Then & Now | Jailed for plotting to kill Mao Zedong, eclectic publisher, first director of Hong Kong University Press: meet Henri Vetch
- After World War II, Frenchman Henri Vetch built a publishing career in China before being implicated in a bizarre plot to assassinate Chinese leader Mao Zedong
- In 1954, he was appointed as the first director of the Hong Kong University Press, and later established Vetch and Lee, which produced a range of unusual books
One name that regularly recurs in memoirs of foreign life in China between the world wars is that of Frenchman Henri Vetch.
Warmly remembered as “a tremendous talker with enormous energy”, this perennially colourful figure of Peking’s interwar European life for almost three decades first went to China in 1920, after serving as an officer in the French Army during the first world war.
According to his close friend and Hong Kong University colleague Geoffrey Bonsall, Vetch once confided to him that “he was unable to decide what else to do” after the war ended, and so decided to join his father, who was already established in the publishing business in Peking, as this choice offered him “as reasonable a career option as any other”.
First with his father, and then independently, Vetch operated the Librarie Française, an independent booksellers and publishing house in the internationally famed Grand Hôtel de Pékin.
For almost three decades, he produced attractive works on a wide variety of subjects. As a publisher, Vetch’s list was eclectic, though, unsurprisingly, China-related themes predominated; Annual Customs and Festivals in Peking (1936) is a representative example.
