Peggy Durdin, 92; Pioneering Foreign Correspondent

Peggy Durdin, 92, the pioneering female foreign correspondent covering Asia in a time and place where women rarely worked outside the home, died of pneumonia Feb. 12 in Encinitas.

Born Margaret Armstrong in China to Presbyterian missionary parents, she was educated there and attended college in the United States, then returned to teach English at the Shanghai American School.

But in 1938, she married New York Times correspondent Tillman Durdin, moved with him to the Chinese wartime capital Chungking, and herself began writing for such magazines as Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest and Time.

Later she joined correspondents in Hong Kong as a “China watcher,” reporting on the closed communist country. In 1958, she co-edited Atlantic magazine’s special edition on communist China and wrote a booklet on China for the Foreign Policy Assn.