation. The Germans planned and built the port, streets, railway, sewers and public buildings of the new city. Among what they built was the brewery founded in 1903, which remains there today.

I knew about that German brewing inheritance before arriving. It was part of the reason for going.

What I had not expected was how good the beer would taste.

Tsingtao sold in Britain is still brewed in Qingdao rather than produced under licence. But a beer shipped halfway around the world cannot arrive with the same freshness as one drunk at its source. Time, storage, temperature and transport all intervene. There is also more than one Tsingtao. At the original 1903 brewery I could taste different versions beside each other rather than treating the name as though it described one uniform industrial liquid.

The beer was clean, fresh and alive. It tasted better there because it belonged there.

Rule 1 of Travel photos failed, take the photo before beginning enjoying yourself

That distinction matters. Modern alcohol companies teach consumers to recognise a label. Older drinking cultures recognised a product, a place and a method. The name was evidence of origin rather than a substitute for it.

Qingdao had preserved both.

A Polish Brewer in Russian Harbin

Then came Harbin.

The Harbin brewery predates Tsingtao. It was founded in 1900 by Jan Wróblewski, a Polish entrepreneur from the Russian Empire, while Harbin was being built as a Russian imperial railway city on the Chinese Eastern Railway, connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Harbin 1900 describes itself on the label as a 100 per cent pure malt lager. That is an excellent claim. Malt is the traditional foundation of beer, before modern mass producers discovered the cheaper ingredients with which part of it could be replaced.

More than a century later, the beer still carries the history of the city that produced it.

The history was becoming unusually neat. German and British capital had established the brewery in the German-built city of Qingdao. A Pole from the Russian Empire had established the brewery in Russian imperial Harbin. China had taken the knowledge, absorbed the machinery and kept the beer.

The foreign presence receded. The breweries remained.

Wine Country

Yantai was the greater surprise.

I had not known that I was travelling into the centre of Chinese wine production. Qingdao is not far away, yet Yantai’s position on the northern side of the Shandong Peninsula gives it a different coastal climate and a serious wine industry.

Changyu was founded there in 1892 by Zhang Bishi, who brought in European vines and an Austro-Hungarian winemaker. It went on to produce China’s first industrially made wine and later its first brandy. That is enough history to understand the point: this was not an invented crest pasted onto a bottle last Tuesday.

The cellar was old, cool and convincing. The barrels and brickwork were real. So were the modern displays and the technology built around them. China had not turned the place into a mausoleum. It had kept the history working.

This was where the woman had singled me out after the scheduled tasting and brought over the award-winning red. It was not another sample left on the table. It was not part of the tasting flight. It was a separate glass of their best wine, poured for me after everyone else had gone.

The history mattered. The glass mattered more.

Then came the second tasting in the 1892 House—also included in my ticket, and entirely unexpected. More wines. Small snacks between them. Proper presentation. Changyu understood that heritage is not merely something to print on a label. It must be made tangible.

Old Methods and New Machines

I had seen the same principle in Chinese factories.

China does not regard inheritance and technology as opposites. It will retain an old cellar, install an interactive museum above it, build a smart factory outside the city and sell the resulting product through a phone. The old method is preserved where it still produces value. New technology is added where it improves scale, control or presentation.

Europe increasingly does something different. It retains the name, sells the history and alters the product.

China inherited European methods and turned them into living industries. Europe increasingly retains the trademarks while reducing what stands behind them.

What Drink Is For

China also remembers that alcohol has a function beyond intoxication.

It is a social solvent. It greases the machinery of business. It turns meals into negotiations and acquaintances into temporary friends. It softens courtship, supplies ritual and allows things to be said indirectly that might otherwise remain unsaid.

Europe once understood this without needing it explained. The pub, the wine table, the brewery and the village bar were pieces of social infrastructure. Alcohol belonged to place, season, work, courtship, argument and reconciliation.

Now it is increasingly treated as a taxable unit delivered by a multinational brand.

When the Name Replaces the Beer

Stella Artois and Newcastle Brown Ale are useful examples.

Both genuinely date from the 1920s, and the original Stella brewery at Leuven has a much older history. But the existence of a historical name does not make the modern product historically continuous. The British Stella version was reduced from 5 per cent alcohol to 4.8 per cent in 2012 and then to 4.6 per cent in 2020. Ireland received the same reduced-strength product. The branding, chalice and ancient dates remained in place while the liquid changed beneath them.

Newcastle Brown Ale suffered similarly. Originally brewed in a brewery next to St James’ Park, I could smell the brewery as a child when my Dad drove us through Newcastle centre to our Grandmothers house. It firstly moved out of the city centre to be brewed across the Tyne in Gateshead. Arguably, perhaps, it retained much of the heritage and ingredient sources, but is now brewed at Tadcaster, and if I read the ingredients, I find myself wondering how much of that was in the original recipe.

