How Polly Shih Brandmeyer solved mystery of her China-born grandma’s past: a lecture

“The trail, quite literally, goes cold at that graveside in Happy Valley cemetery.”

Thus ended an October 2011 Post Magazine article about British sea captain Samuel Cornell Plant, the trail mentioned belonging to two young Eurasian girls adopted in China by Plant and his wife, who had also recently died. The sisters attended the funeral in 1921 but little more was known about them.

The mystery would not stay unsolved for long. In an article published almost two years later, Post Magazine revealed who the girls were and uncovered their story.

Isobel and Clara had been born to a Chinese father and English mother in Chengdu, Sichuan, but death and upheaval characterised their lives until, after the funeral in Happy Valley, they found themselves in the care of Mary Emilia Moore, in Yichang, 1,125 kilometres west of Shanghai.