On The Beaten Track
George Ernest Morrison's Quiet Journey Across Southwest China, 1894
By Brodie Burns-Williamson
In 1894, a thirty-two-year-old Australian doctor stepped off a boat at Chongqing on the upper Yangtze and started walking to Burma. By the time he had hired his first pony and his first sedan chair, George Ernest Morrison had fallen into the history, rhythms, and trickery of an overland road that had been moving people and goods through southwest China for a thousand years.
The walk launched the career that would later make Morrison a Times correspondent in Peking and a confidant of Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic of China. On The Beaten Track is about the walk itself, stripped back to its essentials: the river, the road, the mountains, and the people Morrison and his support crew met along the way.
Morrison's original account of the journey has been translated into Mandarin four times since 1998. This English retelling is the first to include insights from that ongoing Chinese-language scholarship, and draws on original archival research in Melbourne and Sydney.
ISBN: 978-1-7646790-0-8