Guy Burgess and the Chinese Fireplace

Recently read the excellent history of Kim Philby by Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. There was one China-related anecdote I hadn’t heard before…

Fellow Cambridge spy Guy Burgess (below) had already been forced to flee to Moscow. By the time Philby arrived as a defector in 1963 Burgess had descended into an alcoholic stupour, fallen out with his fellow Moscow-residing spy Donald Maclean and was generally an embarrassment to the KGB. Maclean and Burgess had understandably both been close when they first arrived in Moscow eleven years before in 1951. But they ahd fallen out when Burgess had apparently got so drunk at a reception at the Chinese embassy in Moscow and decided, in full view of everyone, to urinate in the embassy’s fireplace. This went down about as well then as it would now and Burgess was shunned by most diplomats. Philby never got to see Burgess in Moscow – he claimed his Soviet handlers prevented them from meeting due to Burgess’s severe disappointment with the reality of the communist state. Burgess died of liver failure in Moscow in 1963 leaving Philby his collection of 4,000 books meaning Kim at least had some reading for the long drab Soviet nights of exile.

I’m afraid I don’t know if the Chinese embassy Burgess embarassed himself in was the same building as it had been in the 1940s, but I’m going to assume that it was…here then is a picture from 1946 of Jang Jing-guo (to the right), Chiang Kai-shek’s son (and future leader of Taiwan) in the Chinese embassy (then still the ROC embassy obviously) in Moscow. Behind them is a mantelpiece and fireplace with framed pictures of Cordell Hull (The US Secretary of State) and the Generalissimo. However, whether or not this is the fireplace into which Guy Burgess was later to deposit the contents of his full bladder I cannot confirm….(more on the picture and its history here by the way)