Travels to the Far East

Abstract

When Herwig received his phone call from the office of Deng Xiaoping in August 1977, little did he know that it would lead to a long relationship with the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese physics community. “At that time, most people in the West didn’t know much about China,” recalled Herwig. “The cultural revolution had recently ended, and Deng Xiaoping was gradually assuming power in China.”

China

When Herwig received his phone call from the office of Deng Xiaoping in August 1977, little did he know that it would lead to a long relationship with the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese physics community. “At that time, most people in the West didn’t know much about China,” recalled Herwig. “The cultural revolution had recently ended, and Deng Xiaoping was gradually assuming power in China.”

Soon after, Herwig was invited to visit China, and he travelled there with his wife and son in spring 1978. “We flew to Beijing and were put up in the best hotel at the time, the Beijing Hotel, which was very close to the Forbidden City, and met, more or less, European standards.” The purpose of the trip was to visit the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), which had been founded in 1973 and was operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With the country emerging from the Cultural Revolution, the institute had the opportunity to develop. “I was warmly received, and I already knew some of the people from DESY,” said Herwig. “They already had a linear accelerator, and they were discussing what they should do in the future. One of the possibilities they were considering was to build an electron–positron storage ring like DORIS, which we were operating at DESY at that time. That would be a very interesting machine after the discovery of the J/Psi particle because it would be able to study the so-called charm particles.”

The Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP)

IHEP had been established in Mao Zedong’s lifetime, but with the Chairman’s health failing in the early 1970s, a power struggle was already underway. By the time Herwig arrived in Beijing, it was close to being resolved in favour of the reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping. By the time the Beijing electron–positron collider (BEPC) came on stream, making China’s science world class was government priority. This was underlined by Deng’s attendance at the ground-breaking ceremony in 1984, and again as the machine neared completion in 1988.

BEPC had a beam energy of 1.5–2.8 GeV, allowing it to be not only a factory for charm particles, but also for the tau lepton, which had been discovered in the mid-1970s. BEPC brought China on to the world stage in particle physics, providing, among other things, a precise measurement of the tau’s mass. BEPC operated until 2004 and has since been succeeded by a more powerful machine, BEPC II, which provides luminosity around 100 times higher than its predecessor. “In recent years, they found possible hints of what is called violation of lepton universality, which implies different behaviour of different leptons, and goes against the standard model,” explained Herwig. “This is a very exciting result, since there are very few experimental routes to physics beyond the standard model.”

A Friendship Across Cultures

“One of the things that impressed me in China was their keenness to learn,” recalled Herwig. “Everywhere I went they wanted to learn, learn, learn, and as we know now, they have done so with some success.” Herwig had meetings with many people, and not only particle physicists. “I got to know the people at IHEP quite well, and in particular Chen Hesheng, who had spent time at DESY and became director of IHEP in 1998,” said Herwig. “But one of the most important meetings of my life was not with a particle physicist, but with a politician called Fang Yi, a vice-premier who was responsible for science and technology. When we first met, it was not clear to me who he really was, but over the years I learned that he was one of the most powerful politicians in China. I think he played a great role in bringing China up to modern standards.” Among his many roles in the Chinese state, Fang Yi was appointed vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1976 and was close to Deng Xiaoping. From 1979 to 1981, he served as the academy’s president. “He was not a scientist himself, but he understood very well the spirit and mentality of science,” recalled Herwig. “One could talk to him as a scientific colleague.”

Fig. 9.1

A photo taken during a visit by Herwig (front row, 4th from left) to China in 1977 to arrange collaboration between the Chinese Institute for High Energy Physics and DESY. The photograph was taken at a reception given by Fang Yi (front row 5th from left), who at the time was Vice-Chairman of the Academia Sinica. A powerful figure in China, Fang Yi went on to become one of the country’s vice-premiers under Deng Xiaoping (©CERN archive, All rights reserved)

Herwig first met Fang Yi in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square. “There were about 50 people placed in a u shape, all sitting in comfortable chairs with Fang and myself in the middle and an interpreter sitting directly behind us,” said Herwig. “Only we two were allowed to speak, the others could only listen. There was no real discussion.” Following that first official meeting came many more at which they discussed possible collaboration between China and DESY. “Fang was crucial in establishing relations between the People’s Republic and the west,” said Herwig, “and I think it’s partly thanks to him that China developed so fast over the decades to keep up with the west and adjust to western technologies.”

