Oh, and the magic is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I lived in Oxford for several years (although, thankfully, I wasn't a scholar) and Kuang has perfectly captured the madness of the city. Her world-building is delightfully realistic and the parenthetical footnotes sprinkled throughout lead to a mesmerising blurring of reality and fiction. When you read sentences like "Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well." it often feels like you're receiving an education as well as experiencing the narrative flow.

The book's politics aren't subtle - but they needn't be. This isn't smuggled polemic; it is righteous fury bound into a novel and set loose on an unsuspecting world. It is the very essence of what it means to be "woke". Our characters gradually have the scales drop from their eyes and they begin to realise the nightmare world they live in.

A thoroughly entertaining read, with a perfect mixture of alternative history, science-fantasy, heartbreak, and wonder.

On a minor technical note - the publishers have rendered all the Chinese characters as tiny images which makes it hard to read them. A bit of a baffling editorial decision!

Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans.

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history.

Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair. Little Sister became first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China. Big Sister made herself one of country's richest women.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister takes us on a sweeping journey from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China.

I'm trying to read wider on feminism outside of the Western world and Anglosphere. Jung Chang's book isn't quite about feminism - rather it is a specific look at three very different women who ended up shaping modern China.

Except... it isn't. In order to understand the history of China, you need to know about the men who shaped it. So the book almost relentlessly focuses on the men in the sisters' lives. I get that it is necessary - but it means we get endless passages about what the menfolk were doing, with nary a mention of what the sisters did or felt.

But even this falls a little short. At no point did the book ever explain what Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek wanted. Were they just egomaniacs who wanted to rule? Did they have political demands? Were they reasonable? There's no real explanation of the politics behind any of the people, so it becomes a bit of a soap opera.

It is a sweeping epic. A worldwide struggle for the heart of a nation - and for the hearts of the sisters. It's exciting and enlightening. It's also slightly infuriating. There are lots of "missing steps". There's very little discussion about the impact these people's actions had on ordinary people.

It is an excellent, if somewhat uncritical, biography of the power-players at the rebirth of a nation.

A few technical criticisms. The book file is 50MB due to its lavish use of photographs. But, annoyingly, all of the images appear at the end! This isn't a paper book, it doesn't need special paper inserts. It would have been great to see the people and places while they were being discussed.

The eBook is badly formatted. It is full of hard-hyphens. Again, it looks like the typesetting was just copied over from the paper book.

There's also a complete lack of Chinese characters. All the names and places have been Romanised - which feels a little patronising. There's also no Pinyin, which makes pronunciation difficult.

It's certainly an interesting biography (triography?) but I wish it went a little deeper.

It is a mixed lot of tales about Chinese people both in and outside of China. But, with the exception of a couple of stories - they just fell flat for me.

I found it hard to assess if the stories are intended to be realistic or allegorical. As the author is a journalist, I thought the stories might be grounded in reality - or based on interviews. Instead, they're an amalgam of possibly-true little slices of life from a perspective you may not have encountered. There's nothing particularly wrong with them, but there's only so many times you can read about someone lost and alone in a big city before it gets repetitive.

The final story, "Gubeikou Spirit", is fantastic. It is a wonderful tale of manipulation, lack of agency, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It feels like the author has perfectly captured the dream-logic of a nightmare.

I decided to take a selfie with this delightful water fountain.

But there was something bothering me. I could hear... something...

What's that?

Zoom! Enhance!

RUN AWAY!

Being veggie in Beijing was relatively easy. I had a stock phrase "我吃素" (Wo Chi Su - I eat vegetables), and a smattering of tourist level Mandarin. I had recommendations from friends and - most importantly - I had the HappyCow app. An indispensable guide to veggie eating around the world.

Here we go!

VegeTiger - 素虎素餐

I was jetlagged and delirious with hunger on my first evening. I'd used the Beijing subway for the first time (so clean and efficient) and found myself wandering through the suburbs of the city. The directions just said "Find the KFC, then walk into the car park." Sure, how bad can this go?

Well, here's the KFC!

Here's the car park - with electric car charging points!

And here's SUHU VegeTiger!

Delightful pickles set out to start with - then a range of mock meat dishes

Staff were very friendly and were generous with my limited use of their language. Food was served quickly and with generous portions.

Dessert looked amazing, but I was too full.

vegetiger.com

Xin Shuang QuanSheng Tai LvYuan Restaurant

Not a strict vegetarian restaurant. It's where all the tour guides take their charges before heading up the Great Wall. As with most restaurants, the menus had large pictures.

My guide helpfully clarified which dishes were veggie friendly and which only had 有一点儿 (a little bit) of meat!

The salted duck eggs looked amazing in their blue shells. They were too salty for my tastes though. Great to try, but hard to stomach.

