Output details

Passport to Peking : A Very British Mission to Mao's China

Passport to Peking could not have been written without extensive research carried out over a period of five years. The various "cultural exchanges" at the centre of the book were reconstructed from largely unknown and uncollected material that had to be assembled before it could be critically assessed. Some of this was propagandistic ephemera that remained dispersed, but the book also entailed many personal interviews and the recovery of often very disorganised material from personal households. The final text had to find its coherence across diverse disciplines, including the physical and biological science, literature, architecture and the visual arts.