Riding the Iron Rooster

Blurb

Riding the Iron Rooster is a travel book by Paul Theroux primarily about his travels through China in the 1980s. One of his aims is to disprove the Chinese maxim, "you can always fool a foreigner". It won the 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
Theroux travelled through China for a year, ending his journey in Tibet after visiting Mongolia, Xinjiang and Manchuria. He was accompanied by a bureaucrat who acted as a chaperon.