Why historic Cambridge is wooing China in the age of tech wars
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A new Sino-Anglo love affair is emerging in Cambridge, where the Chinese presence in the English university now eclipses that of Americans or Europeans and robots and other gadgets are being made in shiny new offices, rather than rhymes.
Xu Zhimo’s poem, A Second Farewell to Cambridge, written in 1928, is one of China’s best known, and features on the national curriculum so schoolchildren can recite the lines.
The poem is one of the reasons Cambridge is so popular with Chinese tourists who crowd the narrow cobbled streets and river punts to take selfies.
The city has even honoured Xu, who was one of its most famous scholars, with a memorial made from Beijing marble that has lines from his poem carved into it.
It can be found at the end of King’s College lawn, near the spot where Xu wrote the poem.
Less visible is the city’s growing Chinese population, unless you pass by the Chinatown on Regent Street, where Chinese restaurants are replacing Indian ones.
Over the last decade or so, China has become a key partner in Cambridge’s development as the centre of what was marketed as “Silicon Fen”, after the region’s wetlands.