The Face of China: Travels in East, North, Central and Western China

China in 1909 stood at the precipice of transformation. E.G. Kemp arrived in Hong Kong in the aftermath of a catastrophic typhoon, witnessing a colonial outpost remaking itself from barren rock into a teeming port. What followed was an extraordinary journey across the breadth of a continent: through the misty provinces of the east, the windswept northern plains, the ancient heartland of central China, and into the rugged western territories rarely visited by Westerners. Kemp's prose captures a world of astonishing variety, where Buddhist monks chanting in mountain temples exist alongside steam locomotives bearing foreign goods inland, and where centuries-old market routines unfold as they have for generations. She records the textures of daily existence with an observer's eye: the weight of silk in a merchant's hands, the smell of incense in a wayside shrine, the collision of rickshaws and railways. This is China on the edge of revolution, preserved in amber by a traveler who understood she was witnessing something vanishing. For readers hungry for the historical past and the romance of vanished worlds, Kemp offers passage to a China that would be unrecognizable within twenty years of her departure.