Herwig remembers Fang Yi as being a kind, easy-going and modest man, with even a touch of naivety. “When I told him that CERN was planning the SPS, he immediately said: ‘Oh, we must also build one in China!’” Herwig persuaded him that it might be better to start with something more modest while China built up the necessary experience and expertise, and indeed that is what happened with the Beijing electron–positron collider, BEPC. “But times have changed now, and they are completely up to the west,” said Herwig. “One possibility for the future of CERN is the future circular collider project (FCC), and the only real competition now is China. I believe what happens in Geneva at CERN will depend to a certain extent on what China decides to do.”

During his many visits to China Herwig Schopper and Fang Yi reached a strong level of trust and mutual understanding. “To a certain extent,” said Herwig, “I would say we even became friends in as much as it’s possible for two people with completely different histories, traditions and mentalities to be friends. One important factor is that he spoke reasonably good English, so we did not need an interpreter. If you can only talk through interpreters, you never really establish a personal contact. We stayed in contact for many years, even after I left my job as Director-General at CERN. He became ill and we exchanged letters and little presents while he was in hospital. I’m sorry to say that he died in 1997 at the age of 81.”

Bismuth Germanium Oxide for the L3 Experiment at CERN

While serving as Director-General of CERN, Herwig’s travels in China took him to Shanghai where he visited the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Ceramics. At the time, Sam Ting was leading the team responsible for the L3 experiment being prepared for CERN’s Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), which was planning to use a novel scintillating crystal approach for its electromagnetic calorimeter. The Shanghai Institute was world leading in producing such crystals. “I visited several important laboratories in Shanghai,” recalled Herwig, “including one where they were able to fabricate so-called BGO crystals. BGO stands for bismuth germanium oxide, sometimes also called bismuth germanate.”

Scintillators emit photons when struck by ionising particles, and this can be used to measure the energy of those particles. BGO is particularly good in this respect, and Sam Ting’s L3 experiment needed about 20,000 large crystals for its electromagnetic calorimeter. “In order to work as well as L3 required, the crystals had to be very pure,” explained Herwig. “They had to be made in cleanrooms, but even the best cleanrooms in the west, largely developed for the production of electronic chips, were not good enough to make BGO crystals. It turned out that the Chinese were the only ones who could make BGO crystals that fulfilled all the specifications of Sam Ting’s detector.”

It was curiosity that took Herwig to Shanghai: he wanted to visit the institute that could make cleanrooms better than any that the western electronics industry was capable of. “I was surprised,” he remembered. “I was taken to a simple wooden barrack that they had converted into a cleanroom. It was impressive how the Chinese could achieve things with very basic means that modern technology was incapable of, simply by being very careful.” L3 was a pioneer in the use of scintillating crystal calorimetry, which is now a widely deployed technique. The CMS experiment at CERN’s LHC, for example, uses close to 80,000 lead tungstate crystals in its electromagnetic calorimeter.

Herwig’s trip to Shanghai was memorable as much for what he did not expect to find there as for what he did. As its name suggests, the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics carries out research into that most iconic of ancient Chinese inventions, porcelain. “They really understood the secrets of ancient Chinese porcelain manufacture, and they knew how they could produce new porcelain the same way as it was done hundreds of years ago,” said Herwig. “They had also developed methods to find whether a piece of porcelain is genuinely old or a modern fake copy. For instance, old porcelain reacts differently to illumination by x-rays or ultraviolet light than new porcelain.” Herwig also learned that the institute could produce porcelain that would fool the experts. “So I asked what they did with such products, and they told me that they labelled them and sold them to Hong Kong, adding with a smile that they didn’t know what happened to the label after. I decided never to buy old Chinese porcelain.”

