Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

A powerful unforgettable journey through China with one of our greatest travel writers.

‘An achievement of great and lasting brilliance’ Patrick Leigh Fermor

Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at the far end of the Great Wall.

What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.