Diplomatic pouch >> With Mike Peters

The Ashes Test cricket series played between England and Australia is one of the biggest rivalries in international sport and dates back to 1882.

England is the current holder and a team of cricketers (the Peking Ducks) from the British embassy in Beijing visited the annual Great Aussie BBQ last weekend for a diplomatic reprise of the contest.

Australia's new ambassador to China Frances Adamson handled the coin toss, which the Brits won, but from then on the game went the Aussie team's way, with a comfortable victory.

The tournament's chief sponsor was Invocare, an Australia-based crematorium that's just entering the China market. That prompted some chuckles about the Ashes ("You have to have a sense of humor in this business," says Invocare's China CEO, Edward Chui.)

Finland's ambassador to China Lars Backstrom and his wife, Brigitta, joined local officials at the Liming School for migrant workers' children last weekend for the launch of a mobile library.

The "bookmobile", donated by the Finnish elevator company Kone, will be in Beijing for 10 days before touring China.

"Tiny Finland has about 250 mobile libraries that visit rural areas of the country for the same purpose," says Tiina Herlin of Kobe's Centennial Foundation. Children at resource-pool migrant schools will get reading lessons from volunteers and, when possible, a donated bookshelf with about 5,000 books to start their own reading rooms.

"So the mobile library volunteers aren't just bringing and taking away," says Backstrom. "They are leaving knowledge behind wherever they go."

The Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries saluted the 20th anniversaryof diplomatic relations of the Baltic nations with China last week.

The association hosted a reception for three ambassadors - Andres Unga of Estonia, Ingrida Levrence of Latvia and Lina Antanaviciene of Lithuania - and the staff and invited guests of their embassies at the Peace Palace in the capital Wednesday.

Danish Ambassador Friis Arne Petersen recently joined a 10th anniversary celebration of the European Centre for Chinese Studies at Peking University. In January 2001, Peking University, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Tuebingen in Germany signed a contract to establish the center, which opened in September of that year. In 2002 University of Frankfurt also joined.

During the past decade 968 students from the four universities studied at ECCS, making it the program with the highest number of European students at Peking University.

The Swiss embassy announced two Beijing Travelogue concerts next week by guitarist Werner Tian Fischer, featuring China Soul, his third release on Altrisuoni Records. Fischer performs Oct 2 and 11 at CD Blues and Jazz Caf with Swiss singer and pianist Mya Audley, Jurg Wickihalder on sax, Gabriel Schiltknecht on drums and Beijing-based Zhang Ling (call him Big John) on bass.

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