Fraser Newham

Fraser Newham finds a connection running from the East India Company’s first mission to Tibet to the completion of the Golmud to Lhasa railway by the Chinese today.

Merchant Ivory’s latest film White Countess tells the story of a high-born Russian woman reduced to poverty and prostitution to support her family – refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution – in a Shanghai slum. Fraser Newham investigates the experience of the real White Russians of Shanghai and discovers this scenario to be close to the truth for many exiled Russian women.