The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
By David Eimer
2014, Bloomsbury USA, 978-1-62040-363-1, $28 hb.
Reviewed by Louis Werner on May 15, 2018
To counter the notion that all Chinese are ethnic Han people (in fact there are more than 100 million non-Han citizens), journalist Eimer took a tour d’horizon at the perimeter of the world’s most populous nation, touching on 14 different border countries including three Central Asian republics. Eimer’s chapters on western China, where the Islamic world rubs closest against the Confucian-turned-Communist country, are likely to appeal most.