China Travel Quotes

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

I travelled across the world. From the ruins of New York, to the fusion mills of China, right across the radiation pits of Europe. And everywhere I went I saw people just like you, living as slaves! But if Martha Jones became a legend then that's wrong, because my name isn't important. There's someone else. The man who sent me out there, the man who told me to walk the Earth. And his name is The Doctor. He has saved your lives so many times and you never even knew he was there. He never stops. He never stays. He never asks to be thanked. But I've seen him, I know him... I love him... And I know what he can do. - Martha Jones

I always have a problem liking things that I'm told I should like. This has been the problem with most of the Wonders I have seen so far. The fact that this one is called the 'Great' Wall of China annoys me. I'll decide if it's great or not. It might end up being the 'All Right Wall of China' to me.

Oh, Lucia the captain said softly, you are so little and so lovely. how I would have liked to have taken you to Norway and shown you the fiords in the midnight sun, and to China- what you've missed, Lucia, by being born too late to travel the Seven Seas with me! And what I've missed, too.

[...] I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession.' 'As sanitary engineer?' 'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.

Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.

I drift like a cloud, Across these venerable eastern lands, A journey of unfathomable distances, An endless scroll of experiences... Lady Zhejiang here we must part, For the next province awaits my embrace. Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East, Where do you go?

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.

Well, the thing is, I don't think Indians are nomadic anymore. Most indians anyway.' No, we're not,' I said I'm not nomadic,' Rowdy said. 'Hardly anybody on this rez is nomadic. Except for you. You're the nomadic one.' Whatever.' No. I'm serious. I always knew you were going to leave. I always knew you were going to leave us behind and travel the world. I had this dream about you a few months ago. You were standing on the Great Wall of China. You looked happy. And I was happy for you.' Rowdy didn't cry. But I did. You're an old-time nomad,' Rowdy said. 'You're going to keep moving all over the world in search of food and water and grazing land. That's pretty cool.' I could barely talk. Thank you,' I said. Yeah,' Rowdy said. 'Just make sure you send me postcards, you asshole.' From everywhere,' I said. I would always love Rowdy. And I would always miss him, too. Just as I would always love and miss my grandmother, my big sister, and Eugene. Just as I would always love and miss my reservation and my tribe. I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them.

มหานทีทอดยาว ขุนเขามิอาจขวางกั้น รู้จักกาลเทศะคือคนฉลาด คำพูดบางอย่างเพียงกล่าวได้รอบเดียว คำเตือนบางอย่างเพียงเอ่ยได้ครั้งเดียว ต่อไปสมควรประพฤติตนเช่นไร ท่านไปพิจารณาเองเถอะ

That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind. After all, we're the ones venturing out into the big crazy world, filling up journals, growing like weeds. And we have the gall to think they're just sitting at home, soaking in security and stability. It is only when we reopen these wrapped and ribboned boxes, upon our triumphant return home, that we discover nothing is the way we had left it before.

In the twentieth century, astrophysicists in the United States discovered galaxies, the expanding of the universe, the nature of supernovas, quasars, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of the elements, the cosmic microwave background, and most of the known planets in orbit around solar systems other than our own. Although the Russians reached one or two places before us, we sent space probes to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. American probes have also landed on Mars and on the asteroid Eros. And American astronauts have walked on the Moon. Nowadays most Americans take all this for granted, which is practically a working definition of culture: something everyone does or knows about, but no longer actively notices. While shopping at the supermarket, most Americans aren’t surprised to find an entire aisle filled with sugar-loaded, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. But foreigners notice this kind of thing immediately, just as traveling Americans notice that supermarkets in Italy display vast selections of pasta and that markets in China and Japan offer an astonishing variety of rice. The flip side of not noticing your own culture is one of the great pleasures of foreign travel: realizing what you hadn’t noticed about your own country, and noticing what the people of other countries no longer realize about themselves.

Don’t take everything for granted, and do not always count on finding everything you need.

I quickly became aware that the phrase "it can only get better" could very quickly turn into "it could always be worse," because it was.

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?

Contentment can only be found in not envying others or comparing yourself to them but in being satisfied with what you have.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

Tea and water give each other life,' the Professor was saying. 'The tea is still alive. This tea has tea and water vitality.

I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

La gloire, c'est comme la gouache, ça prend très vite puis ça part à la première goutte de pluie.

