A Walk Through Cambridge, Where Words Once Lingered
My name is Jacqueline Lam (Jacqui for short).
I am a Cambridge Green Badge Tourist Guide who believes that this city is best understood not only through its colleges and courtyards, but through the feelings it quietly leaves behind.
Many visitors from China arrive in Cambridge already knowing Xu Zhimo's famous Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again. It is a beautiful poem, but also a familiar one. I prefer to invite you a little further off the well-trodden path -- to a quieter, more intimate connection between Cambridge and Chinese hearts.
During the 1920s, Xu Zhimo lived and studied in Cambridge. He walked the same streets you will walk, crossed the same bridges, and paused beneath the same skies. What is less known is that here, he translated a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti -- When I am dead, my dearest.
This was not merely translation. It was resonance.
Christina Rossetti herself was deeply connected to Cambridge through her family, and her poetry reflects a calm, poetic understanding of love, memory, and impermanence. Xu Zhimo's Chinese rendering of her poem -- later set to music -- is one of the most delicate and moving examples of cultural understanding between England and China. It is gentle, restrained, and profoundly human.
When I guide visitors through Cambridge, I do not recite poems on street corners (I promise). Instead, I help you feel why those words were written here. Standing by the river at dusk, or walking through a quiet college lane, many guests tell me they suddenly understand why Xu Zhimo wrote as he did -- and why Rossetti's reflections on life and loss feel so natural in this place.
Yes, the poem is a little sad. But Cambridge is not a sad city -- it is a thoughtful one. It teaches us how beauty, memory, and time coexist. And sometimes, that understanding stays with you far longer than a photograph.
My tours are unhurried, personal, and conversational. I guide not to impress, but to share -- history, literature, small stories, and moments of stillness. Whether this is your first visit to Cambridge or a long-held dream finally realized, I hope you will leave not just having seen the city, but having felt it.
If you are looking for a tour that goes beyond "must-see sights", and instead offers a quiet dialogue between Cambridge, English poetry, Chinese literature, and cross-cultural comparison, I would be honoured to walk with you.
Cambridge is still here. The words are still here. You only need to come and listen.
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