Ling Ling's "List of China Travelogues"
No matter where you are in the world, if you turn on the TV or open a newspaper you’re almost guaranteed to come across another top story about the Middle Kingdom. The subject might have to do with 2008’s Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo or China’s phenomenal economic boom and the huge challenges that come with it. It might be the growing prestige of Chinese art and film or the latest architectural marvel to make the scene in Shanghai or Beijing. It could be wilderness treks in Tibet and Yunnan…
Fortunately, it’s never been easier to visit China and see for yourself how this ancient land—famous in the annals of history for its sages and wandering poets, humble peasants and powerful emperors, golden dynasties and periods of upheaval and rebellion—is transforming itself into a modern nation squarely in the center of twenty-first century global affairs.
Given all that media exposure, if it seems cliché to cast China as a land of contrasts—the old versus new, the capitalist and the communist, the third-world rural village and the high-tech metropolis—it’s only because it’s true. From within the ancient walls of the Forbidden City or the majestic heights of the Summer Palace you’ll see Beijing’s gleaming new towers stretching toward the heavens. You can reach the once remote Tibetan capital of Lhasa via a new high-tech and high-altitude train, passing in comfort through harsh yet beautiful terrain only recently accessible to foreign travelers. Shanghai’s colonial-era Bund architecture is dwarfed by the looming space-age skyline of Pudong. If you wander through the classical Chinese landscape of Guilin, with its green mist-shrouded limestone peaks towering above fertile rice paddies and you’re as likely to come across a robed monk as a mobile-toting businessman.
Following are the ten best China travelogues, written by authors – both foreign and Chinese – who know China (its geography AND its culture) better than anyone else…
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The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Timeby Simon Winchester
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Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nationby J. Maarten Troost
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