Word: sampan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...stubborn, aging (63) leader, the flight across the sampan-flecked Strait of Formosa was a time for bitter remembrance. For China, and the world, it was the end of an era. A quarter of a century ago, with Sun Yat-sen's mantle on his shoulders, young Chiang had marched up the mainland to Nanking and into a new Nationalist China. He had embraced Christianity. According to his lights, he had sought to guide his nation into the mainstream of modern civilization. He had broken the warlords, checked an early international Communist conspiracy, survived Japanese aggression-only...
Marauding Rats. The first week after Chinese New Year Canton steamed under a tropical sun. Then a biting, near freezing rain hit the city. Ricksha boys and sampan coolies sought refuge in dry alleyways where they spent hours culling their tattered palm-frond raincoats for lice. At night they slept on the sidewalks wrapped in dirty burlap bags awaking only to chase away marauding rats which feast in the swill-strewn streets after the city's human population has retired...
...A.G.R.S. recovery teams soon found that they had to become rivermen, mountain climbers, explorers, bush diplomats and detectives. A.G.R.S. men, almost one-third of them Chinese-Americans, went out in groups of from three to ten. They traveled by jeep, mule, native pony, oxcart, sampan or on foot, were almost always supplied by air. Some of them headed west of Chungking toward Tibet, and into mountain country which no white man had ever explored. Others battled leech-ridden jungles and flooded rivers; one group swam a swollen stream to find the bodies of a B-29 crew, swam back, pushing...
...worth of emergency food, medicines and textiles (to crack inflation). Given internal peace, China might suffer less even in the immediate future than many anticipated. In coastal Foochow, two months after liberation, Chinese industry and doggedness had already brought civilian life to prewar levels. Streets were repaved, sampan traffic resumed, trade restored. Everywhere in the countryside the harvest promised to be bountiful. In a nation overwhelmingly agricultural and simple, there was solid reason for hope of a quick return to peace...
Then Airman-Infantryman Saunders became Seaman Saunders. He scrounged a sampan and sailed the Rangoon River southward. Soon he met British soldiers and passed the word. Then Rangoon was more fully and formally captured...