An Australian in China: Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma

The year is 1894. An Australian journalist boards a riverboat in Shanghai with a secret plan: he will cross the heart of China on foot, dressed in Chinese clothes, speaking the language, and passing as a local. George Ernest Morrison's extraordinary travel narrative documents one of the first Western accounts of China's remote interior, and it begins as a journey of prejudice and ends as a story of profound transformation. Over months of travel by riverboat, sedan chair, mule, and his own two feet, Morrison encounters a China that shatters every assumption he carried from home. He finds not the degraded civilization Westerners of his era were taught to expect, but a land of sophisticated kindness, intricate customs, and staggering beauty. This is adventure writing at its most intellectually honest: a man setting out to prove his preconceptions and returning instead with his mind thoroughly changed.