China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan
How’s this for irony: you can instantly tell and show the world your travel adventures, but the fact that you can means there are no more travel adventures to be had. Travel bloggers try their best; bumpy bus rides passing for hardship, stage managed photo ops passing for encounters with natives.
For travel to change you, you have to go somewhere new. Now that you can buy a good burger in Shangri-la, what lost horizons remain to set our sights on?
They remain in books, not blogs or packaged tours to Yunnan Province. Books like In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan. It’s about as vicariously close as you’ll ever get to Old China, chiefly because its author, John DeFrancis, resembles the modern China expat while having had the dubious fortune of being here at one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
1935 finds John languishing in his Mandarin Studies at Peking University. An acquaintance is bent on retracing Genghis Khan’s campaign trail to Beijing, backwards. Short of funds but full of the naïve confidence that defines a 24-year old, John hitches on.
What follows is simultaneously relatable and exotic. Visa snafus plague John despite the most painstaking preparation, but only because every hundred miles’ travel takes him to the fiefdom of another warlord, one of whom holds him prisoner. His progress is delayed by the reneging and duplicity of Chinese agents, which leaves him stranded in the middle of the Gobi, in summer, with cut-rate camels giving up their ghosts. The sane reader soon abandons his whist for wilder days and thanks providence for a China where inexperience doesn’t put his life at risk.
That’s why a Sinophile is better served this upcoming May holiday by reading a book like In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan than by training and plane-ing to remote corners of China. The latter promises plenty of discomfort, without the catharsis of reaching an authentic destination. Go ahead and make your way to the Temple of the Larks, a schlep north from Hohhot. See how much of the living Buddha’s compassion you feel as filthy-fingered touts tug incessantly at your shirtsleeve. See how Dr. Livingstone you feel as busloads of tourists elbow you aside to get a perfect V for victory shot in front of the sacred tabernacles.
It’s not so terrible, really. If only it were – you might find yourself changed by the trip instead of jaded. DeFrancis befriends Swedes in Mongolia orphaned by the massacre of their missionary parents. The cameleer seems a mope, until it’s revealed he recently had to sell his daughter to forestall his family’s starvation. He falls in with opium traders who take their payment in country girls, to be sold to the brothels of the East. He witnesses Chiang Kai-shek’s troops trying out their Nazi training on hapless Turkic merchants. These are all distracting diversions compared to the enervation and ennui of the merciless Gobi, where a simple lapse into reverie invites a scorpion sting or missed oasis.
Such travails make it easy for DeFrancis to laugh at the inevitable hijinks – camels regurgitating their cud on his unsuspecting head, choking down yak eyeballs and moonshine at the behest of his nomadic hosts. Then there are the rewards of Old School adventure travel – exploring the lost city of Etsina, being feted by a Muslim prince, and happening on the forgotten Torgut Mongols, who don’t even know the Qing Dynasty is defunct.
To add to the vicarious thrills and chills of China on the cusp of its modern age, DeFrancis reports on forgotten yet intriguing facets of history, handy for playing “Who’s the real Sinologist?” at mixers and cocktail receptions. He tells of Bishop Montecorvino, proselytizing in Kublai Kahn’s Beijing when Matteo Ricci was still a twinkle in his grandfather’s eye. One of his guides relates how Genghis met his end – castrated on the connubial bed by the daughter of a vanquished foe. We even learn that the main source of distress among Mongolian monks is venereal disease.
Such info hopefully changes an expat from a self-styled expert on China, full of condescending bromides and pat explanations, to an admitted amateur who realizes he’ll never know a fraction of what there is to know about this land, but doesn’t let it stop him from trying. As for DeFrancis, real travel left him really changed. He eventually returned to Beijing, a former dilettante committed to showing the world what he could of China’s glory and ghastliness, to promote the recognition of our shared humanity. Such are the fruits of taking a holiday odyssey rather than a holiday vacation.
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Too many people in China expats don;t read they just go out all the time to bars. Good call Ernie about reading some exciting history!
He began his expedition by buying a Gin & Tonic in the Writers Bar in Beijing, which is where he met up with the quite possibly raving mad Canadian, Desmond Martin. They got utterly trashed and then decided to go explore Inner Mongolia. At the time it was infested with warlords and bandits. The bar is still there, still the Writers Bar and is in the Beijing Raffles Hotel just close to Tiananmen Square. Well worth a read that book and well worth visiting the bar where their adventures began.