Edgar Snow: Red Star Struck
The left-wing journalist’s 1937 account of meeting Mao influenced a generation who saw China through rose-tinted glasses as late as the 1970s — until the...
Peter Goullart: Forgotten Kingdom
20 years after “Shangri-La” was coined in the Western imagination, a Russian adventurer published a memoir from the valley of Lijiang, southwest China, that is...
Ellen La Motte: An American Nurse in Peking
In 1916, an American activist and writer traveled to China from the frontlines of World War I. What she saw in the city delighted her;...
Marco Polo: Travel Writer? Fraud? Sexpat?
‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ is often held up as the earliest Western account of China and Asia. What’s actually inside the covers might surprise...
Peter Fleming: News from Tartary
The British adventurer’s 1936 account of his journey across the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang shows its age but remains a classic of travel writing.