Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:

“Dancing Tree” Has Yen For Good Music
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
December 6, 1981

Peasants in Yunnan Province in southwest China have found a small tree which “dances” when beautiful music is played nearby but which ignores loud martial tunes.

“When music is played near the tree, the trunk sways in time to the rhythm and the leaves turn from side to side. As soon as the music stops, the tree also immediately ceases to move,” the Canton Daily reported.

“When people standing near the tree talk softly, the tree will also begin to dance, but if the talking is loud and raucous, it does not move,” the paper added.

Author note: In 1981, the Chinese official media shook off decades of a politics-only diet and started to publish a few small items that were weird but also politically safe. Working for the Daily Telegraph, there was little chance to talk to ordinary people or do anything approaching ordinary reporting. I had a very cultured and educated “translator” who later became an ambassador, and we subscribed to every single newspaper then available in China, and spent our days together going through them, looking for interesting stuff – trouble in the provinces, a hint of some new twist in the latest political campaign, and weird news items like this one. Some of them I even managed to resell to the National Enquirer, but don’t tell Lord Hartwell.