A Memorial to Chien-Shiung Wu

Herwig’s last trip to China was in the early 2000s when he was invited to visit Nanjing, where Chien-Shiung Wu had gone to university. Because Herwig himself had performed pioneering early experiments on parity violation, he felt a strong affinity with the first lady of physics, as Madame Wu had become known. “Because we had each carried out an experiment proposed by Lee and Yang, we met very often afterwards and became friends,” he explained. “I also got to know her husband, a Chinese-American physicist called Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, and we met very often privately later.”

Chien-Shiung Wu died following a stroke at the age of 84 in New York city on 16 February 1997, but she chose to be buried in her home village of Liuhe on the Yangtse River between Nanjing and Shanghai, where Luke was to join her when he passed away in 2003. Today, a memorial marks the place where the ashes of Chien-Shiung Wu are buried, in the courtyard of the school, founded by her father, that she had attended as a small girl. After her death, her alma mater, Southeast University in Nanjing constructed the Chien-Shiung Wu memorial hall [1], which contains an exhibition based on donations from her husband and from Columbia University. “There was a lot of discussion about why she didn’t get the Nobel Prize,” said Herwig. “She should have received it, but she got many other honours during her life, among them the highest American honours that can be given to a scientist, and this museum and meeting centre in her name was to be the last. I felt deeply honoured to be invited to speak at the inauguration.”

“This was my last trip to China, and on this occasion, I got to know the modern China,” concluded Herwig. “Of course, in many respects, social conditions have improved enormously, but it has also become very western. Airports are like everywhere in the world. The streets are full of cars like everywhere in the world. So, I find that the old Chinese charm has gone. I developed a certain admiration for the old culture, and for the way they adapted to the modern world. And I don’t have to tell you that in future, China will play a major role in world history.”

Taiwan ROC

In parallel with his visits to the People’s Republic of China, Herwig also had several opportunities to visit the Republic of China on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. In 1949, following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang armies by Mao’s communists in mainland China, the nationalists took refuge on the island of Taiwan and groups of smaller islands close to the Chinese mainland. Taiwan became the refuge of several million Chinese partisans of the Kuomintang, and Taiwan thus became the seat of General Chiang’s nationalist republic. The Kuomintang ruled as a single-party state for 40 years, with democratic reforms only taking root in the 1980s. The timing of Herwig’s visits to the island were therefore timed to give him an ideal vantage point to witness another society in transformation. “I paid a few visits to Taiwan, which allowed me to follow the fantastic and breath-taking rise of this country from a completely underdeveloped state to one with a most modern and competitive economy,” he recalled. “My first visit was in the 1970s when I was at DESY. The Taiwanese wanted to develop their science and considered building either an electron–positron storage ring, like DORIS, which we had at DESY, or a synchrotron radiation source.” There was no doubt that the young republic had the intellectual firepower to do so: when Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, many scientists, engineers and other intellectuals joined him. “They were crucial to transforming an agrarian economy into a modern industrialised society over the following decades.”

At the time of Herwig’s first visit, Taiwan had started to build a small linear accelerator that could be used as an injector for a bigger machine. “They invited me in order to discuss a scenario that would work for them,” said Herwig. “I advised them to build a synchrotron light source which would have a broader field of application, and later I was impressed by their determination, their engagement, and their ability to learn quickly and put plans into action.”

Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and was succeeded by Yen Chia-kan, but it was General Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo who was the de facto leader. He became president in 1978 when Yen resigned and remained in office until 1988. He set the tone for the liberalisation of the republic through the 1990s, increasing freedom of speech and tolerating political dissent, but he also had to deal with an evolving international political situation that seemed to favour the mainland. In 1971, for instance, China’s seat at the United Nations shifted from Taipei to Beijing, leaving the republic in an ambiguous and tense diplomatic situation that prevails to this day.

“This was the political background when we built LEP at CERN in the 1980s,” said Herwig, going on to reintroduce a regular protagonist in his career. “Sam Ting suggested that both the People’s Republic and the Republic should participate in the L3 collaboration. In spite of the very critical political situation this was approved by both governments at the highest level. It was the first time that scientists from the PRC and the ROC could work together in the same experiment, and a remarkable example of science for peace.”

