familiar with the full story, clouding Bryan's standing with some (such as Youde's predecessor as Governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose). Bryan's initial plans, again reflecting his wife's inclinations, were to undertake research on Chinese literature back at Cambridge. But, chaffing again with scholarship, perhaps more particularly with his chosen topic, the writer Lu Xun, he turned to more active organisational work, for instance, playing a leading role in the Britain-China Friendship Association. With Joseph Needham, who was by now concentrating on the history Chinese science, he established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic. Bryan and Liao also took to spending alternating periods in the UK and the PRC. In 1963, he began to teach Chinese at Holborn College, later part of the University of Westminster. In 1974 he founded a degree course in modern Chinese there. Their base in China was in Chengdu. Bryan retired in 1978, moving back to Norwich, his birthplace, from 1988. Bryan and Liao were often joined in Norwich by her biographer, Innes Herdan (née Jackson; note also Chiang Yee), who had been with Liao at Wuhan University after their studies at Somerville College; Herdan continued this association with Bryan after Liao's death. Bryan developed conflicting health problems after a long-haul flight from Hong Kong on returning from being a guest in Peking for the fiftieth anniversary in 1999 of the establishment of the PRC. He suffered a stroke in 2002, from which he never fully recovered. In his will, he funded scholarships for graduate students from China at the University of East Anglia, continuing the hospitality he and Liao had commenced on return to Norwich in having Chinese students stay with them for extended periods. Under the guidance of Innes Herdan, the papers of Derek Bryan and Liao Hongying are now in the Special Collections library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (see the Archive Catalogue under PP MS 99). Bryan himself had intended all their books and papers to go to the Needham Research Institute, in Cambridge, honoring their close association, indeed their union on account of, Joseph Needham. Bryan was always somewhat inhibited in discussing his career, out of respect for the Official Secrets Act. Nevertheless, at the time of his death, Bryan had been working up an extended biographical sketch, based on