The names carried the history. The beer no longer had to.

Moretti possesses a real Italian lineage, but much of the beer sold under that name in Britain is now brewed in Britain. Place has been detached from provenance. Madrí dispenses with even that inconvenience. It was created in 2020, brewed in Yorkshire and dressed immediately in the costume of Madrid.

Europe has become very good at manufacturing foreignness.

Meanwhile, real British beers have disappeared. I remember Flowers. I remember Courage Directors, a rich, full-bodied bitter that tasted like beer rather than a chilled advertising campaign. The Flowers brewery itself closed in 1968. The name wandered through later contract-brewing arrangements after the place and company behind it had gone. Directors is now listed as no longer brewed.

These were not obscure liquids preserved only in enthusiasts’ notebooks. They were recognisable British beers. Once lost, they cannot be recreated merely by transferring the trademark to another factory.

The destruction continues. Britain ended 2025 with 137 fewer breweries than it had begun the year. Historic cask ales have been deleted, breweries closed and product ranges reduced as ownership has concentrated.

The knowledge still exists. The structure no longer rewards it.

The State at the Cellar Door

Tax has accelerated the decline.

Ireland imposes €3.19 of excise on an ordinary 750ml bottle of still wine and then charges 23 per cent VAT on the wine, the commercial margin and its own excise. The €3.19 duty therefore costs the buyer €3.92 at the till. On a €15 bottle, €5.99—almost 40 per cent of the entire price—is direct tax. Ireland also imposes minimum unit pricing, preventing a 12.5 per cent bottle from being sold below roughly €7.40 regardless of what the wine is worth.

Denmark uses the same method. The wine duty on a normal bottle is 8.45 kroner. Once 25 per cent VAT has been applied to that tax, it costs the buyer 10.56 kroner. On a bottle selling for 100 kroner, 28.45 kroner is excise and VAT.

Britain now charges about £2.87 of duty on a 75cl bottle at 12.5 per cent, followed by 20 per cent VAT. The consumer therefore pays £3.44 merely for the excise and the VAT imposed upon it, before considering the VAT on the wine and commercial margin. On a £15 bottle, approximately £5.37—nearly 36 per cent—is direct tax.

The state taxes the wine and then taxes its own tax.

Germany proves that this is a choice. It levies no excise duty on still wine. A €15 bottle carries 19 per cent VAT, amounting to €2.39 within the shelf price. The equivalent Irish bottle contains €5.99 in excise and VAT: two and a half times as much direct consumption tax.

Europe then wonders why drinkers retreat towards industrial products supported by enormous economies of scale.

Manufactured Sweetness

The wine market offers its own version of the same decline.

Vineyards are being grubbed up in Europe as consumption falls. At the same time, supermarket shelves fill with mass-produced imports whose principal achievement is consistency. Much of the Australian wine sold in Europe is absolute rubbish. Some of it is disgustingly sweet, with a suspiciously manufactured sweetness closer to an alcoholic soft drink than a proper wine. I do not trust it, and I will not buy it.

The contrast with Yantai was difficult to miss. In Europe I increasingly inspect bottles for signs that the contents have been manipulated into anonymous sweetness. In China I found a producer placing several wines in front of me, explaining the differences and providing food between them so that each could be tasted properly.

China was treating wine as a product worth understanding. Europe’s mass market increasingly treats it as a branded alcoholic delivery system.

What China Remembered

None of this was what I expected to find.

I came to China looking for scale, speed and new technology. I found those things. I travelled on the trains, walked through the cities and watched factories trying to remove human inefficiency from production.

But alongside the future I found old European knowledge still at work.

German brewing in the city the Germans built at Qingdao. A Polish brewer from the Russian Empire in Harbin. European vines and an Austro-Hungarian winemaker in Yantai. Malt, cellars, oak barrels, brandy and wine. Techniques imported during the age of concessions and railway empires, absorbed by China and carried forward after the foreigners had gone.

Europe exported the methods. China kept making the products.

Europe kept the labels, reduced the strength, moved the breweries, taxed the bottles and sold the remaining history through advertising.

China learned to turn heritage into an experience. Europe learned to turn it into a trademark.

I came to China expecting to see the future. I did not expect it to remind me what drink had once been: craft, place, hospitality and social movement.

China had not merely remembered how to make it.

It had remembered what it was for.

Inspecting the Colonies: Yantai

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie / 0 Comments

I had never heard of Yantai until I began working out a route north through China. Then it appeared for two entirely different reasons.

It was the port from which I could take the ferry across the Bohai Sea to Dalian. It had also been one of the great treaty ports of northern China, with a remarkable collection of European consulates and houses still standing around Yantai Hill.

A ferry and a lost colony on the same route. Two nights seemed sufficient.

