MARILYN MONROE AND THE DAY SHE HELD MY HAND

February 3, 2021 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

This video of Marilyn Monroe talking to the press in 1956 shows her unposed and natural.

I was in Los Angeles, aged 23, in 1955 a few months after being the first Australian journalist to visit China since the 1949 Communist Revolution.

I read in The Los Angeles Times that Marilyn Monroe, the reigning queen of Hollywood and probably the best-known woman in the world, was on that day due to fly to New York City to marry the playwright Arthur Miller.

I got on an airport bus and waited at Los Angeles Airport. Soon a gang of Hollywood reporters and photographers arrived.

I asked them, “Are you here to see Marilyn?”…“Yeah, buddy”… “I’m an Australian journalist. Can I come along with you?”…“Yeah, buddy.”

Marilyn Monroe was molested

Marilyn was born as Norma Mortensen on June 1, 1926 to Gladys Baker, whose maiden name was Monroe.

Her father is uncertain as Gladys had separated from Martin Mortensen before the pregnancy.

Gladys spent much of her life in mental institutions and Marilyn spent ten years of her childhood in 11 foster homes, in several of which foster fathers molested her.

In 1942, just after her 16^th birthday, she married a neighbour’s 21-year-old son, factory worker James Dougherty, but they separated soon afterwards.

Discovered by photographer

In 1945, she was discovered by David Conover when the U.S. Army sent him to a factory where she worked to take photos of girls to boost World War 11 soldiers’ morale.

She signed with a modelling agency and for short-lived contracts with 20^th Century Fox and Columbia.

She had minor roles in several comedies but her contracts were not renewed, so she returned to modelling.

Marilyn Monroe posed in the nude

*Cosmopolitan in 2015 published Marilyn’s nude calendar picture*

Her first real breakthrough came when it was revealed that she had posed nude for a calendar.

People sympathised after she said it was because she needed the money.

In 1952 she began a highly-publicised romance with retired New York Yankees baseball star Joe DiMaggio but like her first marriage it was not successful.

Every pregnancy she had then or later ended in a miscarriage.

In Playboy centrefold

In 1953, the first Playboy issue published nude photos of her without her permission.

The same year, after she did a screen text with a Fox executive, Ben Lyon, he renamed her Marilyn Monroe because she reminded him of the Broadway star Marilyn Miller.

Hollywood cast her as a dumb blonde but she was intelligent.

She quickly became one of Hollywood’s top stars with major roles in Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, There’s No Business Like Show Business, How to Marry a Millionaire, Bus Stop and The Seven Year Itch. Her films grossed $US200million, the equivalent of $2billion today.

The Seven Year Itch

For The Seven Year Itch, she performed with her co-star Tom Ewell in what became an iconic Hollywood scene, first above a New York subway where the wind blew her skirt up and then (because the crowd they generated was too noisy) in a studio.

Joe DiMaggio was very jealous about the scene and they were divorced in October, 1954.

She had been introduced to her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, four years earlier by the film director Elia Kazan, who was sleeping with Marilyn and was in Los Angeles to pitch a screenplay to Arthur.

Arthur told Marilyn how unhappy he was in his marriage.

They exchanged letters over the next four years.

Marilyn put a photo of him on a bookshelf above her bed. She decided to join him in New York and to become a serious actress by studying at The Actors’ Studio there.

Marilyn Monroe half an hour late

At Los Angeles Airport, I joined a gang of Hollywood reporters and photographers.

We were asked for Press passes. I didn’t have one but the reporter in front of me told the security guard, “He’s with me, Buddy.”

Marilyn’s plane to New York was already waiting for her for half an hour as a limo drove her on to the tarmac.

We gathered around her open car door as she sat in the back seat, her bare legs crossed. She looked great!

Marilyn was nice to me

I asked her press secretary whether, as an Australian journalist, I could meet her. “Sure, Buddy.”

I held out my hand. She shook it and held my hand for five minutes while I thought of as many silly questions as I could, such as whether she would like to go to Australia. I told you they were silly questions.

I was 23 and she was 30. She was very nice to me.

She asked me questions about Australia and talked to me intelligently and certainly not in the dumb-blonde style of her movie roles. I thanked her for meeting me.

It was one of those moments we all remember.

The Egghead and the Hour Glass

Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio became finalised in October 1955 and Arthur Miller had by then separated from his wife, childhood sweetheart Mary Slattery.

Marilyn and Miller started an affair that became well-publicised because both were famous.

Fox Studios advised Marilyn to end it because Arthur had been called to give evidence to The Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy.

Miller had never been a Communist Party member but refused to name party members he knew. Marilyn stood by him in spite of her studio’s warning.

They were married in June 1956. Marilyn said it was the first time she had really been in love.

Variety called it “The Egghead marries the Hour Glass.” Marilyn and Arthur headed to London so she could work in The Prince and the Showgirl, made by Lawrence Olivier. They clashed.

Marilyn was notoriously late for her film scenes, depended on drugs and suffered from low self-esteem and insomnia.

Marilyn’s marriage lasted five years

Marilyn and Arthur’s marriage started to crumble. He wrote The Mistfits for her to perform with Clark Gable. She was often late for filming or did not shown up at all, and drank too much.

It was not only her last movie but also Clark Gable’s. He had a heart attack two days after filming ended and died ten days later.

Marilyn and Arthur Miller were divorced in 1960.

How Marilyn Monroe met Jack Kennedy

Marilyn was introduced to President Jack Kennedy at a dinner party held by Frank Sinatra in 1962.

Jack is believed to have invited Marilyn to a weekend at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs. Jack’s wife Jackie was not there.

On May 19, 1962, Marilyn was literally sewn into a dress that showed all her well-known curves and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr President” at a huge party in Madison Square Garden, New York, ten days before the President’s actual 45^th birthday

Among the many rumours of her other affairs, one with Jack Kennedy’s brother Robert is confirmed in a letter from the Kennedys’ sister Jean Kennedy Smith to Marilyn, “Understand that you and Bobby are the new item.”

Rumours she was murdered

About midnight on August 5, 1962, less than three months after “Happy Birthday, Mr President,” Marilyn’s Los Angeles housekeeper Eunice Murray noticed Marilyn’s bedroom light was on.