As a result of Ting’s initiative, Herwig visited Taipei in his capacity as CERN’s Director-General. After the official business was over, he was treated as a privileged guest of the authorities. “I remember a visit to the National Palace Museum in Taipei,” said Herwig. “When Chiang Kai-shek left Beijing after the war, he took with him many cultural treasures from the forbidden city and they are now on display at this museum, which is probably one of the largest and most precious collections of Chinese arts covering several thousand years. The most precious objects of the many thousand displayed are protected in heavily guarded vaults.”

Fig. 9.2

Towards the end of his mandate as CERN Director-General, Herwig had discussions in Taipei with Lee Teng-hui (centre), President of Taiwan, on improving scientific cooperation between Taiwan and Europe. Right is Chen Li-an, President of the Taiwan Commission for Sciences (©CERN archive, All rights reserved)

As on the mainland, Herwig’s admiration of the Chinese culture he found in Taiwan was accompanied by a strong dose of culture shock. “One evening I was invited by a minister to an official dinner consisting of some 20 courses,” he recalled. “We arrived at course 19 and I had not eaten a single bite. Taiwan is full of exotic dishes, which I struggled with, but I was saved by Sam Ting, who ordered a special serving of rice so I could eat. Noticing my discomfort, the minister lightened the mood by telling a story of his experience of discovering a new culture in America. Once he came to New York and wanted to buy a present for his wife in one of the famous jewellery shops. When he tried to pay by credit card they refused since he was not a known client. When he was about to leave the shop without a present the employee called him back and told him that he had noticed that the minister was wearing a Rolex watch and this was considered as sufficient evidence for his financial credibility. This amused the minister, who told us that his watch was a fake bought in Hong Kong for 5 dollars.”

Japan

DESY and CERN had many connections with Japanese laboratories. “I made many visits during my terms of office at DESY and CERN,” Herwig said, “in particular to the KEK laboratory and the University of Tokyo, which is considered as one of the elite universities in the world, and I made one particularly good friend in Toshi—Masatoshi Koshiba—who won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his pioneering work on neutrinos. Earlier, he spent a year as a visiting professor at DESY and our families became close friends. He was about my age, and I was greatly saddened to learn of his passing in 2020. Toshi came from an old Samurai family, a kind of nobility in Japan, and was in some respects very traditional, in others quite liberal. His apartment in Tokyo was quite modest as property in Japan is scarce and expensive. Once he invited me with my colleague, Erich Lohrmann from DESY, and our wives to a Geisha evening. Much misunderstood in the west, I learned that traditional Geishas are highly respected in Japanese culture with an extraordinary education in the arts, literature and music. Their main task is to entertain guests by singing, conversation and dance, and above all by exhibiting a traditional costume worth a fortune. On another occasion, he invited us to an apartment by the sea with the great luxury of having a natural hot spring in the house, but again everything was tiny. It had everything you needed, but nothing to excess. He also introduced me to the famous Japanese tea ceremony. He was a wonderful guide to Japanese traditions and culture. Later Toshi spent some time with his family at CERN in Geneva, and my family tried to reciprocate. In the meantime, his daughter had grown up and was supposed to marry. According to traditional Japanese customs the future husband is selected by the parents. However, Toshi was sufficiently liberal to accord to his daughter the right of veto. After she rejected the first and second choices, she was again presented with the first, and this time she said yes. Really, I think she had a say from the start, and as far as I know, it became a quite happy marriage.”

Fig. 9.3

The 2002 Nobel Laureate, Masatoshi Koshiba, addresses an eminent audience in a packed CERN Auditorium on 8 July 2003 (©CERN, All rights reserved)

The Subcontinent: Pakistan

Another occasional destination for Herwig, before and after retirement, was Pakistan. “The country has a rather well developed scientific and technical environment,” he explained, “which is probably due to some extent to the British occupation leaving behind a relatively good education and administrative system, so it’s not surprising that Pakistan started cooperation with CERN and also played an essential role in the development of SESAME” (see Chap. 12).