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

Wasn’t really, to tell you the truth. No shock at all.” Then he went on: “I always told her she should go, told her she should go and find love, you know, true love. She deserves it, don’t you think? That’s where she’s gone now. Off to find true love. Perhaps she’ll find it too. Out there, on the South China Sea, who knows? Perhaps she’ll meet a traveller, in a port, in a hotel, who knows? She’s become a romantic, you see? I had to let her go.” There were now tears welling in his eyes.

Nowadays,” my tour guide says, “it is a man’s world here in China. But 6000 years ago, it was a woman’s world. Man and woman don’t need to get married. Man can just visit the woman’s house at night. When you have a baby, it doesn’t matter who the father is.

MYTH 280. | Spaghetti originated in Italy. Spaghetti originated in China. Magellan tasted it on his travels in Asian and brought

The seven largest emitters of fossil fuels—the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, India, and China

China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—“casually

to my father’s amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai’an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did.

Other times I just lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, imagining the kind of life I want to have when I get older. I picture myself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, climbing pyramids in Egypt, dancing in the streets in Spain, riding in a boat in Venice, and walking on the Great Wall of China. In these dreams, I’m a famous writer who wears flamboyant scarves and travels all around the world, meeting fascinating people. No one tells me what to do. I go wherever I want and do whatever I please.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.

On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.

Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet.

If Moroccans are dying in Indo-China, if it rains too much or not enough, if there is no work, if one’s wife is sick and penicillin is expensive, or if the French are still in Morocco, it is all the fault of America. She could change everything if she chose, but she does nothing because she does not love the Moslems.

I have traveled around the world. I’ve walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That’s not all. I’ve led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I’ve lived a thousand lives. Too bad the only real one fucking sucks.

I've wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It's the China that sends messages just to me. It's not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it's another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it's a part of myself that's been cut off by the word China. I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi... all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains.

I was particularly fascinated by the story of the circumstances that led to the development of tertiary education in China. It seems hard to imagine—but there was a time when institutionalized education, formal curricula and exams didn’t exist.

Long before Christopher Columbus, the celebrated Chinese navigator Zheng He travelled through the south and westward maritime routes in the Indian Ocean and established relations with more than thirty countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Nous sommes tous des naufragés de l'âme vois-tu, la peinture n'est que le reflet de ce chagrin, antichambre de la grande joie à venir." Nous sommes tous des naufragés de l'âme vois-tu, la peinture n'est que le reflet de ce chagrin, antichambre de la grande joie à venir. On ne se tue pas pour une femme (Plon)

ONCE, THERE WAS A CHINA RABBIT WHO was loved by a little girl. The rabbit went on an ocean journey and fell overboard and was rescued by a fisherman. He was buried under garbage and unburied by a dog. He traveled for a long time with the hoboes and worked for a short time as a scarecrow. Once, there was a rabbit who loved a little girl and watched her die. The rabbit danced on the streets of Memphis. His head was broken open in a diner and was put together again by a doll mender. And the rabbit swore that he would not make the mistake of loving again. Once there was a rabbit who danced in a garden in springtime with the daughter of the woman who had loved him at the beginning of his journey. The girl swung the rabbit as she danced in circles. Sometimes, they went so fast, the two of them, that it seemed as if they were flying. Sometimes, it seemed as if they both had wings. Once, oh marvelous once, there was a rabbit who found his way home.

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.

When given the chance to see China off the beaten track, definitely take it.

When you’re in another country, remember to do as the locals do, since it is your ways that may seem strange of offensive to them.

In Chinese business culture, humility is a virtue.

One of the first things which impress the traveller in China is the extremely simple diet of the people.

China has already launched ten “taikonauts” into orbit and is proceeding with ambitious plans to construct a space station and develop a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V by 2020.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” –Oliver Wendell Holmes

What's the worst that can happen?

To stand out from the crowd, you need to begin traveling to new locales to demonstrate that you are someone of originality and interest.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity.

Rare earth elements are crucial for the electronics industry but are mostly found in China. (Rare earths are located everywhere in small quantities, but the Chinese rare earth industry makes up 97 percent of the world trade.

What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.