She knocked at the door but got no answer. At 3am, she called Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist. He failed to knock down her door, looked through her window, saw her lying on her bed naked and called the police. She was dead.

The police noticed empty pill bottles on her bedside table but no glass or cup of water. After the police search, a drinking glass turned up in the room.

The first policeman on the scene, Jack Clemmons, said later, “Her hands were by her side and her legs were perfectly straight.

“It was the most obviously-staged death scene I have ever seen. The pill bottles by her bed had been arranged in neat order and the body was deliberately positioned.

“It all looked too tidy.”

Press conference was never held

The autopsy found Marilyn had overdosed on sedative drugs, “possibly to commit suicide.”

Criminal Intelligence Agency documents later revealed that Marilyn was planning to hold a press conference on the day after she was found dead and would say that Jack and Robert Kennedy had refused to take her calls.

I suspect they arranged her murder so she could not reveal their affairs with her at the press conference.

Within six years, both Jack and Robert had been killed, Jack on November 22, 1963 and Robert on June 6, 1968.

Gianni Russo, an actor, said in a book Hollywood Godfather that he had an on-and-off affair with Marilyn and that a doctor known as a killer for hire injected air into her vein near her pubic region which caused an embolism (blood clot) and killed her although it looked like drugs to the coroner.

Marilyn died young at 36 but still lives in her movies and in my memories of meeting her.

MISERIES MY FATHER SAW 100 YEARS AGO LED TO COMMUNISM IN CHINA

November 7, 2020 — 2 Comments

By Australian Journalist Philip Luker

One hundred years ago in 1920, my father Sidney wrote in the text of an address he gave when he returned to my mother Anne’s Australian home:

“The Chinese have queer philosophy, they hate losing face, they are callous to suffering and the loss of life, they love gambling and they have a system of squeeze or illicit profit.

“China is in a bad way, full of miseries and heading for serious trouble.”

This chapter of my blog will tell in my father’s words how the miseries led to serious trouble and eventually to Communism taking over China.

The photos are his, taken in Shanghai or Peking.

Young China arrived

My father continued: “Twelve years ago, China had a comparatively stable government.

“Then came Young China, full of new ideas picked up in America and Europe. Young Chinese were not capable of seizing the reins and a military ruler came into existence on top.” (Cen Chun-xuan was head of China’s military at the time.)

“And since the first year (1912) of the Republic, a general has been the ruler of China, flouting the idea of democracy that the Republic was based on, bleeding the country of its wealth and leading it into untold miseries and suffering. “

Power is money in China

“We have a proverb, ‘Money is Power’ but China reverses this, as it does with most things.

“For ten years China’s military rulers have taxed, robbed, pillaged and squeezed it. ”

“Dozens of generals have retired with millions of dollars, embezzled from the money they extract from the people ‘to pay their soldiers’ on pain of the solders’ retaliation.”

“The soldiers get no regular pay and live by robbing the people and often desert and become bandits. They burn shops and houses, outrage women and murder children.”

Generals retire with a fortune

“Generals retire to the security of a foreign settlement such as Shanghai with perhaps $US20million and the rest of China shrugs its shoulders and endures this sort of thing.

“An accompanying curse is the resurrection of the opium habit. As much opium is smoked in China today as ever. Britain no longer supplies it.”

Peasants forced to grow opium

In the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, Britain sold opium to the Chinese to buy luxury goods such as porcelain, silk and tea.

“Peasants are forced to grow opium by the military rulers to provide revenue. The foreign-managed Chinese Customs Service wages an ever-losing battle against the opium trade.

“I have found opium planted in my luggage on a steamer on the Yangtze River but I had a wife and baby with me and I wasn’t going to risk anything by ‘finding’ it. The opium trade is run by a guild with agents and spies everywhere.”

Opium suppression a farce

“I know of a place near my office where I could have taken half a ton of opium and got hard cash for it. The suppression of opium has become a farce and China is going back to its old habits.

“It is very puzzling to think of a way to save China. The roads of China are all widening and John Chinaman never goes straight to where he wants to get. Young Chinese, full of windy Yankee ideas, won’t save China by their present methods”

China not ready for democracy

“China is not ready for democracy. It is against all Chinese traditions and habits. China would make as big a mess of things as Russia has if she got going with new ideas.”

My father racially claimed China “is not capable of being honest. Dishonesty is second nature in China.”

Foreign supervision is the way

“The first thing that must be done in China is to disband the soldiers. The generals would say, ‘But we must have money to pay them off.’ Would they pay them off if they had the money? Not likely!

“The Customs and Post Office show what can be done in China with foreign supervision and that, plus honesty, is the only way to get China on its legs again.”

Chinese Communism launched

My father’s arrogant idea of foreign supervision never arrived but Communism did.

On July 21, 1921 (a year before my father left China) the Chinese Communist Party was famously launched in a Shanghai room, which I visited in 1954.

Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalists, became leader of China in 1925…Many peasants remained under warlords’ control…Mao Zedong established a base near the Russian border and from 1934 to ’35 led his followers on The Long March of 6,200 miles through misery, starvation and death: Of the 80,000 who began, 8,000 survived.

China still claims Taiwan

On October 1, 1949, Mao created the People’s Republic of China and Chiang and his followers fled to Taiwan (Formosa).

The constantly-repeated loudspeaker song on my train through China in 1954 said China claims Taiwan. It still does.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO MY FATHER DESCRIBED THE CHINESE ‘HEE-HAW’

October 26, 2020 — Leave a comment

*Workers have lunch in a street in Peking (now Bejing). Photos in this chapter are by Donald Mennie in a 1920 book, “The Pageant of Peking”, given to my father by his workmates.*

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

“Chinese coolies sing or grunt to frighten devils away, or otherwise devils would sit on their loads and make them heavier”—that was how my father Sidney one hundred years ago described the work of “coolies” , a now-derogatory Hindu word that originated in my father’s birthplace, India.

I am continuing the text of an address my father gave when he and my mother Anne returned to her home town of Sydney after he had finished his contract as a civil engineer to plan the sewerage of the Shanghai International Concession.

Loads to break your back

He said, “One gets used to the monotonous ‘hee-haw’ or ‘huh-huh’ of coolies at work. And they carry loads which would break a white man’s back—and his heart.

