"My Name is King Lear," said a Red Guard in Soochow. "How do you do?" "I'm Macbeth," rejoined my Australian companion. "And this," he added, indicating me, "is Macduff. Pleased to meet you."

The surreal quality of the conversation appeared lost on the Red Guard. But he grinned enormously behind his glasses, a somewhat owlish figure in his quilted coat to keep out the morning frost, and offered to take us to the central part of the city.

King Lear was not, as it turned out, as disgruntled as his literary namesake. In fact he was a perfectly affable graduate of the English-speaking Institute in Shanghai. His extraordinary name was, apparently, the nearest translation to his Chinese one.