One's Company: A Journey to China

Blurb

One's Company: A Journey to China, is a travel book by Peter Fleming, correspondent for The Times of London, describing his journey day-by-day from London through Moscow and the Trans-Siberian Railway, then through Japanese-run Manchukuo, then on to Nanking, the capital of China in the 1930s, with a glimpse of “Red China”. It was reissued as half of Travels in Tartary.
Fleming's Preface opens with a self-deprecating observation:
The recorded history of Chinese civilization covers a period of four thousand years.
The Population of China is estimated at 450 million.
China is larger than Europe.
The author of this book is twenty-six years old.
He has spent, altogether, about seven months in China.
He does not speak Chinese.
British in its insouciant class condescension and offhand anti-Semitism, the tone is imperially comic and the judgments quick, though always focused on the author. When Fleming gets to China, the reader is rewarded with acid portraits of Chiang Kai-shek, pronouncements on “Red China” and the prospects of Communism, life on the war fronts, and the nature of the Japanese empire. Nicholas J. Clifford observes: “If for Fleming...