“Religion is practically non-existent in China but superstitions and practices to avoid bad joss or luck are very common.”

Hideous noises scare devils away

“The chief observance is to burn joss-sticks at a temple but there are occasions when drums must be beaten and fireworks let off.

“The Chinese let off millions of fireworks and make hideous noises in many ways to scare devils away.

“Priests function largely at funerals, which are sometimes great occasions.

“A big funeral is more than a mile long, with all sorts of actors and atrocious brass bands in the gaudiest of uniforms, figures of devils, animals, dragons and incense-burning.”

Auld Lang Syne sung at funerals

“I have heard Auld Lang Syne sung at funerals,” showing how the ancient Scottish song that Robert Burns first put on paper in 1788 had spread to China by 1920.

My father continued: “At funerals, money is provided for the deceased. Of course, a special coinage is necessary. Priests make the heavenly money out of paper to be burnt at the altar and collect miserable earthly coins in exchange” – a very good exchange, similar to some Western religious methods.

Coffins are left in the fields

“In most parts of China the dead are disposed of by being placed in the fields. Often the coffins are left uncovered and gradually rot and fall to pieces. They are dotted all over the place in the country around Shanghai where we used to walk.

“In Shanghai streets and in the interior one sees wheelbarrows, the most wonderful one-man vehicle on earth.” In 231 CE (formerly AD), Zhuge Liang, the Prime Minister of the Shu Han Dynasty invented wheelbarrows as military technology.

The top Chinese inventions

The Chinese also invented: Paper, moveable type, gunpowder, compasses, alcohol, clocks, tea, umbrellas, acupuncture, iron-smelting, porcelain, earthquake detectors, rockets, bronze, kites, seed drills, row-crop farming, toothbrushes, paper money, chopsticks, the seismograph, the Silk Road, noodles, the abacus, soy milk, the electronic cigarette and horticulture.

*Donkeys and carts, but no cars in Peking*

My father continued about wheelbarrows: “I have often seen ten mill girls going home on one. It is true they upset occasionally. I defy any of you to manage four hundred pounds of cotton without a spill now and then. Barrows often make ear-splitting squeaking noises, which are highly desirable as they frighten away devils.”

Rice stalks planted individually

“The other mode of transport is the sedan chair.” (Sedan chairs came from the town of Sedan in France. In 1634 Sir Saunders Duncombe introduced them for hire in London.)

“The chief Chinese occupation is agriculture and, as in everything else, their methods are just as they were ages ago. They use buffaloes for ploughing. After the rice plants have grown, they plant them individually in a field. Imagine an Australian farmer planting each wheat stalk separately!”

What China produces

China now has 25 per cent of the world’s factory production but it also is the world’s biggest producer of wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, cabbages, onions, spinach, garlic, green beans, carrots, peanuts, peas, tea, tobacco, mushrooms, grapefruit and strawberries.

My father continued: “The Chinaman eats some weird and wonderful things. A Chinese banquet is a terrible ordeal. The number of courses varies with the importance of the occasion.

“I have had 48 courses at one banquet—shark fins, octopus, squid, snails, slugs, seaweed, fungus, cockroaches—I have not had any cockroaches but I have seen them being sold in the street, cooked or uncooked. The more noise you make at a Chinese banquet, the greater the compliment to your host.”

The next chapter will conclude my father’s comment on China a hundred years ago and briefly report its history until the Communists took over in 1949.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO CAMEL TRAINS BROUGHT COMMUNISM TO CHINA

October 11, 2020 — Leave a comment

by Australian Journalist Philip Luker

*Workmen having lunch under the Peking City Wall* – Photo Donald Mennie

“Someday, China is going to beat the white man at manufacturing most things”—that was a 1922 prediction by my father Sidney Luker in an address he gave to a group in Sydney on his return from China, where from 1920-22 as a civil engineer he planned the sewerage of the International Settlement in Shanghai. He also told how Communism arrived in China.

*Sidney Luker (1890-1952) found the site for the Sydney Opera House*

The Shanghai where my father and mother Anne lived a hundred years ago was obviously a lifetime away from Shanghai today.

My parents travelled two thousand kilometres up the Yangtze River and visited every port and Peking (now Beijing), which my father says was “crumbling and seeing its last days after 12 years of neglect” by the then Kuomintang Government. What a contrast from Bejing today!

Through a pass in the Great Wall

*Camels like those that brought Russian Communism to China*

The photos by Donald Mennie in this chapter are from a 1920s book, “The Pageant of Peking,” given to my father by his workmates.

I still have the complete transcript of an address my father gave back in Sydney.

In it he said: “Through a pass in the Great Wall come the camel caravans, as they did a thousand years ago.”

Communist literature spread widely

“Along with the silks, hides, wool and spices, they bring Bolshevik literature from the 1917 Russian Revolution and it is now being circulated all over China—and who knows when it will bear fruit?’ —a prediction of the huge power that the Chinese Communist Party now has over the world.

In my father’s time, China imported silks and spices from the rest of the world; now it makes 28 per cent of the world’s factory production.

Comparing Peking with Sydney

My father said: “Peking is one of the largest cities in the world, perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most fascinating.

“It has a population as big as Sydney’s.” (Sydney in 1920 had a population of 828,000; Peking had about 800,000. Sydney now has 4,900,000; Bejing 20 million.

Peking ‘seeing its last days’

*A street with no cars in Peking. They were widespread in Europe from 1908*

One wrong prediction my father made was this: “Peking is crumbling and is seeing its last days.

“Twelve years of Republican neglect have played havoc with its grandeur.

“It has an air of heart-breaking neglect, buildings in ruin in the most magnificent setting. But Peking still casts a glamour and still displays something of its former splendour.

“In Shanghai, money is made more quickly than in any other spot, lost as light-heartedly and spent as lavishly.”

Shanghai’s tortuous streets

“Alongside liners are old junks with tattered sails, still playing a large part of the country’s trade, going everywhere along the coast and up the Yangtsze.

“Sampans ply for trade, propelled by a long paddle balanced on a pin and waggled over the end of the boat. A foreigner has to try to use one of them to realise he can learn something from a Chinaman.”