Before she landed, Ms Clinton publicly downplayed the importance of human rights. At a press conference ahead of leaving, she beamingly implored the Chinese government to keep buying US debt, like a travelling saleswoman hawking a bill of goods.

Our boat travelled on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lay at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless information of the well-informed.

Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.

Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. In March 2017, a pair of Chinese cousins made headlines with a hapless string of robberies. The pair had traveled to Hangzhou, a wealthy city and home to Alibaba, with the goal of making a couple of lucrative scores and then skipping town. Armed with two knives, the cousins robbed three consecutive convenience stores only to find that the owners had almost no cash to hand over—virtually all their customers were now paying directly with their phones. Their crime spree netted them around $125 each—not even enough to cover their travel to and from Hangzhou—when police picked them up. Local media reported rumors that upon arrest one of the brothers cried out, “How is there no cash left in Hangzhou?

Tea first came to Japan in the sixth century by way of Japanese Buddhist monks, scholars, warriors, and merchants who traveled to China and brought back tea pressed into bricks. It was not until 1911, during the Song dynasty, that the Japanese Buddhist priest Eisai (also known as Yosai) carried home from China fine-quality tea seeds and the method for making matcha (powdered green tea). The tea seeds were cultivated on the grounds of several Kyoto temples and later in such areas as the Uji district just south of Kyoto. Following the Chinese traditional method, Japanese Zen monks would steam, dry, then grind the tiny green tea leaves into a fine powder and whip it with a bamboo whisk in boiling water to create a thick medicinal drink to stimulate the senses during long periods of meditation.

Like the Obama administration, Chinese officials in 2009 provided an unprecedented $586 billion fiscal stimulus. As a result, the Chinese can now travel on fast trains between their major cities. In contrast, they ask, what did the US get for its $983 billion infusion?33

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.

There’s a vast world beyond the tiny fragment that each of us inhabits, and going out into it is the only way to understand other people, their cultures and religions: you can’t travel and have the sorts of experiences we were having without learning something from the interactions involved.

Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to emigrate to the USA, to Germany, to Canada or to Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I am yet to meet a single person who dreams of emigrating to Russia.

In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade travelled the world ceaselessly as its chief engineer and troubleshooter – to Burma, China, Australia, India, Egypt and wherever else its mineralogical interests demanded. In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

Under Mongol domination, faraway regions of the globe came into contact more than superficially and, for at least a century spanning the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s, these regions were linked in a common network of exchange and production. For the first time, people and caravans could travel safely from Italy to China.

The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the East, to India and China. My

Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.

Dana daydreamed of one day being able to set her agenda at B.Altman with the same courage and tenacity as the woman who was now driving the VW while speaking animatedly about her travel plans for the near future. She would be journeying to India in search of exotic merchandise for the store’s Indian extravaganza, a lavish event planned by Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello to compete with Bloomingdale’s Retailing as Theater movement. The movement was the brainchild of Bloomingdale’s Marvin Traub, who staged elaborate presentations such as China: Heralding the Dawn of a New Era. Typical extravaganzas featured fashion, clothing, food, and art from various regions of the world. “I’ll bring back enough items to make Bloomingdale’s blush!” Nina said confidently. “And I’m not just talking sweaters, hats, and walking sticks. I’ll stop first in the Himalayas and prowl the Landour Bazaar.” Lynn Steward ~ A Very Good Life

In China our professional artists or craftsman used to carve large pieces of white ivory into models of famous buildings, such as the Peking Palace or the Temple of Heaven, with streets and people to the minutest detail. I have been fortunate enough to see a few of theses, and the snow-covered Oxford High, with its yellow stone, resembled one of these exquisite ivory carvings, yellowed with age. I was happy to have discovered such affinity between Oxford and Ancient China.

It is precisely Battuta's lack of interest in peoples outside Dar-al- Islam—the world of Islam—that testifies to Muslim dominance of medieval Asian trade. In the fourteenth century, Battuta could travel 74,000 miles through Morocco, East Africa, India, central Asia, Southeast Asia, and China and remain entirely within the Muslim cultural envelope, never having to interact in a meaningful manner with those outside it in order to survive, to travel, or even to make a living.

Churchill was right about the horrors of Communism, which was ultimately responsible for around a hundred million deaths in the twentieth century, including in Chairman Mao’s China, but in 1919–22, as fellow-travellers trumpeted its attractions, few wanted to listen to his predictions. Yet simply continuing to speak the uncomfortable truth about this deadly totalitarian ideology prepared Churchill well for the 1930s, when he did the same thing for Bolshevism’s sister-creed, Nazism.

