Author(s): Simon Winchester

Travel

The mighty Yangtze splits China in two, between the wheat-growing North and the rice-growing South; almost 500 million people live and work along its banks. In this compelling book, award-winning writer Simon Winchester and his plucky companion Lily travelled upstream all the way from bustling cosmopolitan Shanghai to Tibet, deeper and deeper into inaccessible territory and the hidden recesses of early Chinese history. Their 3,900-mile journey took them past the magnificent Three Gorges, soon to be the site of the world's largest hydro-electric dam, through jungles, grasslands, high plains, polluted industrial landscapes and ice-covered mountain ranges. Winchester sketches in the background, describes a host of strange encounters and vividly reveals the harsh realities of today's China. There could be no more enthralling account of the greatest river on earth. Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and Asia, and now lives in New York. Having reported from almost everywhere during an award-winning twenty-year career as a Guardian foreign correspondent, he is currently the Asia-Pacific editor for Condé Nast Traveler and contributes to a number of American magazines, as well as to the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the BBC. Simon Winchester's 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, Back in Chinese Time, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, The Fracture Zone and The Map That Changed the World. Paperback