IT IS THE JUNGLE of Yunnan during the war against Japan and the man who will become one of the world's most famous scholars of China is a junior officer leading a squadron of soldiers in the stifling summer heat.
'We fear illness - one morning, the eyes of one soldier are inflamed and the next day those of a dozen are. We fear looting - the soldiers will steal the corn of the farmers and feed it to their dogs,' recalls Ray Huang Renyu in his memoirs Yellow River And Blue Mountains.
'Every night officers chain the machine-guns together. They fear the men will sell them to bandits in nearby mountains and desert. One machine-gun fetches 7,000 yuan, equal to the wages of a foot-soldier for 40 years.'
Huang served in the Nationalist army from 1941 to 1950, including periods in Manchuria and Burma, before emigrating to the United States where he became a renowned historian.
He instructed that his memoirs could only be published in Chinese after his death, which occurred in January last year. Since the United Daily News, one of Taiwan's two national dailies, published it in January this year, it has been a best-seller, already running to four reprints. Some of his other works have also been reprinted since his death.
His books have been published in French, Japanese, Spanish, Korean and German as well as Chinese and English.
What makes Huang so unusual is that, unlike foreign historians of China, he had personal experience of the country and the events he was writing about and, unlike historians in China or Taiwan, he was beholden to neither the Communists nor the Nationalists.