Excerpt from Wandering in Northern China At home there are numbers of young men, five or ten years out of college, who can tell you just what is the matter with the world, and exactly how to remedy it. I am more or less ready to agree with them that the world is going to the dogs. What of it? You have only to step outdoors on any clear night to see that there are hundreds of other worlds, which may be arranging their lives in a more intelligent manner. The most striking thing about these young political and sociological geniuses sitting in their suburban gardens or their city flats is that while they can toss off a recipe guaranteed to cure our own sick world overnight, if only some one can get it down its throat, they seldom seem to have influence enough in their own cozy little corner of it to drive out one grafting ward-heeler. In other words, if you must know what is to be the future of China, I regret that I have not been vouchsafed the gift of prophecy and cannot tell you. In the minor matter of Chinese words and names, I have deliberately not tried to follow the usual Romanization, but rather to cause the reader to pronounce them as nearly like what they are on the spot as is possible with our mere twenty-six letters. Of course I could not follow this rule entirely or I must have called the capital of China Bay-jing, have spoken of the evacuation of Shahn - doong, and so on; so that in the case of names already more or less familiar to the West I have used the most modern and most widely accepted forms, as they have survived on the ground. At that I cannot imagine what ailed the men who Romanized the Chinese language, but that is another story. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Three Years' Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China : Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, And Cotton Countries: With an Account of the Agriculture of the Chinese, New Plants, Etc by Robert Fortune, first published in 1847, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

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This is an important description of little-known parts of China by the botanist and plant hunter Robert Fortune (1812-80), who visited China to collect ornamental and useful plants, especially tea. In this 1847 publication, Fortune also describes the people and customs of these remote areas.

The third in Sven Hedin's Central Asia trilogy, The Wandering Lake is arguably his most famous work and a rare account of a now-vanished world. The lake of Lop Nur, the 'heart of the heart of Asia', is one of the world's strangest phenomena. Situated in the wild Chinese province of Xinjiang, Lop Nur - 'the wandering lake'- has for millennia been in a perpetual state of flux, drifting north to south, often tens of kilometres in as many years. It was once the lifeblood of the great Silk Road kingdom of Loulan, which flourished in this otherwise barren region 2,000 years ago, and its peculiar movements confused even Ptolemy, who marked the lake twice on his map of Asia. Following 'the pulse-beats of Lop Nur as a doctor examines a patient's heart', Sven Hedin became captivated by its peripatetic movements and for forty years his destiny was inextricably linked with that of this mysterious lake and the region surrounding it. His last journey to Lop Nur was in 1934, just days after he was released as a prisoner of General Ma Chung-yin (the rebel leader of Xinjiang). Travelling the length of the Konche-daria and Kum-daria rivers by canoe, Hedin embarked on his last Central Asian expedition and proved what he had always suspected - that Lop Nur did indeed shift position - and why. When he camped on its vast banks at night, Lop Nur was deep and full. Today, this once great lake - a mighty reservoir in the desert - is nothing but windblown sand and salty marsh. A gripping story of adventure and discovery, The Wandering Lake is a masterpiece by one of history's last great explorers.

From New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth is a science fiction short story collection featuring the title tale--the basis for the blockbuster international film, now streaming on Netflix. These ten stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award-winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the reader to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.