The Five Foot Road - In Search of a Vanished China
In 1894 George Ernest Morrison started a journey which was to take him from Shanghai in the east, through the heartland of China and into Burma. Alone and dressed in Chinese clothes, but without speaking a word of the language, Morrisbn travelled by foot, sedan chair, mule and boat, several times nearly drowning. One hundred years later, Angus McDonald, also dressed as a Chinese might dress in 1994 - in jeans and T-shirt - set out to follow him. Since 1894 China has witnessed two revolutions, the Japanese invasion, two civil wars and the upheavals of the communist era. And yet, on the scale of history, a century is little more than the blink of an eye. Often travelling where no other Westerner has been for fifty years, McDonald found both change and, in some places, a way of life virtually unchanged since Morrison's time. Angus McDonald has degrees in Chinese history and Indian film. An intrepid traveller since childhood, he now works as a freelance photojournalist covering Asian affairs.