Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road (Traveler) - Softcover

Stevens, Stuart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0871131900 ISBN 13: 9780871131904

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988

Synopsis

The first account of travel in Chinese Turkistan, closed to foreigners since 1949, shows a world where bureaucratic hazards often loom larger than geographical ones. First serial to Esquire.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Stevens, a freelance journalist, filmmaker and political consultant, retraces explorer and author Peter Fleming's legendary 1935 journey through Chinese Turkistan from capital Beijing to remote, unpopulated Kashgar. Stevens was accompanied by three American friends, including Mark Salzman, whose Iron and Silk records his own extensive travels in China. In this colorful, simple narrative, the difficulties outweigh the pleasures as the foursome continually battles the bureaucratic nightmare of government control in China, where purchasing train tickets requires the combined skills of a rug merchant, diplomat and spy. They ride crowded, unheated buses that move at a snail's pace along rough roads and planes that fly low, nearly skimming the ground. They find that their hotels do not have basic amenities like running water and working toilets. Stevens portrays China and the Chinese in a negative, surely controversial, light ("China was like an army, ugly and inefficient, joyless and numbingly monotonous, with little use for art or literature"). Yet, he is also moved by flashes of individualism and rebellion, and by kindness. An aura of romantic adventure buffers the hardships he describes, linking the author and his literary forefather whose footsteps he followed across China.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

pap. $7.95. adventure Cold, windswept deserts, rundown hotels, bumpy, crowded buses, and evasive officials were the usual lot of four intrepid Americans intent on retracing the 1935 route of Peter Flaming and Ella Maillart through far western China. Unlike such adventurers as Charlotte Salisbury ( Long March Diary, LJ 2/1/86) who traveled with Chinese government sponsorship, Stevens and his friends ventured on their own. They met a succession of bureaucratic obstacles in the frontier towns of Dunhuang, Turpan, and Kashgar. Stevens's keen observation and wry comments will serve like-minded adventurers well. Elizabeth A. Teo, Moraine Valley Community Coll. Lib., Palos Hills, Ill.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0871131900
• ISBN 13: 9780871131904
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 237