Singapore and China did not have diplomatic relations at that time [1976]. Communism is banned in Singapore, and nobody could visit China without official approval. The Singapore government had prohibited travel there for fear that Singaporeans would be subverted and converted to the communist cause. . .The travel ban was lifted after Lee Kuan Yew's visit. He realised that nobody could experience life there and be seduced by their system. Indeed, they would better appreciate what Singapore offered.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!" We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in. "Get down! Get down!" he barked. "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!" Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble. Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners. Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

But in her time of greatest need, her activist sisters came through for her. They offered her moral support, assured her that she had done nothing wrong, and confirmed the crucial importance of her work. They also connect her with a good pyscho-therapist. One of them even traveled to her city to speak to mother to tell her that her daughter wasn't a criminal and explained that she had in fact made a huge contribution to women's rights and China. "The Sisterhood offered me a safe place where I could be myself and feel secure" she said. "That feminist solidarity rescued me.

To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources of its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper, of which 2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70 percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other words, just under half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap metal. That’s not a trivial matter: copper, more than any other metal, is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power and information.

Gardening Work There was a man breaking up the ground, getting ready to plant, when another man came by, "Why are you ruining this land?" "Don't interfere. Nothing can grow here until the earth is turned over and crumbled. There can be no roses and no orchard without first this devastation. You must lance an ulcer to heal. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it." So it is with the sensual life that has no spirit. A person must face the dragon of his or her appetites with another dragon, the life energy of the soul. When that's not strong, everyone seems to be full of fear and wanting, as one thinks the room is spinning when one's whirling around. If your love has contracted into anger, the atmosphere itself feels threatening, but when you're expansive and clear, no matter what the weather, you're in an open windy field with friends. Many people travel as far as Syria and Iraq and meet only hypocrites. Others go all the way to India and see only people buying and selling. Others travel to Turkestan and China to discover those countries are full of cheats and sneak thieves. You always see the qualities that live in you. A cow may walk through the amazing city of Baghdad and notice only a watermelon rind and a tuft of hay that fell off a wagon. Don't repeatedly keep doing what your lowest self wants. That's like deciding to be a strip of meat nailed to dry on a board in the sun.

The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world have come to study it. Yet no one has ever been able to explain why it grows like a corkscrew, just as no one can adequately explain China. But like that tree, there it is, old, resilient, and oddly magnificent. Within that tree are the elements in nature that have inspired Chinese artists for centuries: gesture over geometry, subtlety over symmetry, constant flow over static form. And the temples, walk and touch them. This is China. Don't merely stare at these murals and statues. Fly up to the crossbeams, get down on your hands and knees, and press your head to the floor tiles. Hide behind that pillar and come eye to eye with its flecks of paint. Imagine that you are the interior decorator who is a thousand years in age. Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegance, a glorious new motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion. That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit. Those are the traces that have affected all who have traveled along China's roads.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.

The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain without losing their moisture, and without losing the sharp perfume born of the tears Buddha shed for the world's suffering, suffering that also travels in tea: we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, and we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them. Thanks to steam power, we no longer drink the lash of the whip on the oarsmen's backs. But we do drink choking coal miners. And that's the way of the world: everything alive lives off the death of someone or something else. Because nothing comes from nothing.

A caravan from China comes; For miles it sweetens all the air With fragrant silks and dreaming gums, Attar and myrrh -- A caravan from China comes. O merchant, tell me what you bring, With music sweet of camel bells; How long have you been travelling With these sweet smells? O merchant, tell me what you bring. A lovely lady is my freight, A lock escaped of her long hair, -- That is this perfume delicate That fills the air -- A lovely lady is my freight. Her face is from another land, I think she is no mortal maid, -- Her beauty, like some ghostly hand, Makes me afraid; Her face is from another land. The little moon my cargo is, About her neck the Pleiades Clasp hands and sing; Hafiz, 't is this Perfumes the breeze -- The little moon my cargo is.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her Then he gets you on her wavelength And she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you've touched her perfect body with your mind And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind And you think you maybe you'll trust him For he's touched your perfect body with her mind Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning They are leaning out for love and they wil lean that way forever While Suzanne holds her mirror And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And you know that you can trust her For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

