[5] Captain Plant, his wife, Alice, and their two adopted Chinese daughters, boarded SS Teiresias in Shanghai for travel to England on February 23, 1921.

After only three days at sea, Captain Plant, who had been ailing, died in his cabin from pneumonia, despite ship doctor's efforts to treat his condition.

Alice, who was struggling too, died three days later, from heart failure when the ship arrived at its first stop in Hong Kong.

The solid granite obelisk proved difficult to raze entirely and the Red Guard expressed their sentiments by chiseling out every character and letter in the inscriptions.

[15] In either case, Xintan, a Chinese community of river pilots and junk owners, had been protective of the memorial and of Plant's contributions to them and the Yangtze.

During his retirement, Plant lived among the residents of Xintan, outside of the treaty ports and away from the foreign settlements and his fellow expatriates.

[16] The local people of Xintan remained loyal to Plant and in 2002, before the monument would be fully submerged in water from the Three Gorges Dam, they moved the memorial, 114 blocks, weighing 171 tons, to higher ground.