Richard Kirkby was born in Yorkshire, into a farming family with very strong China antecedents, and was educated at a Quaker school, at Bristol University and at the Architectural Association, London. Unlike many of his peers, he remembers the Sixties, when he was heavily involved in student politics. In the early 1970s, he spread his wings to Cultural Revolution China, with a quest centering on China's development model of massive industrialisation with little of the usually attendant urban squalor. He taught English at Nanjing University from 1974 to 1977, an experience enriched by spells of labour in rice paddies and a factory machine shop. After Mao Zedong's death but with China still in troubled times, he moved to Shandong University in Jinan city. Since 1980, the author has been a consultant on the Chinese economy, a director of a China firm, a writer of academic tracts (starting with his 1985 book Urbanisation in China, which is considered a foundation work in the field), and a broadcaster. In the 1990s, he exchanged his barefoot academic status for a fully shoed one at Liverpool University, directing a China research institute. In the city's Chinatown, he oversaw the creation of a ceremonial archway. He now focuses on Chinese art and the classical guitar, as well as fell walking in his home territory of the Lake District. He is married to museologist Louise Tythacott; his children are the fourth generation in his family to get the China bug.