The garlic aubergine was drowned in garlic - just the way I like it!

The monk's vegetables were refreshing and had these strange yellow things which sort of tasted like potato? It wasn't sweetcorn - I know that!

Bowei Tang - 博味堂

OMG! We had a 20 minute wait for a table here. Almost unbearable given the smells coming out of the kitchen!

Bowei Tang served us up an incredible platter of veggie sashimi. All with fake fish.

Including this delight!

We also had some rather good "kung po" style fake chicken, and an assortment of veggie filled dumplings.

King's Joy

My good friend Sylvia recommended King's Joy and I am forever in her debt. A haute cuisine restaurant which serenaded us with a harpist and cellist. We had the cheapest tasting menu which worked out at around £70 each including drinks. That's pricey for Beijing, but such a treat!

The room was too "artfully" lit to get many photos - but here's a sample.

Dessert was so incredible - I had to take a video.

Wow! Dry ice (I think) to make the steam, a fruit dessert and two small cakes.

Wait staff were incredible, patiently explaining each dish and talking us through the history of the restaurant. Expensive, yes. But exquisite!

Fu Hui Ci Yuan Vegetarian Cultural Restaurant

This restaurant is down a back-alley off the highly commercial Wangfujing Street. It's part of a Buddhist museum and gift shop.

The tofu and mushroom sizzling bowl was fantastic - nourishing after a long day.

I found the rice to be too oily for my tastes - but it was redeemed by the steamed papaya and vegetables.

The wait staff were almost comically absent - but as I was the only one in after their lunch rush, I guess I can forgive them.

Ye Bo Zhai - 叶钵斋

The final restaurant of my tour. I found myself utterly exhausted and with only ¥70 left in my pocket. They were adamant that they wouldn't accept credit card. I chose their "Special Noodles with famous mushroom gravy" for ¥55.

It was... pretty good. Not amazing, but I was exhausted and broke. It filled me up enough to get back to my hotel. The decor was beautiful though.

It's all good!

I was too nervous (and rushed for time) to go for any street food - although I treated myself to a fair few ice-creams! The hotel I was staying at did a range of veggie dishes for breakfast, and the conference also catered to us meat-dodgers.

Beijing is a modern, cosmopolitan city. Staff in restaurants seemed more than happy to tolerate my poor grasp of their language.

I only scratched the surface of veggie friendly cuisine in Beijing. With a little planning, and bit of Google translate, it's easy to be vegetarian in Beiing. Pretty sure I need to go back to sample some more restaurants soon!

I've talked before about my time working as an "Adult Material Classifier" for Vodafone UK. In short, my team and I used to watch pornographic videos and classify whether they were suitable for inclusion on Vodafone live.

There were the usual limitations (no more than two participants, all over 18 etc) we also had a list of banned words.

It contained the usual sexual and racial slang which was verboten - as well as strawberry and teabag.

I had obviously lead a very sheltered life. I had no idea that "to teabag" was a thing. Nor that one could "procure a strawberry" to defile. But, you can, and people do.

I can understand that David Cameron wants people not to be able to search for "obvious" search terms - but how do you block ambiguous terms? It's not hard to imagine to sort of depraved search query which would produce this image: As people see what is being filtered, it's fairly easy to switch to a slang which has no "official" meaning. In China, the Government regularly censor discussion about the massacre at Tienanmen Square. Forbidden from mentioning the date of June 4th, locals instead refer to May 35th.

So, how does any search engine filter out "innocent" terms which may lead to "illegal" images?

I'll leave you with a quote from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in the Global Times (emphasis added):

Web regulation in public's best interest

Many countries are trying to regulate their Internet services. Under pressure from public opinion, many well-known websites are becoming more self-disciplined. For example, Facebook has started to provide training for its website regulators to help identify and delete inappropriate remarks. In Turkey, where chaos and turmoil are running rampant, the Turkish government criticized social media as the top threat. Similar denouncements have also been heard from the British Parliament.

What exalted company our wise and infallible government are keeping.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Chinese artist, political prisoner, and sower of porcelain sunflower seed, Ai Weiwei uses dabr!

On last night's Newsnight, as part of a package on Ai Weiwei's release, they showed him using Twitter. Here's a screenshot.

Click for larger image

One interesting thing, none of the user's avatars appear. That's because, at a guess, the images are retrieved from Twitter's servers which are blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

Indeed, if we zoom in on the text we can see the letters "GFW". My Mandarin is too rusty to translate the rest - can anyone else help?

So, looks like my next addition to Dabr will be to use an image proxy to ensure avatar images make it through China's firewall!

Thanks to Kristian Carter for alerting me.

Awesome!