Behind The Wall [Kindle Edition]

After being deeply affected by the horror encountered reading Wild Swans I really wanted to find out more about post-Mao China. What better place to look than this! Although it was written in the eighties, the book does portray flashes of hope for one of the most traumatised nations of modern history. Western influences were already creeping in then - TV, fashion, music... and people were starting to think that there is more to life than communism. (although this was not to be easily discovered!). Yet with quality of life being the poorest of the poor china still has a long way to go!

Mr Thubron has an incredibly perceptive nature. He has an amazing talent to spot a multitude of unspoken words in the tiniest change of expression on someones face, and to describe a multitude of political and emotional concepts in a single sentence. His style of writing may be cumbersome to some, but its well worth getting used to the elaborate words in order to gain one of the most profound western insights into the country imaginable.

Mr Thubron leaves no stone unturned, he remarks on the tiniest details around him and the most trivial of thoughts that would be irrelevant to most, and weaves these into the overall tapestry of his chapter. Nothing is beneath him, he really immerses himself into Chinese culture and engages with Chinese living and thinking. This is what makes him such a unique travel writer. He has so many perspectives. He writes with humour, compassion, detachment, artistic descriptiveness, political knowledge and worldly intelligence, yet he also brings a reassuring touch, human feeling that readers can connect with.

This is the nearest you can get to a virtual trip into China. His books about Russia and Siberia are just as profound, I'm looking forward to reading the rest... !

Thubron's typical eclectic mix of people, lifestyles, places, scenery, history, myth and politics, brings post-revolutionary China to vivid life as he travels north to south, east to west. While undoubtedly China has moved on since his journey, this book reveals as much about the minds and attitudes of its 1980s population as it does about the cities and countryside, industry and wildernesses.
Read this, if you can, before The Lost Heart of Asia and Shadow of the Silk Road. I didn't, and wish I had, although it didn't prevent me from falling under Thubron's narrative spell.
One small downside: I do wish there had been more and better maps. I had to keep referring to my own atlas (or looking on the web) to find out exactly where he was ...

Colin Thubron is one of the most prominent living travel authors and his journeys through Asia are justly praised by fans of the genre. He has a peculiar approach to travel writing, by generally going to one country only and then trying to visit as much of it as possible while talking to the maximum amount of people, unlike for example Paul Theroux, who generally writes about travel across many societies. In this book, "Behind the Wall", Thubron takes us on a tour of China, and then I really mean all of China (except Tibet and Manchuria), as it was when he visited it in 1987.

The result is an interesting overview of Chinese society as it was just opening up to foreigners after the long periods of war and revolution. Thubron was by no means the first tourist to do a tour of China since 1949, but he did travel when European tourists were very rare and limited to expensive package deals and the corresponding upper class environment, be it by Chinese standards. He studiously avoids following in their footsteps, and instead tries to take the cheaper hostels, the lower class train carriages and so forth in order to get an impression of real Chinese society as the Chinese experienced it. The degree to which one can do this as a total outsider is still always limited of course, and as any anthropologist knows the very act of being an observant as a stranger can and will change people's behavior. Nonetheless, the rarity of a white foreigner in the places Thubron goes greatly aids him in conversing with a number of random Chinese he meets, and this leads to some interesting conversations and good insight into the diversity of the Chinese peoples as such, 'even' under Communism.

Thubron has been particularly praised for his good descriptive writing with regard to places and landscapes, and this is fully borne out in the book. He manages to be almost poetic about many of the remarkable sites he visits without either sounding over the top or like a travel brochure, which is quite a feat. His somewhat cynical detachment from the actual society probably helps in that regard. Nonetheless, this can get quite irritating too. Even though the year is 1987, he insists on asking every single person about the Cultural Revolution, obviously fishing for horror stories - and when a poor farmer tells him the Cultural Revolution for him meant an improvement, he simply refuses to believe it. Generally Thubron seems remarkably hostile to the society he is travelling in, not just politically, but also with regard to culture and habits. He is duly impressed by China's history and architecture, but seems to find most Chinese people he meets easily boring and backwards, and even helpful officials lazy and corrupt. There is probably some truth in this, in both the culture shock and the political cynicism, but it does make Thubron seem like a closed-minded conservative diplomat sent to some outpost of faded glory and poor manners.

Overall though, the book contains sufficient memorable descriptions of both famous and less familiar places and sites in China to make it easily worth the read. One could object that sometimes Thubron is so selective in what provides his inspiration that many a large city or 500 km trip passes by without much description, but he can be forgiven for this by the rule that a writer should be allowed to use only that raw material he can work with. And when he does it, he does it well. Much has changed in China since "Behind the Wall", and foreign travel will now not be so remarkable and lead to such friendly bemused responses among the Chinese as in those days, but perhaps for just that reason this book is a good portrait of a China that is past.