Yantai opened as a treaty port in 1861. The British established the first consulate. The French, Americans, Germans, Danes and others followed, until the hill and harbour had acquired an entire foreign quarter.

And so I stopped to inspect the colony.

I booked a hotel beside the railway station. It was a surprise to discover that the passenger station on Beima Road was not completed until 1958. For most of its commercial history, Yantai had faced the sea. The railway came late to a city built around ships.

The approach by train was another surprise. Under a clear blue sky, the low hills, fields and coastal light looked at moments more like Tuscany or Greece than the China presented to us on television. Stepping out into the Yantai sunshine only strengthened the impression.

It was no surprise to discover later that this was wine country.

I spent much of the first day wandering around Yantai Hill. The old consulates, residences and trading buildings had not been cleared away or buried beneath a grand redevelopment. They remained among the trees and paths, forming something close to an open-air museum.

Look like late British Victorian to me, on Yantai Hill

Down by the harbour, the European buildings stood with modern Yantai rising behind them. The German presence was easy to spot. I later discovered that the neighbouring building was Danish. Of course it was.

German and Danish embassies, dwarfed by modernity

The contrast was the interesting part. The old foreign quarter had not been left as a dead imperial exhibit. It sat inside a working Chinese port, with ships in the harbour, towers behind it and a modern city continuing to grow around the remains.

The next major stop was the Changyu Wine Culture Museum. I bought the premium ticket without quite understanding what it included, then found myself tasting wine in the old cellar and later receiving an entire second tasting in the 1892 House. After the first tasting, when everyone else had left, one of the women brought me a separate glass of their best award-winning red.

The wine deserves its own post. It is enough to say here that it was excellent, the museum was far better than expected, and it revealed another side of China I had not imagined finding.

Yantai also supplied a more immediate discovery. Near the hotel was a small place serving wonton soup for about £1.30. I went back every morning. Whether my new addiction is to wontons or monosodium glutamate remains under investigation.

Then it was time for the ferry.

As a two-day stop, Yantai had been almost perfect: Mediterranean light, Victorian consulates, Chinese wine, cheap wonton soup and a working harbour from which I could continue north.

I had inspected the colony and found, regrettably, that the Europeans had all left.

The Chinese had kept their houses and made a living museum of the hill.

Dalian was waiting. There were more colonies to inspect.

Inspecting the Colonies: Qingdao

October 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

A German Colony, a Japanese Interlude, and a Rather Good Brewery

There are places I have wanted to visit for years, and Qingdao was one of them. The very improbability of a German colony on the Chinese coast had always fascinated me. More remarkable still was the suggestion that much of it remained intact.

The Germans called it Kiautschou, and they did not have long to enjoy it. Having acquired the territory in 1898, they began constructing their little piece of Germany on the Yellow Sea. By 1914, Germany had found itself on the wrong side of the First World War, and Japan arrived to relieve the Kaiser of his Chinese possessions.

Sixteen years. Not much time to build a colony, let alone leave a lasting impression.

Yet walking around Qingdao, I found myself astonished by what the Germans had achieved.

The railway station is magnificent. The former governor’s residence is a fabulous Art Nouveau mansion, complete with elaborate interiors, beautiful fireplaces and all the architectural confidence of an empire that evidently expected to remain for centuries.

Elsewhere, German buildings are scattered throughout the old town, connected by broad streets and substantial infrastructure. There is the famous pier, the beginnings of a modern port, and, naturally, a brewery.

The Germans had arrived with plans for something rather grand.

And judging by what remains, they were making excellent progress when history interrupted them.

Indeed, their influence proved so enduring that, more than a century after their departure, the Chinese are still borrowing from their architectural vocabulary. Modern shopping centres reproduce German façades, while the newer railway developments echo the old European buildings.

There are even bratwursts being sold on the streets.

And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there is Tsingtao beer.

Perhaps there is something in the old suggestion that beer contributes to happiness, because the people of Qingdao seem rather more inclined to smile than their counterparts in Shanghai.

The brewery itself was one of the principal reasons for my visit.

Established in 1903, it remains the great surviving commercial achievement of the German occupation. The original brewing equipment and buildings provide a fascinating glimpse into the industrial technology that Germany brought to China.

But there was another interesting discovery.

Although founded by German and British commercial interests, the brewery’s early leadership included a remarkable number of British businessmen associated with Shanghai.

Strong German-Anglo relations and a business deal conducted in sound money, backed by real silver coinage

Here was colonial capitalism operating across imperial boundaries. German territory, German brewing expertise, British capital and commercial connections, Chinese labour and an enormous potential market.

Whatever their governments might have been doing, the businessmen were evidently capable of reaching an accommodation.

And they produced a remarkably successful beer.

The Japanese Arrive

The Japanese inherited something rather promising when they captured Qingdao in 1914.

They also recognised its potential.

