It was when worried residents in Hong Kong started sending food parcels to their mainland relatives that BBC Far East correspondent Anthony Lawrence realised a famine was raging on the mainland in the late 1950s.
Notices had appeared in Hong Kong's food stores that for HK$50 the proprietors would send food parcels to addresses on the mainland. Mr Lawrence rang the post office.
'They said thousands of packets had been sent the week before and that a terrific backlog was building up. I wrote a guarded story saying that because the crops had failed there were a lot of hungry people in China. The office said: 'Are you sure? The minister of health was visiting China and he was shown several villages and gave a news conference saying he'd seen no signs of hardship.' So I said: 'Well he got shown the right villages, didn't he?''
Tragically, Mr Lawrence's early story proved correct: between 10 million and 40 million Chinese would die as a result of famine in the three years that followed Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
In his 18 years as a correspondent for the BBC in Southeast Asia, Mr Lawrence also covered the early years of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, communist insurgencies in the jungles of Malaya, and the Vietnam war.
On television and in radio slots such as From Our Own Correspondent, Mr Lawrence combined political issues with what was happening on the ground from 1956 until his retirement from the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1975. Now living in Hong Kong, he celebrated his 95th birthday on Sunday.