BRIAN POWER, who has died at the age of 89, was the author of a poignant and delicate memoir, The Ford of Heaven, which describes his childhood in Tianjin, a treaty port 80 miles from Peking where he was born and lived until he was 18.
His father, the 12th son of an itinerant thatcher, was born in Querrin, Co Clare, and had been recruited in Dublin for the Imperial Chinese Customs Service as one of the outdoor staff at a salary of £10 a month.
The customs service had been founded after the first opium war, when the British had seized the concession for the administration of collecting taxes on anything imported or exported from the ports.
While based in Tianjin, he had courted and married, Grace d'Arc. She was the only daughter of a family famous for its marionettes and wax works. D'Arc's marionettes had been exhibited all over the world, including a five-year stay in the Rotunda in Dublin. The d'Arcs in Tianjin had left the family business to build and run a hotel in the city.
Power was the second of the four sons. Their father was often away with his work and their mother, who was very religious and also musical, left her children in the care of the servants.
Central to Power's life was his Amah, Yi Jien, with whom he visited the markets to be entranced with their smells of old cabbage stalks, aniseed, garlic and soya.
There were the sounds of the stall-keepers crying out their wares, the beggars and maimed pleading for alms and he heard the destitute selling even their daughters. Along a wall were acrobats, magicians and conjurors and most of all fascinating to him, the story tellers who mimed the ancient legends of the country.
His first language was Chinese until he went to the school with the Marist Brothers and then the British School. His mother was the organist at the Jesuit college where he was an altar boy sometimes to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit French mystic and palaeontologist.
Power's father died when he was seven but the family stayed in Tianjin. His mother married again and went to work as a secretary in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
In 1936, he was sent to England, where he went to King's College in London to read history. At the outbreak of the war, he joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers as a lieutenant and served in North Africa and in Sicily.
In 1943, as he was leading his company across a river near Mount Etna, a bullet hit him just above the heart making the packet of very light cartridges on his back explode like fireworks and setting fire to his clothes. Another bullet went through his thigh and both his lungs filled with blood.
The medical officer decided to abandon him, but the sergeant in charge of the stretcher bearers disobeyed orders and loaded him on to an armoured carrier which was driven back into the hills. He was eventually returned to England, but it took a year for him to recover from his wounds.
At the end of the war, he joined the United Nations War Crimes Commission, serving in Austria and Rome, which led him to take up the law. After a few years as a barrister, he made a second career for himself in teaching public speaking or "Advocacy for the Layman".
He was much in demand for the day-long courses in which he taught politicians, senior army officers, diplomats and businessmen the art of how to present a case and keep the audience's attention.
He had returned to China for a visit in 1972 when it was under the communist regime and was allowed to spend a day in a very different and bleak Tianjin.
But the visit reawakened his love of China and in 1984, The Ford of Heavenwas published followed in 1986 by The Puppet Emperor, The life of Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China.
In 1964, he married the twice-widowed Prunella Stack, president of the Fitness League which had been founded by her mother as League of Health and Beauty. This movement in the 1930s had revolutionised exercise for working women, combining dance, music callisthenics and meditation.
Brian Power is survived by his wife and his two stepsons.
Brian Power: born July 23rd, 1918; died May 16th, 2008