Tessa Jowell, the UK Sports Minister who is in China on a fact-finding mission to help plan for London 2012, made a diversion yesterday to visit the grave of Scottish Olympic gold medallist Eric Liddell.

Tessa Jowell, the UK Sports Minister who is in China on a fact-finding mission to help plan for London 2012, made a diversion yesterday to visit the grave of Scottish Olympic gold medallist Eric Liddell.

Ms Jowell travelled to the site at Weifang, where the athlete died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War.

"I took flowers and placed them on his grave," Ms Jowell told The Herald. "I also visited the museum which focuses on his life.

"There is a stone of Scottish granite at his grave. It is laid on Chinese stone. It's simple and beautiful. It has a text from Isaiah (40:31): They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' "It was very moving to see how the grave has been kept, very carefully, with respect and affection. His name has been honoured.

"The Chinese are very proud of him. They see him as an extremely good man whose teaching was of great benefit to their children."

Liddell, who was the hero of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, was a committed Christian who served as a missionary to China. He was born in China at Tianjin and died in Weifang, aged 43, of a brain tumour.

His three daughters also visited Tianjin and Weifang for the first time earlier this year. His eldest daughter, Patricia Russell, made the trip with her sisters, Heather and Maureen.

"It was a wonderful opportunity for the three of us to find closure," Mrs Russell said yesterday. She last saw her father when she was six and her sister and mother left China by boat for Canada, because their father did not feel it was safe.

"He told me to take care of my mum, and that stayed with me all my life. It is the last thing I remember him saying to me." Liddell never saw his third daughter.

The athlete's life is the subject of a new biography, Running the Race, which is written by Scottish Presbyterian pastor John Keddie, from Skye, who is currently in China to promote the book.

It will be read by more people in China than in Britain, though it is already in its third reprint in the UK.

"We have just printed 3000 each time, but the first print in China is 10,000," said Mr Keddie. "We are very pleased to have got the book published here."

Liddell is being written of in the book as China's first Olympic champion. The first Chinese Olympic champion was Xu Haifeng, a marksman, in 1984. Liddell went to China, where his parents had been missionaries, shortly after his 400m victory in the Paris Olympics in 1924.

He had famously refused to run in the heats for the 100m, his best event, because they took place on a Sunday.

His Christian mission was dangerous. He travelled about by bike, and carried money for church work hidden in bread. He rescued several people, including a man who was the victim of a botched Japanese execution.

A graduate of Edinburgh University, he wrote a chemistry text book for the boys of the Weifang camp and taught them. He also raced in China, long after his Olympic career was over.