John Dodson
（ANSTO, Sydney, Australia）
Australia was one of the first western nations to recognize the Peoples Republic of China and I recall at the time that this was a long overdue and natural thing for us to do. It was a result of this that Professor Liu brought a group of scientists to the Australian National University in Canberra for discussion on collaborations between our countries on Quaternary science. I was working as a young lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and came to Canberra for the meeting on what was an Australia Day holiday I think in 1975.
My next meeting with Professor Liu was at the INQUA Congress in Beijing in 1991. I think this must have been the real beginning of an opening up of the wonderful geological records of China’s Quaternary history to the rest of the world; and many people were lucky enough to participate in some of the INQUA excursions. I could not afford to go on any of these but did participate in Professor Liu’s one day excursion in which he introduced us to loess sections as well as some of the extra ordinarily rich culture that is China. He kindly remembered me and encouraged me to become involved in studying Chinese Quaternary records. It seemed a remote possibility for me at the time as I thought I was having my first and possibly only visit to China in my life time.
This proved to be spectacularly wrong and in 1994 the IGBP-PAGES group decided to set up some Pole-Equator-Pole (PEP) palaeoenvironmental projects. Professor Liu organized a workshop in Beijing at the old Soviet embassy compound and about 60~80 people assembled to discuss how a regional and multinational palaeoenvironmental project might come together. We had 4~5 enjoyable and very productive days and at the end of it all I found myself a joint Pole-Equator-Pole Leader with Professor Liu. It was our role to summarise the main environmental features of the Austral-Asian PEP project and identify the main climate and environmental drivers across the transect that emerged form discussions at the meeting. Naturally most of the people involved in this were from China, Japan, Australia and Russia, but we had significant input from scientists from USA, New Zealand, France and more. Eventually our report was published in English, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. It was exciting times and money was available from the IGBP PAGES office in Bern, and further support from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore funded a number of workshops. Further refinement of the Austral-Asian project took place in Switzerland and Argentina. We soon found that an International Continental Lake Drilling Program was to be set up and the PEP leaders were to have input into where these records might be obtained. These were discussed at meetings in Potsdam, Washington and New York. Professor Liu and I were charged to make sure records from Austral-Asia were represented in the mix.
All through this period I had the pleasure of working with Tungsheng in keeping the PEP program functional and energetically pursuing its aims. We were in regular contact and I felt we became warm and close friends. We made sure our PEP was well represented in all outputs produced through the PAGES office. It was a particular pleasure for me when he came to Australia for a PEP meeting we held in Fremantle, Western Australia. After the meeting I was able to show him some of the environments of the southwest, and he lapped this up in his usual very enthusiastic way. I am sure he always felt very comfortable on his numerous visits to Australia and he had many close friends here.
I vividly remember one occasion which illustrates something about Professor Liu as the man and as a caring human being. We were in Mendoza, Argentina, and after several meals that all seemed to involve steak he said to me “How about we go and have a Chinese meal together tomorrow”. So off we went to lunch. During the course of the meal he engaged in conversation with a young Chinese waiter. He asked where he came from and what was he doing. To our surprise our waiter was a geology student from Xiamen and he was taking a break from studies. To his surprise he was meeting the famous Liu Tungsheng! He promised to complete his degree when he returned to China and to this day I suspect he probably did.
During my time working with Tungsheng I slowly got seduced by China and what it had to offer in research opportunities. I made friends with a number of people in Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Lanzhou. I became part of several research projects, and it did not seem to matter how often or where I visited in China, some lucky coincidence often led me to meet Professor Liu. We had many dinners together and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. We openly discussed many topics and occasionally touched upon how China’s past had been harsh to his generation of scientists. The dinners were always accompanied by young Chinese scientists and he made a point of them being comfortably included in discussions during the evenings. One thing I did not accomplish was being in the field with him in the heart of the Loess Plateau.
Professor Liu’s achievements in science are widely known and applauded. There are two additional things that stand out for me in Professor Liu’s scientific output. Firstly, he recognized the significant and environmental parallels and comparisons that could be made between Australia and China. Secondly, he was a gentle and committed mentor. He attracted a number of gifted scientists in Xi’an and Beijing, and also elsewhere in China, and he encouraged them to become productive scientists in their own right. The kindness and inspiration he shared with me lives on in others and his legacy will be there for many generations to come. If he is somewhere he can smile, he has much to smile about.
