"The art historian Michael Sullivan, who has died aged 96, was one of the most distinguished experts in the field of Chinese art. He had a matchless personal experience of the civilisation that became his life's work, and amassed the leading private collection of modern Chinese art outside the country. From his first visit to China in 1940 to his last in 2013, he forged and maintained friendships with generations of artists. This was not easy after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, and it was not until 1973 that he was able to meet again friends with whom he had been unable even to correspond during the Cultural Revolution. In that period, Michael worked and travelled throughout south-east Asia and the Pacific, acquiring a rare pluralism in his perspective on Chinese art, and he remained outspoken in his support of artistic freedom. His tireless promotion of the understanding of China in the west, as a teacher, writer, traveller and collector, was honoured with the exhibition Michael Sullivan and Twentieth-Century Chinese Art at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 2012. He was born in Toronto, the youngest of five children of Alan Sullivan, a Canadian mining engineer turned prolific novelist (under the pen name Sinclair Murray) and his indomitable wife Elisabeth (nee Hees). The family moved to Britain when Michael was three, and set about educating him as a model Englishman, with only partial success. At prep school (Fonthill, in East Grinstead) and public school (Rugby), he was caned for idleness; at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he drifted through a degree in architecture (1936-39). He lacked direction, but not conviction. A declared pacifist, he heard in autumn 1939 that the Quakers were recruiting a small team to go to China to drive trucks for the International Red Cross. He left the following February, in his own words, "long before the fighting started … and before the tribunals had been set up to test the sincerity of conscientious objectors". For two years, he drove medical supplies between cities in south-west China under bombardment from the Japanese. In 1942, he settled in Chengdu, working at the museum of the West China Union University. There, the Paris-trained painter Pang Xunqin introduced Michael to Chinese painting and also to many of the artists in Sichuan at that time. In 1943 he married Wu Baohuan, a bacteriologist, who became known as Khoan Sullivan. She devoted the rest of her life to his work." http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/25/michael-sullivan
It is always useful to record those who opposed the war as much as those who played other parts, but in the case of Michael Sullivan there is a serious question about his historical recollection. In claiming that his departure for China in February 1940 was "long before the fighting started" he seems to have overlooked some eight years four months of fighting - Japan invaded China in October 1931, and fighting had continued ever since, reaching an early peak in 1937. Likewise, in claiming that the departure was "before the tribunals had been set up to test the sincerity of conscientious objectors" he overlooked the fact the first conscientious objectors' tribunal of WW2 sat on 27 July 1939, some seven months prior to his departure. This is another example of the unreliability of oral history so far as facts, as distinct from impressions and atmosphere, are concerned. Let us at least hope that he checked his facts in his art history.