A traveler in China visited a heathen temple on a great feast day. Many were the worshippers of the hideous idol enclosed in a sacred shrine. The visitor noticed that most of the devotees brought with them small pieces of paper on which prayers had been written or printed. These they would wrap up in little balls of stiff mud and fling at the idol. He enquired the reason for this strange proceeding and was told that if the mud ball stuck fast to the idol, then the prayer would assuredly be answered; but if the mud fell off, the prayer was rejected by the god. We may smile at this peculiar way of testing the adequacy of a prayer. But is it not a fact that the majority of Christian men and women who pray to a living God know very little about real prevailing prayer? Yet prayer is the key which unlocks the door of God’s treasure house.

This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means.” Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible industry, but nearly everything you’ve ever bought traveled over the water.” “My made-in-China headphones, and whatnot.” “Sure, yes, there’s an obvious one, but I really mean almost everything. Everything on and around us. Your socks. Our shoes. My aftershave. This glass in my hand. I could keep going, but I’ll spare you.” “I’m embarrassed to admit that I never thought about it,” Jonathan said. “No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?

No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.

ONCE, THERE WAS A CHINA RABBIT WHO was loved by a little girl. The rabbit went on an ocean journey and fell overboard and was rescued by a $sherman. He was buried under garbage and unburied by a dog. He traveled for a long time with the hoboes and worked for a short time as a scarecrow. Once, there was a rabbit who loved a little girl and watched her die. The rabbit danced on the streets of Memphis. His head was broken open in a diner and was put together again by a doll mender. And the rabbit swore that he would not make the mistake of loving again. Once there was a rabbit who danced in a garden inspringtime with the daughter of the woman who had loved him at the beginning of his journey. The girl swung the rabbit as she danced in circles. Sometimes, they went so fast, the two of them, that it seemed as if they were )ying. Sometimes, it seemed as if they both had wings. Once, oh marvelous once, there was a rabbit who found his way home.

The Troika sought to undo the steep pay raises civil servants had received in the decade preceding the crisis, and Greek government workers saw their paychecks cut by as much as 35 percent. This was intended not only to reduce the government’s wage bill, but to make the Greek economy more competitive. Since public wage levels have a direct effect on private wages, a reduction in the former would result in a cheaper overall labor force, allowing Greece to export products at more competitive prices, the thinking went. Or as I heard some Greeks put it, the plan was to make wages as low as in China, so that Greeks, too, would one day supplicate for jobs assembling iPads until their fingers went numb. The Troika’s plan certainly seemed to work, as average incomes in Greece fell about one-quarter in the years following the outbreak of the crisis. It was not clear, however, that the Greek government would be able to sustain all the public wage cuts it had been forced to implement.

We get the word etymology from the Greek étymon,’ continued Professor Lovell. ‘The true sense of a word, from étumos, the “true or actual”. So we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’ Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’* ‘No, give me something bigger.’ ‘Táifēng?’* ‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’ ‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’ ‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on. “You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by walking into the Kennebec Fruit . . . but the stairs leading up into the pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the same as when you left it.” “So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To wit, saving JFK’s life.” “Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John lives in Dallas, Robert

Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.

Curious Oriental imagery was employed in these documents. In one of his earlier letters the thum asked why the British strayed thus into his country 'like camels without nose rings'. In another letter he declared that he cared nothing for the womanly English, as he hung upon the skirts of the manly Russians, and he warned Colonel Durand that he had given orders to his followers to bring him the Gilgit Agent's head on a platter. The thum was, indeed an excellent correspondent about this time. He used to dictate his letters to the Court Munshi, the only literary man, I believe, in the whole of his dominions, who wrote forcible, if unclassical, Persian. In one letter the thum somewhat shifted his ground, and spoke of other friends. 'I have been tributary to China for hundreds of years. Trespass into China if you dare,' he wrote to Colonel Durand. 'I will withstand you, if I have to use bullets of gold. If you venture here, be prepared to fight three nations - Hunza, China, and Russia. We will cut your head off, Colonel Durand, and then report you to the Indian Government.

