1883Foreign Language Friday: This excellent lady used to live in Shanghai, and someone once told her “image from heart born” in Mandarin - what you see written here is the Pinyin version of that phrase, which is how the Chinese language is written in Latin script.

“We would probably say ‘what you see is what you are’," she explains. "The person who told me this was a Taiwanese girl. We’d discovered that we were basically living similar experiences. She’d come to England to study for a few months and I’d gone to China and been living there for four years.

”She told me this because we were talking about how, in China, everyone has a very optimistic outlook and it’s kind of infectious. So if you look around and you think everything’s fabulous and there’s a lot of opportunity, that’s because you have opportunity and you are fabulous in your own way.”

She elaborates a bit further on this point and there is some fruity language in her audio clip Taken in Chinatown, London.