How Beijing celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1959
- British journalist Christopher Dobson was given unrivalled access to cover the festivities
- Sixty years later, his son recounts his father’s stay in the fledgling nation, and how the experience would last a lifetime
The London-based Daily Express was one of the largest-selling newspapers in the world at the time and its publisher, Lord Beaverbrook, decided my father would open the first foreign newspaper bureau in Moscow since the war. So, after an eight-month wait for a visa, he arrived in January 1959.
On September 28, after flying from the Soviet capital via Omsk, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator in a Tupolev TU 104, the clouds parted at 20,000 feet as the jet started its descent to Peking to reveal the Great Wall of China “snaking away across the bare grey and brown mountainsides”.
“I had expected to see it on this trip but nevertheless, the first sight of it made me catch my breath with a schoolboyish wonder,” wrote my father in an unpublished manuscript about his time in Moscow, the typewritten words still sharp and finely honed on yellowing paper.
His experiences in 1959 were to last a lifetime and he would recycle them throughout his journalism career. He used to tell me that “if a story is worth running once, it’s worth running again”. And this he did with his observations in Peking in features, columns and his 2013 autobiography, Bombs, Bullets and Bylines.