The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  53By now he had sold the magnificent Armstrong-Siddeley and had replaced it with a rather more prosaic car, a Ford Cortina. But had Mao known he would have approved: Needham had ordered the vehicle painted jingtailan, a word now taken to mean cloisonné, but in fact meaning an exquisite Chinese shade of pale blue.

  54Played by Peter O’Toole in Bertolucci’s film masterpiece The Last Emperor (1987).