Pakistan signed a cooperation agreement with CERN in 1994 and became an associate member state of the organisation in 2015. In between, the country made notable contributions to the CERN programme, and developed plans to establish a synchrotron light source in the country. In 2006, Pakistan’s controversial president, Pervez Musharraf, visited CERN, and Herwig came to know first-hand his ambitions for science in Pakistan. “Pervez Musharraf was considered as a sort of dictator, having come to power by military means, but he was a secular president, he was interested in establishing good relations with the west, and he promoted science and technology,” explained Herwig. “He invited me to Pakistan several times and made it possible for me to see parts of the country that are not open to tourists. With him and other government representatives we had many discussions about the long-term scientific development of Pakistan.”

Fig. 9.4

Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, visited CERN on 25 January 2006. He is seen here signing the Laboratory’s guest book, the Livre d’Or. Herwig came to know of the scientific ambitions Musharraf had for his country and had the chance to visit on several occasions (©CERN, All rights reserved)

Herwig met Musharraf on several occasions in Islamabad where they discussed cooperation with CERN and the possibility of constructing a synchrotron light source in Pakistan. By this time, Herwig was already heavily involved with the project to build a light source for the Middle East and neighbouring regions, a project known as SESAME, or synchrotron light for science and applications in the Middle East, as an intergovernmental organisation on the CERN model. Herwig argued that Pakistan should join SESAME before building its own light source.

Scientific research in Pakistan falls under the remit of two organisations both based in the capital, Islamabad: the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEK), and the Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF). Through them, Herwig was able to visit the production sites of several of Pakistan’s contributions to CERN. “The supports of the ring magnets for CMS were produced at a machine shop located some distance away from Islamabad in a kind of desert,” said Herwig by way of example, “I was impressed by the installations, but the area is also interesting from a historical point of view since Alexander the Great had reached this region and had left some traces.” When travelling outside Islamabad, Herwig was always accompanied by a military vehicle. “At the time I visited Pakistan it was relatively safe, in particular Islamabad, where I could move around the centre completely freely at any time of day. I visited a very big modern mosque whose construction had been financed by Saudi Arabia. Of course, some places were to be avoided, such as the area above Peshawar, which was a centre for the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

“I was invited twice to international conferences at Nathiagali, a beautiful resort in the mountains at a height of about 2500 metres in a fantastic mountain landscape,” Herwig recollected. “It had been used by the British as a summer government retreat, and a modest meeting place had been established there, where I gave talks about CERN and SESAME.”

India

India’s involvement with CERN goes back to the 1960s, when scientists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, now Mumbai, first started to visit the European laboratory. “This was mainly due to the outstanding Indian theoretician Homi Bhabha,” explained Herwig. “He became the founding director of the Tata Institute, which was established after World War II, since even before independence, India recognised the importance of natural sciences. The emphasis of the institute was theoretical physics and also some experiments to observe cosmic rays.” Following independence, the Tata Institute became a reference point for intellectual excellence in India. “When I travelled around the country, I found that everywhere I went, educational establishments held up the Tata as the model to aspire to,” said Herwig. “When I visited the institute for the first time, I was shown the former office of Bhabha which is kept in its original state, almost like a sanctuary. To my surprise I saw a copy of a preprint from DESY dealing with Bhabha scattering on his table.”

Fig. 9.5

Homi Bhabha (second from right) in the Palais des Nations in Geneva for the opening of the first International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy on 8 August 1955. He is flanked by (left to right) Swiss President, Max Petitpierre, UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, and Conference Secretary General Walter G. Whitman (©IAEA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Homi Bhabha was a passenger on Air India flight 101, which crashed into Mont Blanc en route from Bombay to London on 24 January 1966 with the loss of all on board. At the time, there was speculation that the crash was not an accident, because it was carrying the man who came to be known as the father of India’s nuclear programme. The subsequent investigation concluded, however, that the plane had a faulty VHF receiver and was relying on verbal instructions. The pilot had started his descent for a scheduled stop in Geneva before clearing the mountain. Bhabha, it seems, along with 126 others on board, lost their lives because of a simple miscommunication.

Herwig never met the father of India’s nuclear programme, but he remembers good relations between CERN and the institute for fundamental research that he created. “I met his successors, M. G. K. Menon, B. V. Sreekantan and Virendra Singh, who ran the institute from 1966 to 1997,” said Herwig. “Once, I was part of a guided tour of Mumbai, which included a visit to the Tata. There, the guide pointed to a statue of Shiva showing the eternal dance of the elements of nature, and the guide explained that the dance of the elementary particles in the atom are also presented by this dance—a wonderful unification of natural science and religion.” Today, a similar statue stands at CERN, a gift of the Indian government in 2004.

