Tomorrow at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists and people from all walks of life will pay their last respects to a special Chinese son, who was also a Jew and life-long journalist of more than 70 years.

He is Israel Epstein (1915-2005), who died last Thursday in Beijing.

His colleagues, and those who have been touched by his series of books about China and about his life in the country, will undoubtedly be moved at the ceremony remembering the unique man who witnessed and documented all the dramatic events that shaped the modern and contemporary history of China.

"Eppy was an intellectual, a serious scholar with a wide range of interests," said Sidney Shapiro, an American lawyer and writer who became a Chinese citizen in 1963, in an interview with China Daily.

"But what he accomplished in his long and fruitful life was predicated essentially on his heart. No one loved China more, no one was more devoted to the cause of the Chinese revolution," Shapiro said.

Despite his passing, Epstein has left a rich legacy especially in books and essays.

These add to his "meditation on history, foreign life in China and China's relations with the United States and the West" comments made by a reviewer of an award-winning color documentary entitled "Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom," a "first person" account with Epstein as the protagonist.

With the documentary, Ronald Levaco, producer/director of Trans Film & Video based in San Francisco and professor emeritus of cinema with San Francisco State University, attempted to answer a number of questions:

Why did Israel Epstein join the revolution led by the Communist Party of China, from which most foreigners fled? Why did he remain in China after five years of imprisonment during the "cultural revolution" as a suspected American spy? What was his life like in contemporary China as a leading journalist and naturalized Chinese, with "round eyes" and a "big nose."

The documentary was invited to over 40 international film festivals and received a huge audience worldwide when it was broadcast on PBS in the United States and then in Australia, New Zealand and throughout Europe and parts of Asia.

Epstein answered all the whys through his own life and work.

Born in Warsaw in 1915 to a Jewish family of socialists, Epstein was brought to China by his parents when he was just 2 years old.

He spent his youth and formative years in Tianjin, where he developed a keen sense of history and justice, as well as an unparalleled empathy for China, traits at which his Chinese colleagues often marveled.

Epstein described Old China as a "football" that was kicked around the international arena.

"In the British concession in Tianjin where we lived, streets bore names in memory of foreign invaders of China and suppressors of Chinese national and social uprisings Elgin, Gordon, Seymour and the like as did the 'houses' of our school. This nomenclature was a daily insult to the country on whose soil we were," Epstein wrote in his own account of modern Chinese history, "From Opium War to Liberation," which he revised and enlarged four times between 1956 and 1998.

"Eppy was my father's closest friend as they were growing up together in Tianjin, and as I was growing up in the United States, my father related many stories to me about Eppy and told me that Eppy was the kindest person he had ever known," Levaco told China Daily in an interview via e-mail.

After they finished junior middle school, both Epstein and Levaco senior became reporters.

"Unlike my father, Eppy remained a journalist and writer, while my father fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming an American by joining an American company in China," said Levaco, who was born in China in 1940.

As a young journalist, Epstein had a chance to meet Edgar Snow in 1933, who, at that time, was lecturing on journalism at Yenching University. The two soon became friends.

And after his experiences and observations, Epstein could not help but be drawn to Snow's book "Red Star over China."

During the War of Resistance against Japan, Epstein shared the weal and woe of all Chinese people.

In 1939, he published his first book on China, "The People's War," expounding on the sacrifice, the suffering and the bravery of the Chinese in the face of Japanese aggression to a world still ignorant of it.

The book was published by Victor Gollancz in London, who had released Snow's Red Star Over China.

"(The book is) different from any other foreign work on our War of Resistance because it relates its analytic firsthand account of the struggle to past history and future prospects," Soong Ching Ling, or Madam Sun Yat-sen, commented.

In 1944, Epstein was able to visit Yan'an with the Sino-Foreign Reporters' Group, after the Kuomintang partially lifted the blockade. From Yan'an between May and September, Epstein sent to the New York Times 25 dispatches. He interviewed Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and other leaders, as well as rank-and-file soldiers and common people.

Later he would say the days he spent in Yan'an were the most unforgettable of his journalist career.

