UNSW Vic Edwards was a man whose stories you didn’t always believe. He had too many of them, they were too good, and they connected too neatly. You’d sit there nodding, smiling, quietly filing it under “classic Vic.” And then, without fail, the story would turn out to be true.

To be fair to Vic, the facts of his own life were already extraordinary enough to breed suspicion. He was born in Shanghai, where his father was a stockbroker and accountant for British American Tobacco. The family sailed to Australia when Vic was five. He went on to run two CSIRO divisions, one in fisheries and one in irrigation research, before becoming the foundation head of a university business school, then an executive in financial services, and finally, back in academia, the director of the Asia Pacific Financial Research Centre at UNSW, where he spent fifteen years working on the very Chinese financial markets whose roots lay in the city of his birth. It was a career built on improbable arcs, which may be why his stories always sounded a little too good to be true.

The best one happened in my village.

Vic came to visit me in Antony Passage, a tiny hamlet in Saltash, Cornwall, about as far from the corridors of UNSW as you can get. We called on a friend of mine, Judith, and over tea the........

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