Across China on Foot

This book, first published in 1911, is one of the most important and best written travel books from old China. Edwin Dingle recounts his adventures as he travels up the Yangtze River from Shanghai and then by foot southwest across some of China's most wild and woolly territory to Burma. Along the way, Dingle absorbed an enormous amount of about life and society in southwest China, and describes what he sees in a readable and sensitive way.

Edwin Dingle was an English journalist born in 1881. In the early 1900s, he was working in Singapore. He made his famous trip across China in 1909 and 1910, and then settled in Shanghai, where he lived until 1927 as the proprietor of the newspaper China and Far East Finance and Commerce. He then went to the United States, where he founded a health and sex cult, which kept him occupied in a world far away from the one found in this book until the ripe old age of 91.