By Simon Winchester
It is the symbolic middle of China. emerging within the mountains of the Tibetan border, it pierces 3,900 miles of rugged state earlier than debouching into the oily swells of the East China Sea. Its course embraces each geographic function and virtually each ethnic workforce, and its banks are domestic to either scenic elegance and foul commercial pollutants. Connecting China's heartland towns with that risky coastal vast Shanghai, it has additionally traditionally hooked up China to the skin international via its approximately a thousand miles of navigable waters. And to commute up these waters is to commute again in heritage, to feel the soul of China. lengthy off-limits to foreigners, the a ways reaches of the Yangtze are nonetheless off-limits to so much travelers and tourists just by dint of the trouble in traversing the terrain. yet, for Simon Winchester, touring the size of this powerful river was once a lifelong dream and, including a chinese language better half, he got down to just do that. the result's this unforgettable portrait of China. eternally curious, urbane, witty, and a professional, Winchester introduces us to a global we would another way have ignored. To stick with him on his adventures up the Yangtze is to adventure the essence of China - to soak up its flavors in addition to study its historical past and politics, to believe its geography and weather in addition to interact in its tradition, and to fulfill up en course with unusual humans in distant and virtually inaccessible areas. this is often shuttle writing at its top: vigorous and informative, a laugh and carefully engaging.
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Additional resources for The River at the Centre of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time
Example text
PENGUIN BOOKS THE RIVER AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and China, and now lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and makes regular broadcasts for the BBC. Simon Winchester's other books include Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire; Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles; The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare, a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over; Prison Diary, Argentina, the story of three months spent in a Patagonian jail on spying charges during the Falklands war; The River at the Centre of the World – A Journey up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time; the number-one international bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne; and The Map that Changed the World, which tells the extraordinary story of William Smith, pioneering geologist of the British Isles.
A few last peaks were dotted through the snow-folds of the clouds, like nunataks on snow, tiny black triangles against the blankness. There was an intentional symmetry here: the peaks were there to echo the mainsails of the junks on the estuary waves. Just as the boats would be fewer and fewer as we went away from land, so the mountaintops would grow smaller and less distinct as the artist's mind closed into the clouds. And so then there was nothing – just an expanse of white emptiness, the unsullied heavens from which the river had first come.
Peruvian? Surely not. I settled for the likelihood of an American correspondent, someone who was probably from the Middle West. Everything that follows had its origins in this letter, leading as it did to a cascade of peculiar electronic coincidences. A journey that eventually passed thousands of miles into the remotest regions of a China far, far away from home first came about by way of a phenomenon that admirers of today's communications revolution would heartily applaud. Some might describe it, with appropriate grandiloquence, as a serendipitous moment, something that was grasped by happy chance while speeding down the information superhighway.