"I would say that though my father was politically and socially progressive, he remained unlike Eppy unconvinced that a socialist or communist revolution was the best path for China to take, although he also believed that dividing China into colonial enclaves and her rule by Chiang Kai-shek's government were not the right path for China either," Levaco said.

"In short, my father gave me many humanistic views of China and her gravest problems especially the seemingly endless suffering of the people that I think he shared with and maybe learned from his friend Eppy, even as their interests divided them," he told China Daily.

Levaco's whole family emigrated to the United States in 1949, as New China was taking shape.

Epstein in those days of 1949, along with his wife, Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley, were in the United States themselves, trying to "help Americans who opposed policies that flew in the face of unfolding reality," Epstein recalled in his My China Eye memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist, published by the Long River Press recently in San Francisco, the United States.

"Though we were temporarily across the ocean, our energies centered no less on China than when we were there: first on arguing against the Truman administration's pro-Chiang (Kai-shek) actions, then on helping a campaign for US 'friendship, recognition, and trade' with the newborn People's Republic.

"Borne out by what did happen between 1944 and 1949, it helped us, and our audiences abroad, to see the main trend in the intervening complex of events, culminating in the birth and growth of a China no longer, as for a century past, a football in the world arena but one of its leading players.

"In 1951, we returned to China, in our last and fullest choice, to stay. And we did through weal, woe, trials and triumphs," Epstein wrote. "Unlike 'watchers' from the outside, we saw the international arena as it looked from within China."

After he and his wife settled in Beijing in 1951, Epstein devoted himself to providing the world with information about China from within China through his own writing and reporting. He became a Chinese citizen in 1957.

"Eppy was on the scene for all his writing and reporting, and his had the depth," said Lin Wusun, a long-time colleague of Epstein and former president of the China International Publishing Group, in an interview with China Daily. "He didn't just report on the events themselves, but went to great lengths to link the events with the past and future."

It took Epstein almost 30 years to complete his work, "Tibet Transformed." For the work, he traveled to Tibet four times, the first in 1955 along the dangerous Sichuan-Tibet highway.

In all his books as well as his memoirs, Epstein offers, from his own analyses and insights, personal answers to the question of why modern and contemporary China has taken such a tortuous path.

He was also always willing to offer help to his Chinese colleagues with their writing and reporting in China.

"He was so knowledgeable, and he told us that he had browsed through encyclopaedia when he was confined to bed with an illness when young," Lin recalled.

And wherever he went to help edit the articles written by his Chinese colleagues, from the offices of China Reconstructs (now China Today magazine), of which he was one of the co-founders, to People's China, he brought with him humor and laughter.

"He would chat with us first, about the current state of affairs and society and the chatting was very helpful to us young journalists," Lin said.

A supervisor at one of the magazines was even a little worried about whether polishing work would be completed in time, Lin recalled. "But Eppy was very efficient and fast editor."

Zhang Yan, another of Epstein's long-time colleagues and the former first deputy editor-in-chief of China Today, said Eppy went far beyond improving translated articles for the benefit of foreign readers.

"Versatile and experienced, he was familiar with Chinese history and also the situation in other countries. His polishing made an ordinary article convincing, appealing and interesting to anyone. Since reform and opening, China's status in the international community has risen, and Eppy's concern for China's international communications elevated the magazine's (China Today) content to one encompassing national issues," Zhang said in an article published in the April issue of China Today.

According to both Lin Wusun and Zhang Yan, Eppy could, occasionally, be a little "difficult" to work with.

"Constant improvement was Eppy's guiding principle. No matter what the article, he could always find a way of changing it for the better," Zhang recalled.

"This habit was not always well received. Some co-workers said that changes at the last stage of the printing process created problems for printing workers, but everyone acknowledged that they were always an improvement," Zhang said.

"Considering our familiarity with both worlds, our perceptions might help others to a rounder view (about China)," Epstein wrote in his memoirs.

And this "rounder view" is by far and away the most precious legacy Eppy has left to the world.

(China Daily June 2, 2005)