What was China like a hundred years ago? Poor coolies carrying huge weight on their tired shoulders over narrow paths winding through rice paddy fields.
Chinese inns with mud floors and walls. Fat Chinese merchants, thin tall serious missionaries staying in inhospitable places hoping to convert Chinese. White traders, sailors, pompus officials looking down upon the Chinese! The grind, poverty, racism. Somerset Maugham wandered around China with cool clinical eye hundred years ago and described the place and people, strange, idiosyncratic, always fascinating. His language is heavy, yet he draws a lyrical portrait of a bygone era and you travel with him in another age! He travels on foot, is carried on sedan chairs, rides a pony, floats on ramshackle boats, and meets poor labour, pretentious white men who too are refugees far away from home in a distant land and culture.
Like Time Travel.
Wish another Somerset Maugham arises to see the world today.