ABSTRACT
On October 5, 1985, I received by air mail a letter from the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking, China, forwarded on to me from my former address at Crescent Place. I opened the envelope, with true foreboding this time. The printed notice was entirely in Chinese. For me, after many years of disuse of what never was much more than a rudimentary ability to translate, reading the notice was hard going. This much I saw, immediately: on the fifth day of the ninth month of 1985, Sun Yutang had died.
