People: Jun. 4, 1984

His famed family tree reaches all the way back to a small village in West Africa, and earlier this month, Roots Author Alex Haley, 62, was breaking new cultural ground on another continent. He was in Peking as the executive producer for a 12-hr. TV mini-series called The Last Emperor: The History of China. "I didn't know anything about African culture before I started working on Roots," he explains. "If you do hard research, you can fill in your knowledge of any culture." As part of that research, Haley visited Peking's Forbidden City with Pu Jie, the only surviving brother of...

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