Beggars with loathsome diseases

“Shanghai’s narrow tortuous streets are full of malodorous crowds pushing and jostling, beggars exhibiting loathsome diseases, quaint goods being sold, swarms of flies and mangy dogs and an overcrowding such as is seen nowhere else in the world.

“You cannot appreciate what an awful thing is a Chinese city,” said my father.

“The streets are often only six feet wide. In the Foreign Settlement you can buy silk, lace and furs without risking your health in the Chinese City.”

Letter-writers and travelling cook shops

“In the Chinese City are letter-writers, because millions of Chinese cannot write their own language and I don’t wonder at it, it is such a terrible one. Fancy having to learn about two thousand characters as an alphabet!

“A travelling cook shop supplies workmen and others in the streets with all the weird and horrible stuff they eat.

“Wood-sawyers are at work—they still hold their own against modern sawmills, typically of the cheapness of labour in China today.”

Half the Chinese children die

“But the Chinaman is learning modern methods. Shanghai has huge factories and cotton mills employing thousands. Some day they are going to swamp our foreign trade,” my father predicted.

“And the cause of the cheapness of labour is millions of children arriving every year. If times are good, more children are born. Normally at least half the kids die.

“Even the beggars have children in swarms and if they don’t have a suitable child, they borrow one. Beggars inflict horrible cruelties on children. For example they keep babies in jars for months so to deform their legs and make them more valuable for begging.”

Beggars give to famine funds

“The beggars in China are a power in themselves. They have a guild and funds.

The beggars in Shanghai contributed to the famine funds.

“The Beggar Chief goes to the man organising a grand wedding or a funeral and asks, ‘What is it worth?’

“And if the man does not make it worthwhile, the beggars gather at the function, things are stolen, the guests are worried to death and everything goes wrong. Similarly with the Thieves’ Guild.

“My contractors always pay a contribution to the Thieves’ Guild to secure freedom from theft.”

My father’s report on China when he was there one hundred years ago continues in the next chapter of my blog.

THE CHINA I FOUND AND THE BIG DIFFERENCE WITH THE FREE WORLD

September 20, 2020 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

I asked the Head Secretary of Peking Municipal Prison, Shao Sung, why there should be political prisoners at all. She answered without hesitation, “People trying to overthrow the government should be sentenced to death or long imprisonment.” She obviously believed what she said.

I was being escorted around the prison by Anne, my interpreter, as the first Australian journalist to get into China after the 1949 Communist Revolution.

It was 1956, but I am sure Shao Sung’s successor would say the same, as would officials in other harsh dictatorships around the world.

Typically, China has denied it has any political prisoners at all.

Prisoners were brainwashed

Shao Sung said two-thirds of the 1,800 prisoners in her jail were political.

Some still had as many as 20 years to serve for “crimes” like “actively supporting the Kuomintang,” the previous government of China.

The prisoners I interviewed had obviously been brainwashed. Some said their sentences should have been longer.

Of course, they were being interpreted by Anne, who they knew was a government interpreter.

One 47-year-old prisoner, working hard to complete his quota in the jail’s clothing factory, said the government had been too kind to him, giving him only 15 years for being a Kuomintang agent.

Two hours daily indoctrination

The prisoners spend two hours a day absorbing indoctrination by Communist Party officials who try to change their way of thinking.

They work for nine hours a day spinning, weaving and making stockings.

Their actions were mechanical, their faces devoid of expression and their minds, when I questioned them, produced stereotype answers like the machines they operated produced cotton.

The Communist Party governs China by fear. Fear makes the Chinese inform on their own families and keeps the mouths of non-communists shut. Fear makes the Chinese do exactly what the party wants. Europeans still in China told me fear makes Chinese stand up in front of their workmates and admit to “crimes” they had not committed.

Four thousand executed a year

They said the whole of China forms a strong and sure secret service because the party says everyone should inform on even their own relatives.

The daughter of a Shanghai mill worker, for instance, announced at the mill that her father had become a “counter-revolutionary” by not supporting the party.

He disappeared late one night, never to be heard of again.

Europeans I met in China said the party wants some information about political arrests, executions and jail conditions to leak out, increasing fear among the people.

The government regularly publishes the totals of people “eliminated” in certain districts, but never the total.

The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation says at least four thousand people are executed in China a year—more than in any other country.

Every factory had a creche

Europeans told me how communists have secretly arrested and executed victims then heaped their bodies on a truck, scattered blood around and driven the lot through crowded streets.

It is called “Hsiao mieh”—deprived of existence. China when I visited it was even then advanced in some ways.

The Minister for Labour I interviewed was a woman.

Every factory I visited had a crèche because mothers were encouraged to go to work.

No women in the world saw more changes in their lives in the six years before my visit than the women of China.

Women’s status transformed

^{_{Smiling at a visitor they probably assumed was Russian}}

Their status was transformed from a docile, subservient race obeying feudal customs into dressing, working and playing like men and having equal rights with them in all fields, including wages.

Mothers in industry received 56 days’ maternity leave and then were expected to bring their babies to work with them, strapped to their backs or left in the factory’s nursery.

But in the rush for equal status with men, they lost some of their femininity, dressed in shapeless boilersuits and wearing no make-up.

In the year I was in China, women were allowed to wear a little lipstick and a splash of coloured clothing in their sea of boilersuit blue.

I did not see a skinny child

_{Children at a Peking kindergarten put on a show for me}

Workers I interviewed in China were paid by piece rates because increased production was and is the government’s main aim in industry.

Workers were under a moral or stated obligation to complete quotas or risk being labelled “unpatriotic” or something similar.

A communist cadre can easily stretch such a word to mean “counter-revolutionary”. Average working conditions were eight hours a day, six days a week.

I did not see a skinny or diseased child in China, a strong contrast to the many in “free” Asian and African countries.

Children in China were the privileged class, almost as much as party officials.

The last American not in jail

I had two weeks of Peking interviews, tours of collective farms, factories and sanitised slums.

The day before I went by train to Shanghai, I asked my interpreter Anne whether young Chinese went to dances and if they did, would she go to a dance with me?

She said she would have to ask her boss. Her boss declined to give approval, or maybe Anne went dancing with someone else.

In Shanghai, the Third Secretary of the British Consulate gave me the names and addresses of “Old China Hands”—Europeans who had lived through the Revolution and stayed in China. I visited them.

