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Behind The Wall
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  • Published: 1 June 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459323
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99
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Behind The Wall

A Journey Through China

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Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

A powerful unforgettable journey through China with one of our greatest travel writers.

'An achievement of great and lasting brilliance' Patrick Leigh Fermor

Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at the far end of the Great Wall.

What Thubron reveals is an astonishing diversity, a land whose still unmeasured resources strain to meet an awesome demand, and an ancient people still reeling from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.
  • Published: 1 June 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459323
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Colin Thubron

COLIN THUBRON is a celebrated travel writer, winner of many prizes and awards. His classic travel books include: Among the Russians (1983), Behind the Wall (1987), In Siberia (1999), Shadow of the Silk Road (2006) and The Amur River (2021). He is also the author of eight acclaimed works of fiction, including A Cruel Madness (1984), winner of the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, To the Last City, long-listed for the Booker Prize (2002), and Night of Fire (2017). Passage is his ninth novel, shaped by a journey to Egypt.
portrait photo of Colin Thubron

Also by Colin Thubron

Passage
The Amur River
Night of Fire
Journey Into Cyprus
To a Mountain in Tibet
Mirror To Damascus
The Hills Of Adonis
See all

Praise for Behind The Wall

An achievement of great and lasting brilliance

Patrick Leigh Fermor

This transcendentally gifted writer is, of course, one of the two or three best living travel writers

Independent

A travel book which tells us more about this strange, sometimes terrible region and its people than a library of more pretentious works

Literary Review

An intrepid traveller, who also writes beautifully, with wit and erudition... The result is a rare first-hand account of a country seen through the eyes of one who has experienced what he describes and who is in a position to understand what he sees... He penetrates where most would believe it is impossible for a foreigner to go

Spectator