Will Travel My Beijing

"Four short stories set in a hutong, or residential alleyway, of Beijing, China. Yu'er, her grandfather, and their eccentric neighbors experience the magic of everyday life."--

This is a story about a boy who was told if he kept digging he would end up in China. Because of his sister's fearlessness and some fantastic friends, he finds himself in Beijing. In this comical retelling, the group meets in Beijing to support the boy's sister, who is running The Great Wall Marathon. The run is a great excuse to extend the trip into an experience of a lifetime: enjoying local cuisine, checking out shopping hot spots, dispelling myths and pre-conceived notions, and putting the T back into tea--all the while laughing at themselves along the way.

This is a story about a boy who was told if he kept digging he would end up in China. Because of his sister's fearlessness and some fantastic friends, he finds himself in Beijing. In this comical retelling, the group meets in Beijing to support the boys sister, who is running The Great Wall Marathon. The run is a great excuse to extend the trip into an experience of a lifetime: enjoying local cuisine, checking out shopping hot spots, dispelling myths and pre-conceived notions, and putting the T back into tea--all the while laughing at themselves along the way.

Following her celebrated Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, Mary Morris, still alone, still graced with her extraordinary gifts of narrative and observation, presents an unforgettable account of her 1986 trip through China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. As in Nothing to Declare, she combines vivid portrayals of people and places with a more personal journey—in this case a search for roots, family, and her ancestral home in the Ukraine. Traveling across China and Mongolia to Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express and finally on to Berlin, Morris views the changing landscapes of nations and history. She encounters and converses with a colorful assortment of people from party-liners to dissidents, from ordinary men and women to the Moscow elite. Her journey, however, occurs against the backdrop of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. On the train and in Russia, Morris hears terrifying, contradictory reports of the condition of the region so near her intended destination outside of Kiev. In midst of this anxious situation, she is forced to make a momentous decision a continent away from family and loved ones, adding a complex inner counterpoint to the public crises unfolding around her. Bringing her skills with foreign languages and her facility with people to this journey, Mary Morris once again proves that she is, in the words of Times magazine, “a fascinating guide, with an eye for the brutal, the garish, the silly and the bizarre.” Wall to Wall is a powerful travel memoir illuminated by the unique sensibility of one of our finest writers.

Great Wall hiking tips & guide to local cuisine Forbidden City in 3D Full-colour pull-out map of Beijing

Lonely Planet Beijing is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Scale the Great Wall, sip a cocktail in an historic alleyway, or go ice skating with the locals in Houhai; all with your trusted travel companion.

Thirty leading China experts—ranging from Perry Link, Andrew Nathan and Jonathan Mirsky to W. J. F. Jenner, Lois Wheeler Snow and Morton Abramowitz—recount their first visits to China, recalling their initial observations and impressions. Most first traveled to China when it was still closed to the world, or was just beginning to open. Their subsequent opinions, writings and policies have shaped the Western relationship with China for more than a generation. This is essential reading for those who want to understand the evolution of Western attitudes toward modern China. At the same time, this collection provides a vivid, personal window onto a fascinating period in Chinese history. “To collect the stories of first encounters with China was a brilliant idea. Not only do we get the benefit of many fascinating insights (and hindsights) from a range of foreigners and overseas Chinese, but these deftly edited views from the outside make up one great story: the history of Communist China. More than a history of one damned thing happening after another, however, this is a history of perceptions, lies, myths and revelations, as much about China as her rulers wish it to be seen, as about those who chose to see China, more and sometimes less clearly, over the last half century.” —Ian Buruma, author of Bad Elements “The opening of China to the world, and then of the world to China, is one of modern history’s most consequential stories. That story is told in a fresh, innovative fashion in this insightful collection of personal experiences related by a distinguished collection of historians, diplomats, journalists, political writers and others who ventured behind the Bamboo Curtain early on. Leading the way are disillusioned leftists stunned by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Great Leap Forward that they discover. They gradually give way to knowing observers of a tumultuous society determined to become once again a world power. Their accounts form an impressionistic vision of epochal change taking place on the gallop.” —Jim Hoagland, contributing editor, The Washington Post “This is a wistful and absorbing volume, and a fitting remembrance for all of us who once thought that China was going to be easy to study.” —Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.