Why did you decide to make Lia Franks memory training – her mnemonic skills – a cornerstone of her character?
This was risky, but I much wanted to portray – in real time – the flight of China’s imperial art collection. This is one of those real-life historical dramas which is all but unknown in the West. As the Japanese approached Peking in the 1930s, Chinese officials frantically packed up 640,000 of the 1,000,000 masterpieces then in the Forbidden City – an art collection which had been continuously built for 1100 years. It is hard for Westerners to appreciate how very important protection of this art would have been to the Chinese as they faced invasion by a foreign power. Art in China does not reflect or evoke the past; it is the past. He who holds the nation’s artistic legacy holds its cultural patrimony. The art collection, split into three parts for safety, was hidden and spirited around China for years – always in the hands of the Nationalists. Japan surrendered in 1945 and the civil war raged on. When the Nationalists finally lost to the Communists in 1949, they fled to Taiwan and too
