Land of the Dragon
My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges of the Upper Yangtze

Published in 1889, this travel diary gives a lively account of the life of a British civil servant in China.

William Spencer Percival (Author)

9781108013819, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 June 2010

360 pages, 1 b/w illus. 1 map
21.6 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.46 kg

First published in 1889, Land of the Dragon provides a lively account of William Spencer Percival's daily life as a British civil servant working in Shanghai at the end of the nineteenth century. An author of several travel books such as Twenty Years in the Far East (1905), Percival takes his 'sympathetic' British friends' prejudices about China as pretext to give a thorough account of his life in the East. He delights in relating his boating and hunting excursions in the Chinese countryside, and his adventures – camping out, shooting pigs, and towing through rapids – are packed with often extraordinary anecdotes about the land, the Chinese people, and other foreigners, including American and Roman Catholic missionaries. Part travel diary, part anthropological study, this book gives a valuable insight into the relationship between the British and the people of Qing dynasty China.

1. Shanghai
2. Start for the gorges
3. The British Consulate, Hankow
4. The first rapid
5. Washing for gold
6. Mr Archibald Little
7. Country roads
8. Waifs and strays
9. Reflections
10. The lotus and the poppy opium
11. The new world
Addendum.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]