China's Interest in Cambridge Real Estate: Is a Poem to Blame?

The price of real estate in Cambridge (UK) is rising and the Guardian is wondering whether Xu Zhimo's poem "Farewell to Cambridge," written in the 1930s, a poem that many Chinese children learn in school, is to blame.

On the edge of Scholar’s Piece, the strip of farmland just behind King’s College, lies a granite stone which has become arguably Cambridge’s most coveted tourist attraction.

For the many students who amble past it every day, it’s easily missed; placed rather innocuously next to the bridge that joins Scholar’s Piece to the rest of the college. But for the thousands of Chinese tourists who travel to Cambridge every year, it is this, rather than the city’s grand 15th-century chapel, meticulously manicured lawns or historical statues, that they’ve come to see.

Carved into the stone are the first and last lines of a poem that has gone down in Chinese folklore. Titled Farewell to Cambridge, it was written in 1928 by Xu Zhimo, a 31-year-old poet and writer who was revisiting King’s after studying there in the early 20s.

Zhimo died three years later in a plane crash, but he would go down as a cult figure in modern Chinese history, immortalised through his premature and tragic end, illicit love affairs and success in introducing western forms into Chinese literature.

And while Zhimo spent most of his life in China, Farewell to Cambridge has become his legacy. It is now part of China’s national curriculum, taught to all schoolchildren as an example of the modern poetry movement in the early 20th century.

Continue reading at the Guardian.