". . . beautifully written volume. . . . While Nicholas Clifford nods in the direction of 'scholarship' on travel from the field of literary criticism, he is ultimately less concerned with discourse analyses or with the biographies of travel writers (although these are impossible to ignore) than with the people and places observed. This, then, is a book about China from the last decades of the Qing dynasty through the founding of the People's Republic, not solely about the 'Western representations' of same."
—Joshua A. Fogel, Institute for Advanced Study, American Historical Review, October 2002
— Joshua A. Fogel, Institute for Advanced Study, American Historical Review