Hier is aflevering negen van Bureau Breuker over Peter Fleming en diens boeken over Mantsjoerije en Manchukuo.
Hier is de mp3 (320kbps):
As a Dutch national who braved the vagaries of Dutch public transportation daily (not anymore! Now I just cycle to the institute. Life is good, to quote what was once called Lucky Goldstar, yes, Lucky Goldstar – I wonder how many marketing millions went into trying the erase the memory of Lucky Goldstar, btw, but that is an entirely different matter), I probably have a tendency to underestimate (and severely so)
I was just sent classified materials. 291 pages of classified, top secret data filled with numbers, analyses, tables, indexes. How do I know they are classified, you ask? Well, this here to the left is a dead give-away, the Chinese character equivalent of this immediately recognizable warning below:
That is what it would have said had this been a 70s spy movie.
If I had been a young man in the 1920s and had gotten hold of Manchuria, Land Of Opportunities (1922), I just might have bought myself a one-way ticket on a slow boat to Manchuria. In terms of opportunities, in particular investment opportunities, it doesn’t come much better than as described in painstaking detail in this book. Did you know for example that in 1920 1,955,464 gallons of lubricating oil were imported into Manchuria? Don’t ask me why. No, don’t. And that in the same year 52,508,400 pounds of perilla leaves were exported from Manchuria?