One was the last American not in jail. He was a former import-export agent and the government used him continuously to bring American dollars into China by ordering him to redecorate his flat or buy a new car.

He attacked the government in an interview with me. I said, “You will be jailed if this is published.” He replied, “I am so fed-up, I don’t care.”

I wrote the article, he signed it and after all the Hearst newspapers in the US published it, I read that he had been given an exit visa and had gone home.

The Great Tragedy of Hong Kong

Not until the day I left China did I realise where lay the biggest difference between it and free Asia.

I turned my back on the tiered paddy fields, the sweating workers and mud houses of rural China.

I walked up the path from the last station on the railway line from Canton, on to the bridge over the border stream, through the barbed wire gate and down the path into Hong Kong.

There the paddy fields were also tiered, the workers were sweating and the houses were mud, just as in China.

The biggest difference was that the workers in Hong Kong at that time could stand up at any time and say exactly what they liked.

The Great Tragedy of Hong Kong is that now the Communist Party has made it just another city of China, the people cannot say and do whatever they like.

NEXT CHAPTER: What my father found in China one hundred years ago.

A WOMAN BREAKING STONES: CHINA AS IT WAS AND STILL IS FOR 647 million PEOPLE

September 6, 2020 — 2 Comments

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

*My photo of girls grinding wheat on a Peking co-operative farm*

A woman, hardened by sun, wind and work, was squatting beside a railway station, her solemn, black-eyed baby tied to her back. She was breaking stones to build a road with what we would call a tack hammer.

The train taking me from Hong Kong to Canton (now called Guangzhou) had stopped at the station. It was an entirely new scene for a 22-year-old journalist whose earlier foreign experiences had been in England, France and West Germany.

The first Australian journalist allowed in

Every minute or so, the woman would stop and look up at the humanity in my train. Then she would go on breaking stones.

She—more than anything I saw in January 1954 as the first Australian journalist allowed into China after the 1949 Communist Revolution—was old China and starkly different from life in Chinese cities today, or for Chinese in cities around the world.

The work the woman was doing would take a machine minutes but was taking her days.

It is still the kind of work done by 647 million rural Chinese, who comprise 45 per cent of China’s population of 1,439 million, 18.5 per cent of the people in the world.

The same work six decades later

And while the earnest, boiler-suited government officials in Peking (Beijing) rattled on to me for hours about new factories and China-made machines and escorted me around their industrial showplaces, I remembered the woman and her lifetime of breaking stones.

I remembered her on my two later trips to China. Even now, six decades later, rural Chinese spend their lives doing the same kind of work.

I arrived in China 17 years before Gough Whitlam did as Australian Opposition Leader and Henry Kissinger did as U.S. President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1971

Nixon himself arrived the following year. I took risks in going to China as neither the United States nor Australia recognised Communist China at the time and had no diplomats there.

Four days trying to sleep

I spent four days trying to sleep in a Hard Class train compartment to Peking because I did not want to play extra for Soft Class.

As you can imagine, I didn’t sleep much. Everyone else in my carriage was obviously surprised to see a European in Hard Class because Europeans, mostly Russians, travelled in Soft Class.

I asked many fellow travellers, “Do you speak English?” One did. I tried to have a conversation with him on and off for four days.

Everything he said about China followed the government’s line of progress, prosperity and perfection. Repeatedly, a song was played on the train’s loudspeaker system.

I asked my friend, “What is that song?” He said, “The song is, ‘We are determined to liberate Taiwan’.” Seven decades later, China is still saying the same.

Conversation with Chinese doctors

I got a fever towards the end of my four days in Hard Class and when I arrived —not very well—at Peking Railway Station, the government tourist guide who met me took me to Peking Hospital, where I stayed for two days while many Chinese doctors visited me and felt my pulse, several times a day.

One who spoke English told me they had never treated a European before. It was hilarious trying to tell the doctors I felt much better and wanted to continue my visit to their country.

Luckily, the hospital gave me a chart with translations into Chinese for “A bottle please” and “A bedpan please.”

I was looked after very well. The nurses were full of charm and kindness.

My Chinese interpreter spoke good English

Out of hospital, I persuaded Intourist to give me an interpreter and a car driver free as I was a freelance and couldn’t charge anyone for my expenses.

My interpreter was Anne, of about my age. Anne spoke good English. In spite of the way she pushed the official line in whatever she said, we got to know each other.

My first trip with her was to a show co-operative farm near Peking. We dove there in a new Ford over the worst road I had ever travelled on.

The local village was an assortment of mud huts, in the biggest of which plump, homely peasant girls served me green tea while the co-op leader, Chao Chen, talked about production gains, full stomachs and overjoyed peasants.

*Boys reading a propaganda comic in Peking*

Fifteen million more deaths than WWII

*Some things don’t change: A “feudal wolf” and Uncle Sam in a Peking parade*

Four years later, at the instigation of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward killed 45 million Chinese, followed in 1966 by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which even the current Chinese Government admits killed 30 million people.

Together these events caused 15 million more deaths than all of World War 11.

Today Mao is still honoured in China. The ruling Chinese Communist Party’s verdict on him is that he was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.

His birthplace, Shaoshan village in Hunan province receives millions of Chinese visitors a year. A large photo of him still adorns the front of The Forbidden City in Beijing.

Huge increase in Chinese factory production

When I toured China in 1954, only 13.3 per cent of the Chinese lived in cities; now, 61.4 per cent do, so intent has the Communist Party been on dominating world production of factory goods.

In 1990, China produced less than three per cent of global factory production; now, it produces 25 per cent, including 80 per cent of the world’s air conditioners, 70 per cent of its mobile phones and 60 per cent of the world’s shoes.

In Australia, which has the world’s highest minimum wage, a person on that wage takes only 18 minutes to buy a local Big Mac; in France it takes 22 minutes, in the U.K. 23 minutes, in the U.S. 35 minutes and in China 183 minutes—ten times longer than in Australia. No wonder China now dominates world factory production.

THE NEXT BLOG CHAPTER will briefly report further significant events on my China trip and also what my father found there in 1920.

Hectic Cairo is famous for pyramids, wars and bellydancing

August 8, 2020 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

Bellydancing was born in Cairo and so were Tutankhamun, Moses and Cleopatra.

