Travel Quote by John Pomfret

“I was posted to China in the summer of 1988” lands like a logistical detail, but it’s doing something sneakier: it’s a timestamp with a fuse. For anyone who knows modern China’s timeline, 1988 isn’t just a year; it’s the last stretch of a comparatively open, improvisational era right before 1989 hardens the state’s posture and rewrites the mood. Pomfret’s “posted” suggests institutional vantage - likely diplomatic or journalistic - while also implying proximity without claiming ownership. He was there because history assigned him a seat.

“Which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China” is deliberately hedged bravado. The “I think” isn’t modesty so much as a protective layer: an acknowledgement that “greatest” is a provocative word when talking about a country on the brink of upheaval. The line flatters the period’s vitality without romanticizing it outright. It signals that 1988 felt electric: reform energy, intellectual ferment, looser cultural air, and a sense - especially for foreigners embedded in Beijing - that the future was up for grabs.

The intent is partly personal mythmaking (I was there at the hinge of history) and partly a quiet argument about lost possibility. By calling it “the greatest time,” Pomfret frames China not as a monolith but as a moving target: there was a window when the story could plausibly have gone elsewhere. The subtext is elegiac: the “greatest time” is only legible because what followed narrowed the frame.