What China Thinks of Britain

When we asked 350 of our Weibo (Chinese Twitter) followers to come up with one word to describe the UK, here's the colourful result. It's not a big sample, and it's people who already have a reasonable knowledge of Britain, but it's kind of revealing. The usual clichés: Big Ben, fog, fish and chips, red phone booth etc; and the usual contradictions: traditional and modern; rainy and blue sky; humorous and serious; conservative and liberal; reserved and dramatic; modest and arrogant... The two surprises for me were the inclusion of 'dreamlike' (eh?) and the omission of Beckham.