This dancer, Jasirah, was born in Poland, which shows how international this blog is. Her dance here has been downloaded 25 million times.

She is not as plump as some other bellydancers.

That’s how many Middle Eastern men prefer them.

Cairo’s first music hall

Badia Masabni (1892-1974) was the godmother of Bellydancing.

She was a Syrian-Lebanese actress who opened Cairo’s first music hall in the 1920s.

Cairo has had many unofficial bellydancers, including some who danced nude for ANZAC World War 1 servicemen returning from Gallipoli and having a break before carnage on the Western Front in France.

Cairo is a city of conservative social customs becoming more liberal, more people dressing in Western fashion, more women working than elsewhere in the Middle East, a bloody succession of conquests from Alexander to the British, crazy traffic, blaring car horns, a unique atmosphere, little back streets and three pyramids.

The Great Pyramid took 20 years

Pharaoh Khufu used a thousand paid workers and slaves who took 20 years to finish the Great Pyramid in 2540 BCE (Before Christ).

They hauled the huge stone blocks up ramps with sledges, rollers and levers. There were no welcome breaks in music halls after work.

Pharaoh’s son built the Great Sphinx

The Great Pyramid is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World and the only one to remain largely intact, a tribute to the pharaoh and his skilled engineers and workers.

The six other Wonders are: The Colosseum, the Christ statue above Rio de Janeiro, the Great Wall of China, the Petra historical city in Jordan, the Taj Mahal and the Machu Picchu ruins in Peru.

Pharaoh Khufu’s family were keen to leave mementoes of themselves behind: His son built the Great Sphinx, with a body of a lion and the face of a man who looks like he did. It’s surprising other dictators have not copied the idea.

Egyptian men have several wives

Life in ancient Egypt was not very different from life for many Egyptians outside Cairo today. Families were and are important.

Most men had several wives, including a chief wife, but women were often treated as equals and were allowed to own property and conduct business although they were expected to obey their husbands

Taxes were imposed on crops.

Most ancient and modern Egyptians live on the banks of the Nile.

It is regarded as the world’s longest river at 6,853km (4,258 miles) although Brazil claims the Amazon is longer.

The Nile gives Egypt irrigation, hydropower, a steady water supply and rich soil.

Cairo has population of 20 million

Cairo has a hectic atmosphere of crazy traffic and 20 million people, twice the number in Sydney and Melbourne combined.

Thirty-five per cent of Cairo people are aged under 15 and only one per cent are aged over 75. In Australia, 13.6 per cent of people are aged 65 or over.

Women walking through a Cairo Street with a Pepsi sign in the background

Cairo is enchanting, although not if you struggle to survive, as the general living standard is low. Its culture is a mix of Eastern, Western and Arab cultures.

My photo of women in Middle Eastern dress shows a Pepsi sign in the background.

The three pyramids and the Sphinx are only seven kilometres away and are its main tourist attraction.

Islam discourages dating

Almost all Cairo people follow Islam to a greater or lesser extent. Islam discourages dating so single men and women are not supposed to be alone together if not related.

Lower-income families often negotiate marriage with another family.

Once a couple is introduced, the families meet to discuss who will pay for the marriage and the dowry to be paid by the wife to the husband or his family.

Then a supervised meeting is arranged, when either person can say no to the marriage. All very unromantic.

Egypt was conquered eight times

Alexander very bloodily conquered Egypt in 323BCE.

Then the Romans did so in 30BCE, followed by Arab Muslim armies in AD 639, then the Mongols, then the Mamluk Sultans, then the Ottoman Empire until 1798, then by Napoleon but for only three years until the British occupied Egypt in 1882.

Egypt became important for trade after Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat, built the Suez Canal through it in 1869.

Like most people conquered by a foreign army, the Egyptians were not in love with the British and in 1952 some Egyptian generals led by Garnal Abdel Nasser took their country back and made Nasser President.

Nasser’s popularity skyrocketed

Australian and British schoolchildren were taught how terrible Nasser was.

Actually, he was personally incorruptible, accessible to ordinary Egyptians, introduced land reforms and in 1956 his popularity among Egyptians skyrocketed when he nationalised the Suez Canal.

Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt but withdrew when the United States and Russia protested.

As a result, bellydancing did not spring into fashion in London or Paris and certainly not in Jerusalem.

But otherwise it has spread around the world.

Volatile Argentina is the home of sensual Tango and was the home of ratline Nazis

May 12, 2020 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan, sensual city of Europeans in a Latin American continent and is—like the Tango that was born there — captivating, seductive and bustling with energy.

Men danced the Tango with each other

The Tango’s most popular tune, played here, is La Cumparsita (The Carnival), originally a march written in 1916 by 18-year-old architectural student Gerardo Rodriguez.

It became popular in Buenos Aires when immigrant men in slaughterhouse-district brothels entertained themselves by dancing with each other (that is correct) while waiting for women.

From there, it rose to become fashionable in high society in Paris and around the world.

How Evita Peron became a legend

Most of Argentina’s 45 million people have descended from Spanish and Italian immigrants.

Europeans comprise 86 percent of the people.

Argentina declared itself independent of its Spanish conquerors in 1816 and since then has had a succession of dictators, particularly Juan Peron, whose wife Eva, known as Evita, became a legend by using her position to help the poor and to give equality and education to women.

Evita album became a musical

Born poor herself, Evita died of cancer aged only 33 and came to worldwide admiration when in 1976 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote the album “Evita” and later turned the story into a musical of the same name, including the incredibly sad song, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.”

Argentina itself has had periods of great sadness.

Between 1930 and 1975, the army overthrew six governments and the country alternated between dictatorships and democracies.

U.S. sponsored Operation Condor

In a series of political coups called Operation Condor sponsored and supported by the left-wing-hating U.S. Government, the last Peron government (led by Isabel Peron, who Juan married after Evita died) was overthrown by the army, which started what is called “Argentina’s Dirty War.”

About 30,000 men, women and children disappeared because the army considered left-wingers terrorists.

About 500 children were given to army officers and others after their mothers were kidnapped and killed.