As in China, Herwig profited from his business trips to India to explore the country and its cultures. “I travelled around India on occasions, sometimes after conferences or just as a tourist. My wife and I saw beautiful places, like the Taj Mahal at Agra, and Madras. We admired Indian art and culture and would sometimes spend the night in luxurious former palaces of maharajas, or at the other extreme in the rather more modest accommodations of a Guru. I do not want to repeat here just what is described in travel books, but I can’t help recalling the cultural dissonance of the colonial legacy, which was particularly striking in Goa, the former Portuguese colony. I attended several conferences there and was always struck by the presence of a beautiful gothic cathedral in the midst of an Indian city. It was the same when I visited Macao.”

Both India and Pakistan carry out their fundamental physics research in part through institutes dedicated to atomic energy, and both are today nuclear powers. Born from the calamitous partition of British India in 1947, which displaced millions along religious lines, the two countries have always had a tense relationship. Their involvement with CERN led to Herwig being invited to take part in a meeting on the shores of Lake Como organised by the Rockefeller Foundation. “The main topic was the threat of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” recalled Herwig. “Since by this time, both countries had nuclear weapons, there was great concern that they would use them. I brought in the argument that they wouldn’t dare since doing so would lead to self-destruction. Both had developed such weapons for defence, and for national prestige. I remember introducing the probably unrealistic idea that nuclear war could be replaced by cyber warfare, which would carry less of an existential risk. Such an argument holds in principle for any country developing nuclear arms.”

Vietnam

The last Asian country that Herwig developed links with is Vietnam. “Sometimes one gets involved by chance, and for me this was the case with Vietnam,” said Herwig. “At CERN I got to know a French physicist originating from Vietnam. His name was Jean Trân Thanh Vân and in his activities he was strongly supported by his wife Le Kim Ngoc, also a physicist who has done much for Vietnam in her own right.”

Jean Trân Thanh Vân was born in Vietnam in 1936 and moved to France in 1953, where his successful career led to him to becoming a director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1991. Despite his success in Europe, he never forgot the country of his birth.

Beyond research, his forte is as an organiser of meetings, establishing the Rencontres de Moriond in 1996, a conference series in the French Alps which has become one of the most important global conferences for particle physics. In 1989, he repeated the model for the field of astrophysics with the Rencontres de Blois, and when Vietnam started to open up to foreign scientists in 1993, he established the Rencontres du Vietnam, to provide a forum for dialogue between the global scientific community and Vietnam. From the Rencontres du Vietnam grew the beautiful International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and Education (ICISE), located where the mountains meet the sea at the town of Qui-Nhon, between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city. “Vân invited me to conferences at the centre and I participated twice,” said Herwig.

Fig. 9.6

Herwig shakes the hand of Tran Dại Quang, President of Vietnam, on the occasion of the 12th rencontres du Vietnam in July 2016 (Herwig Schopper’s personal collection. ©Herwig Schopper, All rights reserved)

Herwig spoke about CERN and SESAME as role models for successful international collaboration in science, and on his second visit, in spring 2018 raised the question of creating such a centre for Southeast Asia. “It was a proposal that was accepted with great interest,” recalled Herwig. “Vân had developed excellent relations with the government. After each conference the participants were invited to a meeting at the presidential palace in Hanoi in the presence of government ministers and the president himself.” These were very formal meetings at which, following the president’s address, three guests were each given three minutes to speak about their ideas for Vietnam’s development. “At the second meeting I attended, the speakers were two Nobel Prize winners and me. I used my three minutes to suggest creating an international research centre on the CERN model, like we had done with SESAME in the Middle East, promoting science and technology and at the same time smoothing relations between countries.” There was no discussion, so Herwig received no immediate reaction to his proposal. “But after the meeting the minister of research approached me, asked some detailed questions and promised that they would follow up this idea” he recalled. “Later I learned that the discussions continued, and that Singapore was interested to participate or even house a research centre for synchrotron radiation.”