Walking through the old commercial district, I discovered an extraordinary collection of buildings dating from the Japanese occupation and the years immediately following it.

The architecture is fascinating. German influences mingle with Japanese interpretations of European Art Nouveau, gradually giving way to the harder lines and geometric confidence of Art Deco.

Some of the streets are almost absurdly beautiful.

Here are banks, commercial offices and imposing institutional buildings, constructed by people who clearly believed that Qingdao was going to become an important centre of international trade.

And then there is the former Japanese commodities exchange.

What an extraordinary building.

Completed around 1920, it resembles a great concrete temple to commerce. Monumental, imposing and entirely unexpected, it dominates its surroundings with the confidence of an institution that anticipated considerable wealth passing through its doors.

I had not expected to find anything quite like it.

The Japanese were not merely occupying a former German colony. They were investing in its commercial future, building the infrastructure through which they intended to profit from northern China.

Inside, some of the decorative paintings offer an intriguing glimpse into the thinking of the period.

Among them are scenes depicting the Puritans arriving in America and trading with the indigenous inhabitants.

An interesting choice of subject for a Japanese commercial building in China.

One wonders whether the intended parallel was entirely accidental.

The Japanese had arrived in a foreign territory, bringing capital, technology and commercial institutions. The Chinese possessed the land, the labour and the resources.

Perhaps the paintings were simply celebrating international commerce.

Or perhaps they reveal something about how Japan imagined its own relationship with China.

Either way, they are a remarkable survival.

The Peace That Nobody Liked

The Japanese occupation was not destined to last.

At Versailles in 1919, Germany’s former rights in Shandong were awarded to Japan rather than returned to China.

The Chinese were furious. The decision helped ignite the May Fourth Movement and became one of the great grievances of modern Chinese nationalism.

By 1922, following the Washington Conference, Japan had agreed to return Qingdao to Chinese administration.

Imagine the frustration.

The Japanese had captured a valuable German possession, invested heavily in its commercial infrastructure, constructed magnificent banks and an enormous commodities exchange, and then found themselves obliged to surrender political control.

All those splendid buildings, intended to anchor a profitable Japanese future, now stood in a Chinese city.

A rather expensive lesson in the uncertainties of empire.

The Germans, meanwhile, had their own reasons to be dissatisfied with the peace.

Their overseas possessions were gone. Alsace-Lorraine had returned to France. Territories had been transferred to Poland, and Northern Schleswig had returned to Denmark.

I found myself imagining a rather curious scene inside the former German governor’s mansion.

A few German gentlemen seated beside those magnificent Art Nouveau fireplaces, perhaps joined by their Japanese counterparts, discussing the injustices of the post-war settlement.

The Germans complaining about the territories they had lost.

The Japanese complaining about the territory they had been compelled to surrender.

Both convinced that the victorious powers had treated them rather badly.

Perhaps, over a glass of something suitably strong, they might have wondered whether these injustices could someday be corrected.

Perhaps even together.

History, of course, would eventually produce a German-Japanese alliance, although not quite in the circumstances of my imaginary gathering.

Still, standing inside that beautifully preserved mansion, it was difficult not to entertain the thought.

A Colony That Refuses to Disappear

What makes Qingdao so remarkable is not simply the survival of individual buildings.

It is the survival of an entire architectural landscape.

The Germans were here for barely sixteen years. The Japanese governed the territory for only another eight before its return to China.

Yet both left an extraordinary physical inheritance.

Railway stations, banks, commercial exchanges, administrative buildings, churches, hotels, breweries and private residences.

Protestant Church. Wins for me over the larger catholic cathedral

And much of it remains astonishingly intact.

I spent hours wandering the streets, continually discovering another remarkable façade, another unexpected building, another reminder of the extraordinary ambitions of the men who once governed this distant corner of China.

The architecture tells a story that political maps cannot.

Empires arrive, draw boundaries, invest fortunes, erect monuments to their own permanence and then depart.

The buildings remain.

Sometimes they even become the architectural inspiration for the people who inherit them.

Qingdao is particularly good at this.

And a word about the entrance fees. Several of the finest buildings charge admission, but I found the interiors so extraordinary that the experience exceeded my expectations tenfold.

The governor’s jugendstil residence alone is worth the journey.

Beautiful rooms, original architectural details, magnificent fireplaces and a level of preservation that allows the visitor to step directly into the world of Imperial Germany.

It is one thing to read about Kiautschou.

Quite another to stand inside it.

I had wanted to visit Qingdao for years, and it exceeded everything I had imagined.

A fabulous city, full of architectural surprises, improbable history and exceptionally good beer.

But there are other former imperial possessions to inspect, and the Chinese high-speed railway awaits.

So it is time to leave the Germans and Japanese behind.

I have an appointment at the British Embassy.

Unfortunately, I fear I may be about 100 years too late.

Nevertheless, I shall give it a try.