This was the beginning of his magnificent collection of such prints, now in the National Gallery of Australia. His friend Zhou Enlai gave Townsend his first contemporary woodcut. Townsend was close to the writer Xiao Chien (later humiliated in the cultural revolution), an intellectual who translated James Joyce's Ulysses into Chinese. He was appreciated as a translator, a reporter and a representative of the cooperative movement. The self-effacing Townsend mixed with the leaders of the Chinese revolution as well as with the peasantry, because of his linguistic ability and new talent as a newspaper man. His only European possession was a flute. Soon, he once said, he began to dream in Chinese. Chinese, with its dialects, became his first language. He also contacted cooperatives in distant parts of the country. Townsend lived for five years in this communal but hopeful poverty. They established medical centres and schools. All members took part in policy discussions and shared any profits. These were rural industrial units that produced blankets, bricks, paper and ceramics. After ineffectual hospital work, he found a place in the Chinese industrial cooperatives. Terrible sights began to put an end to Townsend's pacifism, though not his idealism. Amid air raids he rescued a truck from the burning docks, then drove down the Burma Road to southwestern China. In 1940, after only one year studying history at Worcester College, Oxford, Townsend registered as a conscientious objector, began to learn Chinese and joined the Friends ambulance unit.

Time and Chance by Peter Townsend