Riding Away

HANGZHOU, June 21 ( tasteallchina ) -- From the stern of a wobbly ferry, Kenneth Andrew Salmon dropped a red poppy wreath bearing the picture of his father into the sea -- the exact same wreath was placed on his father's coffin during his funeral and had been preserved at home for 24 years. The wreath kept afloat, riding away on the choppy, frothy waves off the Zhoushan Islands in east China's Zhejiang Province. Salmon's father, Andrew Salmon, was a sergeant of the Royal Artillery and one of the 384 British prisoners of war (POWs) who were rescued by Chinese fishermen following the sinking of the Japanese-requisitioned ship Lisbon Maru in 1942. On Tuesday, Salmon and a dozen of other descendants of British POWs visited the water of the sunken ship in Zhoushan, where they scattered white chrysanthemum petals -- a Chinese ritual for mourning the dead. Among the visitors was 75-year-old Denise Wynne. She is the daughter of Dennis Morley, a soldier of the Royal Scots and a British POW who survived the shipwreck. "My father always said that the fishermen were heroes, and if it weren't for the Chinese fisherman, he wouldn't have lived," Wynne said. A TRIBUTE…