Thirty-one countries have compulsory voting

Since 1983, Argentina has been a full-scale democracy, one of the 31 countries with compulsory voting. But the government and economy continues to be in constant turmoil and in 2001, Argentina had five presidents in ten days. Many politicians are corrupt.

Argentina already had many German residents when Juan Peron, himself a supporter of fascism, established ratline escape routes for thousands of Nazis after World War 11, including Adolph Eichmann (the architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution”) and Joseph Mengele, the “Angel of Death.” who had conducted macabre medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz death camp.

Nazi fugitive tackled as he got off a bus

In 1960, Israeli spies observed Eichmann’s daily routine in Buenos Aires, wrestled him to the ground after he got off a bus, drugged him and smuggled him on to a plane to Jerusalem, where he was tried and hanged in 1962.

Mengele owned a mechanical repair shop in Buenos Aires, married but drowned off the coast after he had a stroke.

Latin America’s highest infidelity rate

Argentina was the first Latin American country to legalise same-sex marriage; it has Latin America’s highest divorce and infidelity rate; it was the first country in the world to use finger-printing in crime-detection; its people listen to the radio for more hours (20.1) a week than any other country; Buenos Aires has more psychiatrists than any other city—maybe because of the city’s fast pace?; it has the world’s widest avenue, 9 de Julio (July 9, 1816 was when it became independent of Spain); it was the birthplace of the current Pope Francis, who was once a Buenos Aires bar bouncer; four-fifths of Argentinians are Roman Catholic but most do not practice it.

The Tango has come a long way since slaughterhouse workmen danced with each other although beef and other food processing is still Argentina’s biggest industry.

The saddest love song sung in the happiest country – Costa Rica

April 18, 2020 — 1 Comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

The musicians I photographed in a café in San Jose, Costa Rica, are playing “Historia De Un Amor,” one of the most popular and certainly the saddest love song throughout Latin America and holding the world record for translations into other languages, a total of seventeen.

One Youtube recording of it, by the Mexican singer Guadalupe Pineda, has been played 51 million times.

The song was written by the Panamanian songwriter Carlos Almaran after the death of his brother’s wife and it passionately and hauntingly tells the story of a man’s suffering after his love has disappeared.

I played the sad song on juke boxes in cafes throughout Central and South America.

Costa Rica has the most democratic government in Central America

But Costa Rica is a happy story. It has the most democratic and stable government in Central America.

It also has the highest literacy rate (97.5 per cent) and a life expectancy of 76 years for men and 82 for women.

All adults among its five million people must vote for a president and assembly every four years; medical care is free; education is free and compulsory.

There are several excellent universities and a network of bookshops make it the intellectual centre of Central America; the crime rate is very low; living standards are high; so is the proportion (80 per cent) of people of European descent, mostly Spanish.

Costa Rica aims to be carbon neutral

The people I spoke to are proud of their political freedoms and stable economy, which has swung from coffee, bananas and pineapple production to services and technology.

Costa Rica was first in the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index in 2009 and 2012 and aims to be carbon neutral by 2021.

Ticos, as the Costa Rican people are called, use the phrase pura vida (pure life) in their everyday speech as a greeting or to show appreciation for something

Costa Rica is neither rich (as its name, “Rich Coast” implies) nor poor, like its neighbours Nicaragua and Panama.

But the most remarkable thing about Costa Rica is that it abolished its army in 1949.

Costa Rica is among Nineteen countries that have no army

After 44 days of civil war, on 24 April 1948, rebels wrested control of the country and promised reform and free elections.

The rebels’ leader, Jose Figueres, issued a new constitution, enacted social reforms, granted full citizenship to blacks, introduced votes for women and abolished the army.

Eighteen other countries, including Iceland, Haiti, Monaco, Mauritius and Vatican City, have no army.

Costa Rica, like all Latin American countries, has drug gang problems.

Its two main gangs, 18^th Street and Mara Salvatrucha, both started in Los Angeles, U.S.A. Between 2000 and 2004, the U.S. deported 20,000 people back to Costa Rica.

Central America plagued by poverty

Central American countries Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, have been plagued by chronic poverty and violence, which have sent a flood of refugees to the U.S.

Guatemala, next door to Mexico, gained independence from Spain in the 1820s.

From 1954, its governments faced formidable guerrilla opposition that sparked a 36-year civil war until peace came in 1996.

Since then, it has had a slow political and economic recovery.

Half the Guatemalans are poor

Life expectancy is low; more than half the people live below the poverty line; and fewer than one in five children go to secondary school.

Only three-quarters of the people can read and write and they vote for Congress every five years.

The economy is based on coffee, sugar and bananas.

Nicaragua, next door to Costa Rica, is the largest Central American country with seven million people.

Seventy per cent of them of mixed Indian and Spanish descent and only seventeen per cent pure Spanish.

It has a repressive, autocratic government that has sparked popular uprisings.

The average income in Nicaragua

Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, with one and a half million people, has shopping malls, local markets and nightclubs where bands play a combination of European and Latin American music.

Several times, I heard them play and sing Historia De Un Amor. Eighty-three per cent of women can read and write, one per cent more than the men.

The income per person averages $US13,220 a year or $254 a week.

Almost half the people in Honduras, next door, are rural, living in small villages and many of them working for two U.S. corporations, Chiquita and Dole, which control most of the agricultural land and export bananas, coffee beans, tobacco and sugarcane.

Honduras’ political power changes violently

One-fifth of the Honduran’s can’t read or write. Families and family loyalty are central to Honduras’ daily life and society.

Eighty-six per cent of the people are of mixed Mestizos race.

Honduras has a rough landscape and violent weather.

Two-fifths of it is covered by forests. It is a democracy but power often changes hands violently.

Panama, next door to Costa Rica to the south, was Spain’s first Pacific Ocean colony and was the staging point for its Inca Empire conquest.

I watched a very rude strip show in Panama City

Twenty thousand people died, mostly from disease, when the French tried to build the Panama Canal and another five thousand died before the Americans finished it in 1914.

America relinquished control over the canal in 1999. Panama City is known for its nightclubs and strip shows, one of which—a very rude one—I watched.

Belize, the smallest Central American country, was known as British Honduras until 1973 and was Britain’s last colony on the American mainland.

It achieved independence in 1981 but remains a member of the (formerly British) Commonwealth and has a stable and democratic government.

