The Rough Guide to China, 2nd [Taschenbuch]

Of the three sections, Part One, The Basics and Part Three, Contexts, are little changed. Between them, Part Two, The Guide, at 1005 pages is 76 pages longer. Regions which get an increase of twenty per cent or more are Dongbei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hong Kong and Macau.

A few new routes have been added, including the roads from Chengdu to Shaanxi and from Mangshi south-east along the Burma border. The book notes the opening of western Sichuan and north-western Yunnan, but unfortunately and oddly provides little information about these important regions. In fact there is very little mention of a vast tract stretching generally south from the Xining-Lhasa road, through Qinghai, the Tibetan "Autonomous" Region and western Sichuan to north-western Yunnan.

Although that region warrants much more attention, it is inevitable that there will be some substantial regions that do receive little or no attention. All of north-eastern Sichuan/Chongqing, for example, is a blank. Perhaps it deserves to be; but a traveller is unlikely to find out unless he ventures there and explores for himself. This raises another unfortunate omission - any comprehensive account of which parts of China are still closed to foreign visitors without special permits. That matter is of little importance to travellers wishing to visit the "sights" listed in this guidebook, because few of those "sights" are in closed areas. That is, I expect, why the whole matter of what is closed amounts almost to a non-issue for the popular guidebooks. But it is certainly of importance to the traveller who, having reached this or that province with the help of a guidebook, wishes to go off to see what is in one of the blank areas. Comprehensive lists of what is closed are available, but hard to get, and available nowhere that I know of in English. Such a list, or better still a map of China showing the counties which are closed would be invaluable. That is exactly the kind of information that a guidebook of this kind should provide.

The great majority of the changes in this edition are in the detail - admission prices, opening hours, accommodation addresses and prices. Whether the new information is accurate will have to wait for on-the-road testing. But the very large number of detailed changes suggests that the revision has been thorough.

There is, of course, the usual and almost inevitable smattering of errors - Dehong described as an "Autonomous Region" (it is an autonomous prefecture) at page 810, Hubei abutting Sichuan (p503: it used to, but not since Chongqing was excised from Sichuan province in about 1997), the map on p773 showing part of Guanxi as incorporated in Guizhou province, Anhui not named on the map at p470, Macau omitted from the table of contents. An important error is the map on p898, showing the "Desert Highway" across the Taklamakan as joining the southern highway at Khotan, more than three hundred kilometres west of the actual junction, which is east of Minfeng (Niya).

I would have liked to see more attention to the regional maps rather than the twelve pages of pictures. The maps are, on the whole for their given scope, reasonably well done, fitting in well with the text. Their scale bars are sometimes awry, and maps of adjoining regions are sometimes incompatible - most notably the map of the north-west, which does not fit with the other maps at any scale.

So now I come to another special plea. Planning a trip through several regions calls for an overall map. In times gone by, fold-out or loose sheet maps were sometimes provided with guidebooks. Perhaps the practice was abandoned on the grounds of cost; it was not abandoned for lack of usefulness. Of course separate maps are available, but they are much less useful than a map would be if specially prepared for a particular guidebook - less useful because they include so many places not mentioned in the book, omit some that are, and in China may even use different names. After wrestling with adjustments to scales different from those indicated by scale bars I produced a single map of China from the regional maps in the new Rough Guide, and a most useful map it is for use in conjunction with the book.

When next I travel to China, the new edition of the Rough Guide will be the one I shall take, supplemented where needed and possible by information from other sources. ()