China Tourism: Recommended Reading

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Recommended Reading

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There's enough entertaining reading on China to fill a library, so here are just a few pointers to get you started:

Readable modern novelists easily purchased in translation at home include Ha Jin, whose stories tend to be remarkably inconclusive and so all the more true to life, derived from his experiences living in the northeast. Ocean of Words (Vintage, 2000) Waiting (Vintage, 2001), and the collection of short stories The Bridegroom (Vintage, 2001), lift the lids on many things not obvious to the casual visitor. Soul Mountain (Harper Collins, 2000), by Gao Xíngjiàn, China's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (although the Chinese populace is kept in ignorance of this), is the tale of a man who embarks on a journey through the wilds of Sìchuan and Yúnnán in search of his own elusive líng shan (soul mountain). The Republic of Wine (Arcade, 2001), Mò Yán's graphic satire about a doomed detective investigating a case of gourmand-officials eating baby tenderloin, is at once entertaining and disturbing. His The Garlic Ballads (Viking, 1995) is an unsettling epic of family conflict, doomed love, and government corruption in a small town dependent on the garlic market.

First-class travel books include Peter Fleming's News from Tartary (Northwestern University Press, 1999), originally published in 1936, and still the best travel book ever written about China. Fleming's perceptive account of a hazardous expedition along the southern Silk Route, from Beijing to northern India, is a masterpiece of dry wit. Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Perennial, 2001) is the best of more recent efforts. He recounts with humor his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fúlíng, one of the now flooded towns along the Three Gorges area. The best Chinese effort in this genre is Ma Jiàn's Red Dust (Chatto and Windus, 2001), a sharp-eyed and disturbing account of 3 years on the road in the early 1980s, around a China now as vanished as that of Fleming in the 1930s.

Handy specialist guides to complement this book include Joanna Capon's very useful Guide to Museums in China (Orientations Magazine), a slim volume providing the detailed English explanations missing in most Chinese museums, as well as a list of dynasties and a useful glossary (contact omag@netvigator.com to find your nearest supplier). Collecting Chinese Antiquities in Hong Kong by Victor Choi (Dragon Culture, 2001) is a beautifully illustrated and essential pocket guide, whether you intend to spend thousands or just $100 on something small but a thousand years old. The guide is available via the Web (www.dragonculture.com.hk). A Field Guide to the Birds of China, by John MacKinnon and Karen Phillipps (Oxford, 2000), is the best wildlife guide.

For good general background reading, there are a few authors and publishers who turn out so much excellent and readable work that you should start by having a look at what they've done recently. Jonathan Spence writes the most readable histories of China, not just the weighty The Search for Modern China (W W Norton, 2001), but gripping and very personal histories such as The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Viking, 1994) on the clever self-marketing of the first Jesuit to be allowed to reside in Beijing, God's Chinese Son (W W Norton, 1997) on the leader of the Tàipíng Rebellion who thought he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and The Question of Hu (Vintage, 1989) on the misfortunes of an early Chinese visitor to Europe.

The Hong Kong branch of Oxford University Press (www.oupchina.com.hk) reprints early travel accounts and entertaining anthologies, such as Chris Elder's Old Peking: City of the Ruler of the World (1997), China's Treaty Ports: Half Love and Half Hate (1999), and the series Images of Asia -- small, slender, illustrated hardbacks on specific aspects of Chinese culture, such as Chinese Dragon Robes, China's Muslims, and Chinese Classical Furniture.

Several of these small hardbacks (China's Walled Cities, Chinese Bridges, Chinese Houses) have been contributed by Ronald G. Knapp, who also writes excellent books on Chinese architecture for the University of Hawai'i Press, including China's Old Dwellings (2000), an essential introduction to all of China's ancient dwellings, from the courtyard houses of Beijing to the "earth building" fortresses of Fújiàn Province. Hawai'i (www.uhpress.hawaii.edu) also has an astonishing range of 20th-century Chinese fiction in translation, and the site is well worth browsing for ideas. Dover Publications (http://store.doverpublications.com) reprints handy guides to Chinese history and culture, as well as oddities such as Robert Van Gulik's versions of 18th-century Chinese detective stories featuring a Táng dynasty detective-judge, such as The Haunted Monastery and the Chinese Maze Murders (1977). Dover's two-volume reprint of the 1903 edition of The Travels of Marco Polo (1993) is the only edition to have -- more than half is footnotes from famous explorers and geographers trying to make sense of Polo's route, corroborating his observations or puzzling why he goes so astray, and providing fascinating trivia about China far more interesting than the original account.

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