Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on May 10, 2001 at 20:44:18 from 152.163.201.64:
In Reply to: Re: Ransome's Art of Secure Communications posted by Dave Thewlis on May 07, 2001 at 01:07:01:
I think it is generally thought that the character of Missee Lee is a composite of Soong ChingLing, the widow of Sun YatSen, and the lady pirate in the opening chapters of "I Sailed with Chinese Pirates" by Aleko Lilius.
When I lived in Beijing I was told by Susan Lawrence, the correspondent of the Far East Economic Review there, that her grandmother had been in the Yunnan caves at the end of WW2. During the Long March, the Communists had worked out a way of keeping themselves informed. In those days most newspaper and radio correspondents transmitted their reports by telegraph, using Morse code. The Communists listened in to these transmissions.
Operators were trained to recognise the Morse letters and to write them out, although they did not speak English; only very senior people like Zhou EnLai could speak English and understand what was going on. One word the operators were trained to recognise was "flash", used to prefix an important and urgent message. On one occasion all the listeners in the caves reported this word. A senior person was sent for to read the message. Japan had surrendered. The decision was taken to wake up Mao. He replied "hen hao" (very good) and went back to sleep!
So Missee Lee's use of people trained in English letters, but ignorant of the meaning of their messages had a foundation in fact. It seems possible that Ransome could have heard about this during his visit to Shanghai, when he met Soong ChingLing, and I presume, bought a copy of Aleko Lilius's book.
The Romanisation system for Chinese in use then was Wade-Giles ("Peking"). The sounds are much closer if you adopt a French accent in pronouncing them ("Pekin"). After 1949 the Communists needed a better transliteration system for the many Russian advisers who entered the country. They developed the Pinyin system ("Beijing") using Cyrillic as the transliteration alphabet. With Russia falling out of favour in China, the Pinyin system has been adapted to the European alphabet, but is pretty approximate in some cases!