Abstract: Patience Darton was one of the few British women invited to work in China in the 1950s. Her recently discovered letters and papers offer a rare glimpse through female foreign eyes of life in Peking during the four years she was employed by the Foreign Languages Press. This article explores what motivated her to make such a dramatic change in her circumstances and places her experiences there in context. In 1937, as a qualified nurse, she had volunteered to serve at the front with the International Brigades during Spain’s civil war. Saddened and bereft at the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, along with a number of other former members of the medical units she turned her hopes towards China, believing it to be a place where they could help to build a truly socialist society. A few months after her eventual arrival in Peking in 1954, she married Eric Edney, a former International Brigader, and in 1955 gave birth to their son. The detailed and nuanced observations in the correspondence with her sister offer a unique insight into the everyday world around her, while other documents and reports from her collection reveal how her sympathetic view of the Communist political system and Chinese officialdom were put to the test.  

Key words: 1950s China, ‘foreign friends’, International Brigaders in China

Angela Jackson holds a doctorate in History from the University of Essex, (2001). She is the author of British Women and the Spanish Civil War (published in Spanish as Las mujeresbritánicas y la Guerra Civil española) and other books on the subject of the relationship between International Brigaders and the local population. This article is based on her most recent publication, ‘For us it was Heaven’: The Passion, Grief and Fortitude of Patience Darton from the Spanish Civil War to Mao’s China published by Sussex Academic Press and the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2002. (Alsopublished in Spanish in 2002 as Para nosotros era el cielo. Pasión, dolor y fortaleza de PatienceDarton: de la guerra civil española a la China de Mao.)