Thegirls also ordered catalogues for items they could never buy, and theLisbons' mailbox filled up once again: furniture catalogues fromScottshruptine, high-end clothing, exotic vacations. Unable to goanywhere, the girls traveled in their imaginations to goldtipped Siamesetemples, or past an old man with bucket and leaf broom tidying amoss-carpeted speck of Japan. As soon as we learned the names of thesebrochures we sent for them ourselves to see where the girls wanted togo. Far East Adventures. Footloose Tours. Tunnel to China Tours. OrientExpress. We got them all. And, flipping pages, hiked through dustypasses with the girls, stopping every now and then to help them take offtheir backpacks, placing our hands on their warm, moist shoulders andgazing off at papaya sunsets. We drank tea with them in a waterpavilion, above blazing goldfish. We did whatever we wanted to, andCecilia hadn't killed herself: she was a bride in Calcutta, with a redveil and the soles of her feet dyed with henna. The only way we couldfeel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions, whichhave scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives.

As we lifted off, China growing ever more distant from the window-seat, the endless ocean opening up before us, I was torn between the excitement of something new and leaving that which I'd grown to love. In that moment, I understood we may never come back; that we were floating there suspended between two worlds, above the world. There was no logic in where we would go from here, nor any limitation. We had each other, and we knew now of what adaptation we were capable. Their faces flashed through my mind, and I wondered if we'd ever find a country like that again, or if we'd ever be as open with new friends, knowing now what it was like to leave them. Like a first love lost. I hoped we'd have the courage to love Germany so that the day we'd leave our hearts would also break. For what is life except that kind of attachment? And isn't it true that one can live in a place all their life, surrounded by comfort and familiarity, and never feel this longing? As the last view of China slipped off the horizon, I promised myself that I would always dare to love, squeezing Patrick's hand, and seeing that in our love for each other, we'd always have the strength to let go.

Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word. They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot. Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.” Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water. How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller? It is too late to flee.

the mystery was far from solved. Nobody understood why heparin—which is made from the mucosal lining of pig intestines, most of which come from China—was suddenly making patients sick. In February 2008, the FDA discovered the likely source of the contamination: a Chinese plant supplying crude heparin to Baxter. In a clerical blunder, the FDA had completely overlooked and failed to inspect the facility, Changzhou SPL, located about 150 miles west of Shanghai. Instead, it inspected and approved a plant with a similar-sounding name. Predictably, once FDA officials finally traveled to Changzhou in February 2008 to make an on-the-ground inspection, they found serious problems. The facility had dirty manufacturing tanks and no reliable method of removing impurities from heparin, and it acquired the crude heparin from workshops that had not been inspected. Chinese regulators were no help at all. A loophole in Chinese regulations allowed certain pharmaceutical plants to register as chemical plants, which made them subject to far less oversight. For U.S. congressional investigator David Nelson, whose committee was now immersed in the heparin crisis as well, the situation laid bare the “classically good reason to be suspect of production coming from any country that doesn’t have competent regulatory authority.” The FDA issued an import alert in March 2008, meaning that Changzhou SPL’s shipments would be stopped at the U.S. border. Though

Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.

As the future draws ever closer – with speedy travel, immediate communication and almost-instant trade – the historical past can seem more remote, like another world, rapidly receding. And whilst we may be increasingly aware of cultures other than our own, the genuine understanding that allows us to connect through what we share, and also to respect our differences, does not always come naturally. But at a time when misunderstanding can easily escalate, it is vitally important that we seize opportunities to learn – both from our global neighbours and from our collective past. If we consider an age of unexpectedly changing political landscapes, with regions of cosmopolitanism alongside those of parochialism, when developments bring a better quality of life to many, yet the world remains vulnerable to serious threats such as disease, poverty, changing climate, violence and oppression, we might well recognise this as our own age. It is equally true of the 10th century, on which this book focuses. The centuries surrounding the second millennium saw enormous dynamism on the global stage. Influential rules such as those of the great Maya civilisation of mesoamerica and the prosperous Tang dynasty in China were on the decline, while Vikings rampaged across north-western Europe, and the Byzantine Empire entered its second-wave of expansion. Muslim civilisation was thriving, with the establishment of no fewer than three Islamic caliphates.

Memory of the elderly monk survived in the accounts of some of the greatest leaders in medieval Europe, along with lengthy accounts in the Vatican archives, but he was soon forgotten in the West and in his homeland of China.