Looking out to sea I whispered a farewell prayer to the wind: Help me to be content to pass by even the most beautiful places without wanting to remain in them for long or to keep them for myself.' The Ford of Heaven, an ancient river port in north-eastern China, gave travellers access to the Celestial City of Peking eighty miles to the west, where the Emperor ruled by the mandate of Heaven. Tientsin, as British settlers called it, became a treaty port in 1860 in the wake of the Opium Wars. In the 1920s and 1930s it was occupied by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and other foreign powers. As rival war-lords fought for control, the elusive White Lotus society plotted, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists vied with the ‘Reds’, the old order was soon to be swept away. This memoir evokes a childhood spent in this strange and exotic place. In contrast to other accounts of lives lived in foreign enclaves, Brian Power’s early experiences were shaped not by his parents’ values but by the loving care and calm spirit of his Chinese amah, Y Jieh, who gave him the gift of Chinese and an understanding of her people’s legends and superstitions. The world that Power evokes is a microcosm of the complexity and ferment that was China before the Second World War, yet seen through the fresh eyes of a sensitive child attuned to the lives of the people around him. This new edition of The Ford of Heaven (first published in 1984) contains a new foreword by Frances Wood, Curator of the British Library’s Chinese Collection, as well as a postscript and extensive additional material by the author. His memoirs are delicate, animated, firmly fleshed and unforced.’ The Observer