“Nothing has so far come of this, but these things take time, and I hope that one day it will happen,” said Herwig. “These visits gave me an excellent possibility to get to know the beauties of this country, in particular an excursion to the famous bay of Vinh Ha Long with its multitude of islands traversed by picturesque sailing junks. I noticed that in spite of frictions between Vietnam and the People’s Republic, there were many Chinese tourists, and new hotels being built to accommodate them. Perhaps tourism can work for peace, as well as science?”

In His Own Words: Memories from a Big Country

“Beijing in the late 70s was a grey place.” At that time, just after the Cultural Revolution, everyone was dressed in Mao suits, grey suits. There was no colour to be seen on the streets or anywhere. There were lots of people and the roads were crowded with bicycles. There were hardly any cars, just a very dense traffic of bicycles. There were so many that I was puzzled, and I asked, ‘What happens if there are accidents between two bicycles? Do people have to pay a fine?’ I was told, ‘No. In China there are no fines. If somebody causes an accident, then he will be summoned to the team where he works. There will be a discussion about the error he committed, and in that way, he will learn not to make the same mistake again.

Things were quick to change, and when I came back ten or maybe 15 years later things were very different. There were practically no bicycles anymore, but only cars. So I asked again: ‘What happens if there’s an accident between two cars, are people still summoned to their work team to be educated?’ I was told, ‘No. Not at all. They have to pay a fine and that’s it.’ Things change.

Of course, in the ‘70s, there were practically no foreigners in Beijing, so my family and I were among very few, which made us quite exotic. While I was at work and in meetings, they invited my wife and my son to visit the zoo to see the pandas, which were famous around the world at that time. Everyone turned to look my wife. When she remarked that people seemed more interested in her than the pandas, the interpreter explained that they had never seen anyone with blonde hair and blue eyes before! On another occasion, my son was taken on a trip accompanied by a young Chinese person, and they were put up in a modern hotel for foreign tourists. It had a bar with neon lights, a band playing modern rock music and people drinking whisky. My son’s companion was completely flabbergasted: he’d never seen anything like it. Things like this were among the first signs of western culture appearing in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Of course, during my various visits to Beijing, I visited many of the interesting places that all the tourists go to these days, like The Great Wall and the Ming tombs. They’re so well known these days that I don’t need to go into detail, but one of these visits says a lot about the Chinese mentality. Not far from Beijing are the famous Ming tombs, the mausoleums of 13 Ming dynasty emperors dating from as far back as the fifteenth century. In imperial times, ordinary people could not visit them, and even today, only a few are open to visitors. One reason, I was told, is that the Chinese archaeologists decided not to explore them all because opening up an old tomb is a one-off event, which cannot be repeated, and since technology for archaeology is always improving, it would be irresponsible to open them all now—far better to leave them to future generations. The wisdom of that impressed me very much. I can’t see us in the west taking such a long view. Our curiosity would lead to us opening them all to see what’s inside.

Walking around in Beijing was a bit of an adventure: everything was written in Chinese, and very few people spoke English. One time I got lost and had no idea how to get back to the hotel. Nobody on the street could understand me, but I could recognise pharmacies, so I went into one hoping that the pharmacist might speak some English. To my great relief, he did, and was able to explain to me how to get back to the hotel. On one of my trips, I bought a model of one of the famous grey horses from Xi’an as a souvenir. It was about the size of a big dog, which would be difficult to bring home today, but back then I was able to just carry it onto the plane under my arm. Those were happy times to travel by air—few controls or checks.

When I visited Xi’an and the tomb of the first emperor with its terracotta army, one nice thing was that there were practically no tourists, no foreign tourists anyway. Thanks to the authorisation of Fang Yi, I was able to visit not only the excavations, which were not as far advanced as they are today, partly because of that Chinese long-view I learned about at the Ming tombs, but also the laboratory where they investigated the objects they had excavated. They were very proud to show me a chariot, a metal chariot that they had just excavated, and which was not yet on display. Their analyses had shown that it was made of metal alloys that were not even known at the time.

