How long would it take to walk across the world's most populous country? The Great Walk of China is a journey into China's heartland, away from its surging coastal cities, where the ripples of prosperity are only just beginning to be felt and many find themselves left behind. Through his conversations with the people he meets along the way, the Chinese-speaking Earnshaw paints a portrait of a nation struggling to come to terms with its newfound identity and its place in the world. Our wandering guide never backs away from sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable topics, and captures the essential kindness and generosity of the Chinese people with brilliant clarity.

The Chinese written language is today the only language in the world which is non-phonetic, using pictures to convey meaning. The history of the characters goes back over 3,000 years, and their impact extends over most of East Asia. This book celebrates the breadth and depth of the thousands of characters that make up the script, starting with the most simple and commonly-used, presenting one word per page from a variety of different perspectives. It looks at the many different ways in which characters are pronounced, including in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, as well as Chinese languages and dialects, but also shows the breadth of meaning and the many different ways in which they can be written. The characters are capsules of history and culture, and this book provides a hint of the richness that attaches to each one.

A lost city in the desert, wolf packs, a book, and, of course, a sword... The Book and the Sword was Louis Cha's first novel, published in 1955, and quickly established him as one of the new masters of the wuxia genre. The novel is panoramic in scope and includes the fantastical elements for which Cha is well-known: secret societies, kung fu masters, a lost desert city guarded by wolf packs, and the mysterious Fragrant Princess, an embellishment of an actual historical figure - although whether she actually smelled of flowers, we will never know. Further to that Cha revives the legend about the great eighteenth-century Manchu Emperor Qian Long which claims that he was in fact not a Manchu but a Han Chinese as a result of a baby swap. The Book and the Sword is a rip-roaring tale of Chinese kung fu masters battling it out for the future of the Chinese empire and control of central Asia.

Daisy Kwok's life spanned old Shanghai and modern Shanghai, old China and "New" China in a way that no other did. This book presents stories written by her of her life - stories from the high-flying years of Old Shanghai, and the desperate drama of the political campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Daisy was born in 1908 in Australia, and in 1918 moved to Shanghai with her father who built and owned the Wing On Department Store on Shanghai's main thoroughfare, Nanking Road. For three decades, Daisy led the life of the rich and famous in one of the world's most dazzling cities. Then, after the communist takeover in 1949, she spent three decades being denounced as a "capitalist" Through it all shines Daisy's effervescent personality

Foreign adventurers have been tramping around China for centuries, and this book presents some of the best of the stories from the dozens of travel memoirs published, particularly in the golden era of the late nineteenth century. These accounts, abridged and explained, concentrate on the gripping details with a constant commentary on the significance of what is being recounted. They are a window into old China and also into the mentality of the adventurers. Lost China Travel Classics is a digestible and exciting way of meeting some of the greatest travelers of a bygone age.

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake) Formosan language at Oxford University. The Formosa fantasy world he created, including elephants and camels, gold mines and outlandish religious sacrificial ceremonies, almost rivals Tolkein's Middle Earth, with the crucial difference that many people believed it to be real. This is the story of one of the great frauds in literary history.

The old Shanghai was a rich and cosmopolitan mixture of East and West and this engaging book offers a glimpse into that world through an assortment of photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons, stamps, and other collectibles. Evoking different eras, this record also contains vintage advertisements, excerpts from travel guides, flyers handed out to ex-pats highlighting Shanghai's international atmosphere, and often hilarious firsthand accounts from those who had the opportunity to live in or pass through this bustling trade port. The scrapbook format allows readers to either read from the start or flip through to any page to learn of the extraordinary layers and depth of the old-world city.

Isabella Bird was one of the greatest travelers and travel writers of all time, and this is her last major book, a sympathetic look at inland China and beyond into Tibet at the end of the 19th century. In describing the journey, Isabella provides a rich mix of observations and describes two occasions when she is almost killed by anti-foreign mobs. It many ways, Isabella created the model for travel writing today, and this one of her greatest works.

This wonderful book is written as the diary of a one-year-old baby in an American expat household in Shanghai in the early 1920s. The world of old Shanghai, the life of expats in Asia - it is all reflected here through the eyes of the baby. Elsie McCormick, an American resident of Shanghai, nails the feel of the times with humor and insight.

This book, first published in 1909, in the autobiography of a man who witnessed and played a key role in 19th century China. Remarkably, the book was written in English - Yung Wing, born in 1828, was the first Chinese person ever to graduate from a major US college. He then returned to his own world, seeing it now with outsiders' eyes. He brokered the purchase of China's first arms factory from the US, and proposed widespread financial and social changes, which were the inspiration for the changes China went through in the 20th century. This is a unique and highly readable book.

For two years, Princess Der Ling was the favorite lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager Cixi in the imperial palace in Beijing. This book provides a unique and surprisingly intimate portrait of the Dragon Lady, who ruled China for 47 years, and brought the country to the brink of destruction. Der Ling refers to the larger political context on many occasions. But the best parts of the book are the small details. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the life and personality of the Empress Dowager, and a sense of the inner workings of the highly secretive world of the imperial palace.

The Golden Chersonese is a travel book written by Isabella Bird, the greatest travel writer of the 19th century. It recounts her travels in 1883 through southern China and into the interior of the Malay Peninsula-which in the age of Ancient Greece and Rome was known as the Golden Chersonese. It was ground-breaking reportage at the time because many of the places she visited were totally cut off from the outside world.

"The Formosa Fraud," known for most his life as George Psalmanazar, prepared his memoirs for publication after his death in 1764, but even then he did not directly admit the fraud, and never revealed what his real name was. The Memoirs of George Psalmanzar - are a crucial part of the story of the deception, and provide a highly entertaining account of his youth in France, and how his pretense of being a Formosan allowed him to escape rural poverty and live most of his life in the world's great city of the time - London. This book is a companion to The Formosa Fraud, by Graham Earnshaw, which details the stupendous fraud perpetrated by Psalmanazar. He claimed he was born on the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, which was a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake) Formosan language at Oxford University. The Memoirs of * * * * provides the background to the story of one of the great frauds in literary history.

Isabella Bird was the greatest travel writer of the late nineteenth century and she undertook her journey into western Tibet in the early summer of 1889, when she was already in her late fifties. But she was not the slightest bit fazed at the prospect of discomfort and possible death. And nearly die she did, at least once, before the trip was over. Isabella travelled over several months through some of the remotest places on the planet and her descriptions of the journey, the sights she saw and the people she met, transcend the times and continue to entertain and inform.