Half its 408,000 people are Mestizos. There and everywhere else I went in Central America, I heard the haunting Historia De Un Amor.” I still remember it well.

Into the Amazon with dancing girls and down the Amazon with monkeys

April 2, 2020 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

The Colombian Air Force plane that took me with crates of beer, two dancing girls and condoms for a hundred bored and lonely soldiers in Leticia, on the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru, did so because Brazil once invaded Colombia.

Ever since, soldiers had been stationed there in case Brazil tried to do it again. It hasn’t.

I photographed the little boy looking at my Amazon ferryboat—far more humble that the tourist ships that now go up and down the river—soon after my two-propeller plane had arrived in Leticia.

Colombian dancing girls did high kicks

That night I was invited, along with the cheering soldiers, to see the girls perform dressed not in bikinis but in old-fashioned two-piece swimsuits–Brazil is socially conservative.

Visualise the show: The girls doing high kicks to the sound of a long-playing musical-comedy record and cheers from the troops and me

The officers had arranged to be entertained by the girls afterwards.
Leticia had a dirt main street, a few shops selling nothing much at all and a row of wooden houses with thatched rooves.

Life is still the same in some smaller Amazon villages. Siesta lasts from noon to 4pm.

Boats going down the Amazon

Now, Leticia is a busy port for many luxury tourist boats going and down the river, but when I was there, only one boat did this and it had no timetable.

I asked local people when the next boat would arrive. The reply was always, “No se, senor” (Don’t know, senor). “Quizas manana” (Maybe tomorrow).

Colombian law prevented the boat from coming to Leticia, only as far as the next village down the river in Brazil, Tabatinga.

So I pleaded with a boy living next door to my pension to tell me as soon as he heard it had arrived at Tabatinga.

One sleepy afternoon he woke me from my siesta (there was nothing else to do) and said, “Zee boat come, senor”.

Amazon trip in third class

The boy paddled me in his canoe down the river to Tabatinga and I boarded the ferryboat, asked for the captain and how much was a trip in Third Class.

He quietly led me to the open deck, where local people had strung-up hammocks.

I asked the captain about First Class. He showed me a good four-birth cabin with the luxury of sheets on each bed. Zee cost? Ten American dollars, including three meals a day for the week-long trip to Manaus, half way down the Amazon. Naturally I agreed.

Amazon boat had no refrigeration

The boat had no refrigeration but as soon as I saw two cows in a small pen on the deck and turtles and monkeys in other pens, I guessed they were to feed us.

As we churned our way slowly down the Amazon, I felt sorry for the monkeys I was probably eating in the dining room.

American society dollar-structured

The only other passengers who spoke English were two American teachers.

One significant thing they said was that although both were graduates and full-time high school teachers, many other Americans would not consider them successful because they were paid fair but not large salaries, so much was (and is) American society dollar-structured.

At each riverside village, the boat tied up at a rickety wharf or at the riverbank and local people brought cooked food and live monkeys in cages to sell to the third-class passengers, who had to provide their own food. Again, I felt sorry for the monkeys.

Villagers used Amazon as a toilet

At one village on stilts in the swampy river bank, an American church missionary called John told me the villagers were lethargic, infected with worms because they and their cattle used the river as a toilet.

So he’d urged them to always boil river water before drinking it. “They did boil the water when I was watching them, but as soon as I stopped doing so, they went back to drinking unboiled water,” he said.

Even then, logging and cattle-raising companies were raiding the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest forest and home to ten per cent of all animal and plant species.

John said: “The cattle and timber raiders are spreading diseases such as influenza among the remaining tribal Indians, who have fled further into the jungle because they feel threatened.”

Amazon tribes remain isolated

Native people in 350 different tribes comprise nine per cent of the Amazon’s 125,000 people and most of the tribes remain isolated.

Many scientists blame increasing deforestation on Brazil’s aggressive, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army officer.

Three-quarters of Amazon rainforest loss has been in Brazil, which since 1960 has offered incentives for farmers to clear forest to raise cattle.

People in villages like John’s live in wooden, thatched houses on stilts to avoid the river in the rainy season, when it expands up to 38 km wide. They grow vegetables, fruit and corn and hunt and fish.

They have little chance of education or health care but in recent years Amazon villages in Brazil are visited by a health-services boat every few weeks and many villages receive lessons via generator-powered television sets, which also give them news and entertainment.

John told me the most dangerous Amazon animal is the Anaconda, a semi-aquatic snake that squeezes its prey—sometimes humans–to death like a cobra.

Piranha fish have a dreadful reputation for stripping animals to the bone and eating them alive but rarely attack humans.

I didn’t test this by having an Amazon swim, one other reason being that the river is full of leeches.

Brazilian spider the world’s most venomous

Other Amazon creatures are not any prettier. You can touch a Poison Dart Frog and get a shot of enough poison to kill you; the Amazon Giant Centipede, with legs 30 centimetres long, can overpower and kill lizards, snakes, frogs and birds; the Brazilian Wandering Spider is the world’s most venomous spider; then there are black Caiman crocodiles and elusive Jaguars.

The Amazon was named by a Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, who in 1541 was the first European to sail down it from one end to the other, on his way encountering female warriors like the Amazons of Greek legend, which is why he named the river Amazon.

Huge Amazon rainforest lost

It is the world’s largest river by volume of water and holds one-fifth of all the water on the earth’s surface. It has 3,000 fish species, the world’s largest number.

Ninety billion tons of carbon are stored in Amazon rainforests, the world’s largest. But 750,000 square kilometres of rainforest have been destroyed for logging, mining or cattle-raising.

The only city on the Amazon is Manaus, which has a remarkable opera house called Teatro Amazonas, built in 1896 during the Amazon rubber boom—before plastics were discovered.

Ships that exported rubber to Europe brought back art works, bricks and 36,000 ceramic tiles, used to build the opera house.

The days have gone from when a rubber baron gave his horse Champagne to drink but Teatro Amazonas is still the home of the Amazonas Opera Festival and Amazonas Philharmonic Orchestra.

Manaus now a tax-free city

Manaus started to recover from the rubber slump in about 1950 and became a tax-free city for manufacturing.

Currently two million people live there, a sharp contrast with the sleepy town I visited.