The Greeks have long been at home in the wider world. Since Herodotus, they have travelled not merely to trade or to conquer, but to look —and to report with curiosity, wit, and an eye for the telling detail. In that spirit, this book gathers the dispatches of our modern Herodotuses as they cross China: attentive to what endures from an ancient civilisation, alert to what is startlingly new, and unsentimental in their praise.
It is, in short, a record of encounter —insightful, candid, and timely— between two old civilisations meeting again in a century that will be shaped, in no small measure, by the one we are still learning to understand.