Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff led a peripatetic life in his early days. While he was born in Petropavlovsk, Russia in 1913, in 1917 he and his parents and siblings, escaped to Harbin, China, at the onset of the Russian Revolution. As a young man Tretchikoff lived in Shanghai, where he met and married Natalie Telpregoff (a fellow Russian refugee). The couple moved to Singapore after their 1935