I couldn’t resist discussing with my Chinese colleagues the importance of traditional medicine compared to modern medicine. In particular I asked what they would do if they got seriously ill. Some of them told me: ‘Well, of course you would go to a modern hospital. Chinese medicine only works if you believe in Mao.’ They said it with a laugh, of course, but I think that was also a sign of the changes underway in China at the time. When they weren’t being so flippant, we all had to agree that Chinese medicine is based on many centuries of practical experience, and worthy of being taken seriously.

On several occasions, I visited a place that nobody in the west had heard of, but we all know it now: Wuhan, and I saw the now infamous live animal markets where Covid-19 most likely made the jump to humans. I was there for conferences lasting one or two weeks, and the organisers took us for boat trips on the Yangtze River. The first time I went on one of these trips, the scenery was beautiful, but the river was squalid, and lined with coal-powered factories producing a lot of smoke. We were fed on the boat, and one of the soups contained frogs. We even saw a human cadaver floating in the river. Things were very different the next time I went. We had a modern boat, and everything was clean. We could enjoy the beautiful landscape where the river flows through the three gorges without distraction. Since then, they’ve built the famous three gorges dam to tame the water and use it for electricity production. When I was there, construction of the dam was in full swing. It was very impressive, and it’s still probably one of the largest industrial projects ever made in China. When I was first there, they had just started it. The second time, they had started to fill the reservoir with water. Of course, the whole idea of the dam is controversial, but the people I met there were all in favour of it because before the dam it was normal that every decade or every two decades there would be a big flood, killing people and wiping out crops. Now, because of the dam, they can control the flooding. Of course, there are also negative effects on the environment, but I think the people who live there are quite happy to have the dam.

On one occasion, I was invited to visit an aunt of Samuel Ting. She was a widow, and her husband had been a participant on the Great March, so she belonged to a politically favoured family. This meant that she was allowed to live in a very privileged quarter of Beijing very close to the Forbidden City. The houses were very modest, humble even, but still it was a very privileged quarter. Today I think it has been completely replaced by modern buildings, but when I was there, I was surprised at how modestly even such a privileged family lived. The rooms were rather empty. There was not much furniture. Nothing comfortable on which one could rest, just a table, chairs and not much else. It was quite an occasion for Sam’s aunt to have a western visitor, so she’d also invited her sisters, and there were six aunts in total. To be kind to me, they didn’t introduce themselves by their Chinese names, but as aunt number 1, aunt number 2, and so on.

China is a vast and very populous country, we all know that, but one event really brought it home to me. When I was Director-General of CERN, I visited China and met a vice-president of a firm that produced non-ferrous metals like niobium, because we needed niobium for the radiofrequency cavities of LEP. Over dinner he asked me what CERN is, and how big it is. I explained it to him, and then I asked him how big his company was. ‘We are a relatively small firm in China,’ he said. So I asked him how many employees he had. Two million, came the answer.

I already had a feel for the sheer size of the country. At the end of my first visit, I was invited by Fang Yi for a trip from Beijing to Canton, as it was at the time, and ending up finally in Hong Kong. I came to understand that China is not just a country but a continent, a huge part of the world full of different ethnic groups speaking many languages and dialects. It’s for that reason that the Chinese government insists that all children learn Mandarin because otherwise they would not have a common language. They also insist on a universal script. When we travelled through the country from one province to the other, sometimes interpreters had difficulty speaking with local people, and when that happened, they pointed to the written characters, and these of course were understood.

Everywhere we went, the local dignitaries wanted to meet me. They were hungry for knowledge, and they squeezed me for all the information I could give them. They took me to all kinds of factories where they asked me for advice on everything from how to make steel to building transformers. I had to disappoint them to a certain extent, but I did try to give them advice on managing an organisation.

Shanghai was particularly interesting. I went there for various conferences and was impressed, maybe even shocked by the extent of western influence. Because of the importance of Shanghai’s harbour, and the international settlement that was run by America and Britain right up to the 1940s, western influence was everywhere. The waterfront known as the Bund could easily have been in America or the UK.

All in all, I have very strong memories of China, of the many people I met there, and I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to spend time in the country at a time of such profound change.”