Studying Chinese in 1960's

We would like to thank Guanghwa Bookshop for assisting with the film.

Frances Wood is an English librarian, sinologue and historian known for her writings on Chinese history, including Marco Polo, life in the Chinese treaty ports, and the First Emperor of China.

She was born in London in 1948, and went to art school in Liverpool in 1967, before going to Newnham College, Cambridge University where she studied Chinese. She went to China to study Chinese at Peking University in 1975–1976.

Wood joined the staff of the British Library in London in 1977 as a junior curator, and later served as Curator of Chinese collections until her retirement in 2013. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the International Dunhuang Project, and the editor of the Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society. She was also a Governor of Ashmount Primary School for 20 years. relinquishing this post on the completion of her current term of office in July 2014.

She has argued in her 1995 book, Did Marco Polo go to China?, that the book of Marco Polo (Il Milione) is not the account of a single person, but is a collection of travellers' tales.

Source: Wikipedia

1970's Image of Frances in Chinese courtesy of Frances Wood.