ABSTRACT
Eric Liddell was born into a Scottish missionary family in Tianjin, China. At the age of five, he returned to Scotland for his education, later becoming an athletics hero at the University of Edinburgh. After winning a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Liddell decided to return to Tianjin for missionary work in 1925. He was rounded up as an internee with other foreign nationals and held in the Weihsien internment camp by the Japanese invaders in 1943, dying there in 1945. Liddell made a significant contribution to promoting physical education and the Olympics in modern China, and with the passing of time has become a prestigious sporting hero with a legacy of cultural communication between China and the UK through sport and the Olympics.
