Dennis Bloodworth

Far East Correspondent of 'The Observer'

Dennis Bloodworth made his name as the Far East Correspondent of The Observer soon after the birth of Communist China. In 1955 he was the first British journalist allowed into Mao's kingdom; in 1967, after extensive travel and study of both language and culture, he published Chinese Looking Glass.

Dennis Bloodworth, journalist and writer: born London 24 May 1919; reporter, The Observer 1949-56, Far East Correspondent 1956-77; OBE 1989; married Ching Ping (two adopted sons, and one adopted son deceased); died Singapore 14 June 2005.

Dennis Bloodworth made his name as the Far East Correspondent of The Observer soon after the birth of Communist China. In 1955 he was the first British journalist allowed into Mao's kingdom; in 1967, after extensive travel and study of both language and culture, he published Chinese Looking Glass.

Learned, witty and highly readable, the book used the Chinese past to illuminate the Communist present and became a Western best-seller. When Richard Nixon went to Peking in 1972 and changed the balance of world power he took Chinese Looking Glass with him.

Bloodworth said he wrote for people who knew little or nothing about Asia, and that "a book must have more to it than the dry bones of academic study if it is to be fit for human consumption". All his books fitted this description, among them The Chinese Machiavelli: 3,000 years of Chinese statecraft (1970), written with his wife Ching Ping, and The Messiah and the Mandarins (1982).

He settled in Singapore, which China-watchers based in Hong Kong thought eccentric, but was ideal for a correspondent who travelled throughout the Far East. He had arrived in the region when the war in Indochina was about to enter a new phase, and his reports on that tragic conflict included some of his best writing.

Bloodworth's Indochina was a poignant and surprising place. Typical Saigon acquaintances included a Trotskyite revolutionary turned Buddhist sage and a paint salesman quite uninterested in paints but remarkably well-informed about the Vietcong. In Phnom Penh he listened straight-faced to improbable gossip from royal courtiers, and in Laos drank a good deal of Scotch with its irrepressible princelings. The latter appeared, barely disguised, in his first and very funny novel, Any Number Can Play (1972), and many of his Indochina reports in the successful An Eye for the Dragon: South-East Asia observed 1954-73 (1970, revised 1973).

Most of his books are dedicated to Ching Ping (known to Western friends as Judy) to whom he felt, he said, "an unrepayable debt". They met shortly after he arrived in the Far East, when her prominent Peking family had left Communist China and she was looking after the three orphaned sons of her sister who had committed suicide during the revolution.

They adopted the boys and brought them up in their pleasant bungalow on a hillside in the Singapore suburbs. Judy insisted the boys know Chinese as well as Western culture. This was educative for Bloodworth too. One of the book dedications to his wife is the Lao proverb "When you have heard you must listen, when you have seen you must judge in your heart". It was largely thanks to his Singapore family that Bloodworth's heart was so deeply engaged in his Far Eastern reporting.

He watched with fascination mixed with apprehension the transformation of colonial Singapore into the gleaming island state of today for he knew all those involved, including the founding genius Lee Kuan Yew. Later the government suggested appointing Bloodworth High Commissioner to Britain, but it was not a job either he or Judy wanted. Singapore's admiration was expressed again last week when Lee (now 82 and the island's "Minister Mentor") led other government leaders to the wake held after the cremation by Judy and their two surviving sons.

Like many who joined David Astor's Observer after the Second World War, Bloodworth was an unlikely journalist. He had left school at 17 (in 1936), and his last job before he met Astor was managing a sheet-metal plant in Peckham that went bust.

During the war, though, he had risen through the ranks of the Intelligence Corps to become a captain, and that served him well when he arrived in Asia in 1954 - following five years in The Observer's Paris office - to report from Saigon, becoming Far East Correspondent two years later. In those days there was no computer filing or satellite telephones; copy had to be sent through unpredictable telegraph offices. Messages to and from head offices were in curt cable-ese. It was often frustrating but for Bloodworth and those like him had a great advantage: they were their own masters to an extent unimaginable to journalists today.

This suited him perfectly, for he was by nature enterprising and curious, and happy to explore between the sub-continent and Japan. A large man, he was also physically strong and blessed with a sturdy sense of humour, both essential when coping with Punjabi taxi drivers or Vietcong booby-traps.

The peculiar problem of The Observer was lack of space, and it was a tricky moment when the Saturday evening "hero-gram" arrived on the Bloodworths' terrace with the result of a week's work. A "Thanks your lucidest Laos regretfully outsqueezed pressure of news luv foreign editor" caused terrible explosions of frustration.

One of Judy's finest achievements was an understanding with the Singapore telegraph office that cables arriving on Saturday evening should only be delivered on Sunday morning.

Mark Frankland