Don Quixote in China: The Search for Peach Blossom Spring

Somerset Maugham excelled at travel writing at a time when many parts of the world were untouched and unseen by modern man. Writers such as Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer, writing in a very different age, excel at describing the ironies involved when dynamic change collides with traditional values. Dean Barrett’s search for a utopia described in a beloved 4th century Chinese poem goes well beyond that as it allows him to journey into a journey in search of the ultimate unspoiled community, possibly real, possibly the product of a poet’s imagination. His quest is a provocative one and Chinese reactions on meeting with a long-nosed, green-eyed, foreign-devil in search of their Arcadian paradise range from amusement to consternation. Both the writer’s intimate knowledge of Chinese history, literature, culture and language, and the nature of the search itself – a search for an elusive, possibly non-existent, destination in a Chinese poem – lend the book a fresh and novel approach to the classic road trip. In Don Quixote in China, readers travel with a writer as besotted with the spiritual riches of China’s literary landscape as Don Quixote de la Mancha was besotted with the ideals of chivalry. Whereas for Don Quixote, windmills became the unbeatable foe, in Don Quixote in China, the author faces an even greater modern China’s unbridled and unashamed passion for getting rich combined with its post-Cultural Revolution ignorance of traditional literature. Although the focus of the book is on the search for Peach Blossom Spring, the absurdity of the quest for an idyllic, Chinese-style Brigadoon in itself elicits humor. The book achieves a balance between serious, reflective travel on the one hand and whimsical humor and entertainment on the other.