Behind The Wall
Colin Thubron
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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 an acknowledged master of travel writing, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first writing was about the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled into the Soviet Union in an ancient Morris Marina, pursued by the KGB, a journey he recorded in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier) and Shadow of the Silk Road. His most recent book is To a Mountain in Tibet (all available in Vintage). Colin Thubron was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017.

portrait photo of Colin Thubron

Also by Colin Thubron

The Amur River
Night of Fire
Journey Into Cyprus
To a Mountain in Tibet
Mirror To Damascus
The Hills Of Adonis
In Siberia
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
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