Liam D'Arcy Brown sets out to be the first Westerner in modern times to travel the length of China's great wonder, the Grand Canal. During his journey, he attempts to reconcile the China which fascinated him as a child with the modern, more open China he sees now. Bribing and talking his way onto the enourmous barges that carry bulk building materials for China's rapid modernisation, he follows the world's longest man-made canal, chugging through a list of characters and historical but forgotten sites from China s anscient past. The Emperor's River provides an intriguing insight into a side of China seldom seen.
Emperor's River: Travels to the Heart of a Resurgent China
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This lyrical and sympathetic narrative will be loved by sophisticated readers, travel buffs, and memoir fans. --Library Journal
...insights into a side of China seldom seen. --John McCarthy, BBC
Praise for Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: Historical insight, Chinese mythologies, modern commentary are all deftly interwoven with the narrative of his own odyssey... This is an impressive debut. --Daily Telegraph
...insights into a side of China seldom seen. --John McCarthy, BBC
Praise for Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: Historical insight, Chinese mythologies, modern commentary are all deftly interwoven with the narrative of his own odyssey... This is an impressive debut. --Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Liam D'Arcy-Brown is a sinologist, public speaker and acclaimed travel writer. Born in London in 1970, he now lives in Warwickshire with his wife Becky. He studied Chinese at Oxford University and Chinese History at Fudan University, Shanghai. His debut, Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior, received exceptional reviews in most major newspapers.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By DRM
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
An epic journey through Eastern China encompassing the length of the one thousand plus mile Grand Canal rolls fluently from the pages of this most interesting and lively book.
Punctuated by both modern and historical anecdotes and conversations, this is much more than a travelogue; through the author's intimate conversations in Mandarin it offers a keyhole surgeon's insight into the Chinese psyche. Like his first publication, "Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior", it highlights the omnipresent tension between the philosophies of today's all too rapidly modernizing industrial China and the agrarian tradition of China's imperial past.
D'Arcy Brown (aka Lin Jie) is clearly besotted with China, Mandarin and the Chinese people, and this exudes from every page of the book, being vividly highlighted by the fact that his solitary journey, started just three days after his marriage, is described as his honeymoon.
Rebecca must be both an independent and accommodating woman; I suspect her view of the honeymoon would make an equally interesting read!
The Emperor's River gets my coveted Triple-R award (derived from a Tyke school teacher who often referred to a good book as being a right riveting read) and this equates to a full Amazon five-star rating. My one disappointment: this was not available as a hard-back.
P.S. There are Chinese Whispers that Liam's third tome is in gestation - I can't wait for the delivery!
Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: A Journey Around China's Symbolic Frontiers (Hardback)
Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: A Journey Around China's Symbolic Frontiers (Paperback)
Punctuated by both modern and historical anecdotes and conversations, this is much more than a travelogue; through the author's intimate conversations in Mandarin it offers a keyhole surgeon's insight into the Chinese psyche. Like his first publication, "Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior", it highlights the omnipresent tension between the philosophies of today's all too rapidly modernizing industrial China and the agrarian tradition of China's imperial past.
D'Arcy Brown (aka Lin Jie) is clearly besotted with China, Mandarin and the Chinese people, and this exudes from every page of the book, being vividly highlighted by the fact that his solitary journey, started just three days after his marriage, is described as his honeymoon.
Rebecca must be both an independent and accommodating woman; I suspect her view of the honeymoon would make an equally interesting read!
The Emperor's River gets my coveted Triple-R award (derived from a Tyke school teacher who often referred to a good book as being a right riveting read) and this equates to a full Amazon five-star rating. My one disappointment: this was not available as a hard-back.
P.S. There are Chinese Whispers that Liam's third tome is in gestation - I can't wait for the delivery!
Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: A Journey Around China's Symbolic Frontiers (Hardback)
Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior: A Journey Around China's Symbolic Frontiers (Paperback)
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you want to know more about the real China, and who doesn't these days, this is an absolute must. Liam D'Arcy-Brown gives a fascinating, funny, frequently poignant insight into the land along China's great Grand Canal. One of the things that sets this travel story apart is his attention to language. He has an almost poetic eye for words and you learn an unexpected amount about the way Mandarin is written and spoken. This is a book that deserves to be widely read and much better known.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Before I read this I did have a dim idea that the longest man-made canal was in China (I visited Shanghai and Beijing a couple of years back), but there it ended. Now, I don't know which mind-boggling statistic to repeat first - let me see as I flick through the first chapter... erm, it's 2,500 years old, as long as the distance from London to Tunis or New York to Miami, carries 260,000,000 tons of cargo a year, and I could go on quoting...! Liam D'Arcy-Brown's first book on China (Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior) was beautifully written and was one of the round-about reasons I ended up travelling out there, and so I got The Emperor's River as a pre-order. To sum up, he's the first Westerner in two centuries to travel the length of the Grand Canal of China from Hangzhou to Beijing, and he does this by "bribing and talking his way" onto 1,000-ton bulk-cargo barges (I don't want to spoil the plot, but China's geography and police conspire to make the trip more complicated and less watery than you might expect). As the journey unfolds, D'Arcy-Brown introduces the ways by which the Chinese are reinventing their relationship with the Grand Canal, and by the time he reaches Beijing three months later (he adds, almost as an aside on a couple of occasions, that this trip started just three days after he got married, a personal detail I might have liked to hear more about) we've learned that the communist party is promoting the canal as another example of why Chinese culture is far and away better than the West's. Just like in Green Dragon, Sombre Warrior, he brings in fascinating characters he meets along the way, and he has the same nicely-tuned ear for dialogue that made that book such a beautiful read. After plodding my way through several "novelty" travelogues that had been recommended to me, it was a pleasure to read something of substance by a travel writer who really understands his subject and its country (he's a fluent Mandarin speaker). It gets a strong four from me. I wanted to know more about his poor wife...
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