26 January 2006
Accuracy
I still haven't read enough to decide if that snap judgement was correct, but being in the middle of writing a 2000-word general introduction to Beijing and Shanghai for a forthcoming guide book, I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust, opened it at random, and my eyes lit immediately upon a reference to 'Thomas' sub-machine guns.
I can't claim to know much about machine guns of the first part of the last century, and it's perfectly possible there was a Thomas machine gun of that era, but it seems to me very likely (as it probably will to you) that it was the famous Thompson sub-machine gun that was intended here.
I noted with some interest that I immediately felt disinclined to read any further. I had expectedly quickly to trip Sergeant up over some Sino-technicality, some commonplace of the multiple misunderstandings that creep into most China commentaries of the 'May you live in interesting times' or '5000 years of culture' type, but instead this seemed to be a commonplace of general knowledge. So what chance that the rest of the book would be accurate?
However, I remember once seeing a comment on my Beijing in which I'd gone to the effort to research and set out the addresses of Chinese embassies and consulates in major English-speaking countries and multiple other European ones, saying that I'd made an error in either the postal code or telephone area code (I forget which) of the embassy (as it then was) in Bonn. If I couldn't get such a simple thing right, the comment argued, what chance for the rest of the book?
Of course my knowledge of Beijing was rather more extensive than my knowledge of Bonn, and the information I gave was supplied by the Chinese embassy itself, which, if it was just about any other country under discussion, ought to be regarded as about an authoritative source as it would be possible to find. These days double-checking such information is far easier, but then I was scrambling to put the book to bed, and had to take the chance that the Chinese knew their own contact information.
But it's true that even tiny errors almost irrelevant to the main topic can have that deflationary effect on the reader, and this is why it is the least comprehensive and detailed guide books that are often regarded as the most authoritative--remarkably frustrating to those of us who try to dig up as much as possible, and instead of saying, 'Take a bus out of town east to the village of X' (enough, it appears, to support claims of authority) name the right bus station to start from, and give frequencies, journey times, prices, and a description of the route, in the full knowledge that it will only take a small change in price, something over which we have no control, to stimulate accusations of inaccuracy (often disingenuously by competitors incognito in public places such as Amazon reviews).
Undoubtedly I should give Sergeant a second chance.
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