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Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron is a President Emeritus of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of In Siberia, Shadow of the Silk Road, and, most recently, Night of Fire, a novel.
 (December 2020)

‘Mandarin’s wife and two daughters with bound feet’; from Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond

Reveling in Discomfort

The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory

by Mrs. J.F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), with an introduction by Dervla Murphy

July 19, 2018 issue

Fishermen on the Okhotsk Sea, at the mouth of the Amur River, which separates Russia and China

A River Runs Through It

Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires

by Dominic Ziegler

October 26, 2017 issue

An East German soldier looking through the Berlin Wall, 1990

Mesmerized by Germany

Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany

by Cees Nooteboom, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson, with photographs by Simone Sassen

December 19, 2013 issue

The Chukchi people hunting walruses and whales; ivory tusk engraving from the village museum in Uelen, the easternmost settlement in Russia and Eurasia

The Last Shaman

The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

August 18, 2011 issue

‘The Beauty of Xiaohe,’ female mummy, circa 1800–1500 BC; excavated from Xiaohe (Little River) Cemetery 5, Charqilik (Ruoqiang) County, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China

The Secrets of the Mummies

Secrets of the Silk Road

an exhibition at the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, March 28–July 25, 2010; the Houston Museum of Natural Science, August 28, 2010–January 2, 2011; and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,

May 12, 2011 issue

Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, from 1520 to 1566; sixteenth-century painting by a member of the Venetian school

The Great Battle Against Islam

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

by Roger Crowley

April 9, 2009 issue

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