Far Eastern Horizons

Hong Kong to Tokyo | 15 days

Unravel the mysteries of one of the most captivating corners of Asia. Mingle with merchants at Hong Kong’s famed Stanley Market. Learn the nuances of Taiwan from a local. Hear about the recovery of Nagasaki and Hiroshima from residents who connect you to their rebirths. And make sense of the dazzling cultures of Shimizu and Tokyo with the help of those who live there. Overnight stays in four ports let you delve deeply.

Southeast Asia & Hong Kong

Bangkok (Laem Chabang) to Hong Kong | 15 days

Immerse yourself in the cultural tapestry of four Southeast Asian countries on one sweeping journey. Overnight stays in five ports let you pull back the veil of Indochina and connect with locals. Mingle with merchants at vast indoor emporiums and intimate floating markets. Meet monks at revered temples and artisans in their workshops. And witness life on Ha Long Bay as you explore by authentic junk. Uncover the nuances of Indochina with Viking.

Southeast Asia Horizons

Tokyo to Bangkok (Laem Chabang) | 29 days

Trace the coast of East Asia when you combine Far Eastern Horizons and Southeast Asia & Hong Kong. This enlightening 29-day voyage takes you into the heart of the Far East and Indochina. Visit five fascinating countries, from Japan and China to Vietnam and Thailand, uncovering the traditions of deeply spiritual nations and their remarkable histories. Overnight stays in eight ports provide a closer look at the region’s many vibrant cultures.

Southeast Asia

Hong Kong to Bali (Benoa) | 27 days

Embark on a magnificent journey into the East when you combine Southeast Asia & Hong Kong and Bangkok, Bali & Beyond. Get to know some of the world’s most vibrant cultures, meeting those who call them home as you explore the richly historic nations of China and Vietnam; the modern, cutting-edge cities of the Malay Peninsula; and the deeply spiritual islands of Indonesia. Overnight stays in six spectacular ports let you explore up close and in depth.

Far East & Alaska

Hong Kong to Vancouver, British Columbia | 37 days

Combine Far Eastern Horizons and North Pacific Passage for an epic 37-day journey. From imperial treasures to the magnificent natural beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, you will accompany locals as they reveal what they love most about the varied places they call home. A crossing of the historic Pacific Ocean links these diverse cultures, and overnight stays in five ports let you explore fully and take in the nuances and complexities of the North Pacific.

Australia, Asia & Alaska

Sydney to Vancouver, British Columbia | 79 days

Combine Komodo & the Australian Coast, Bangkok, Bali & Beyond, Southeast Asia & Hong Kong, Far Eastern Horizons and North Pacific Passage for a remarkable 79-day journey. From the “Land Down Under” and Indonesia to Indochina and the northern reaches of America’s last frontier, join locals and delve with them into an astonishing array of cultural treasures and breathtaking natural wonders. Overnights in 13 ports bring your destinations into sharp focus.

Grand Pacific Explorer

Auckland to Vancouver, British Columbia | 93 days

This 93-day cruise combines Australia & New Zealand, Komodo & the Australian Coast, Bangkok, Bali & Beyond, Southeast Asia & Hong Kong, Far Eastern Horizons and North Pacific Passage. Bridge oceans and continents on our most epic Pacific itinerary yet. Overnight stays in 13 ports help you immerse yourself in a fascinating array of cultures and let you embrace endless opportunities to get to know locals from East to West. It is an enriching journey unlike any other.

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

By Murasaki Shikibu, Royall Tyler (Translator)

Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. Supplemented with detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies to help the reader navigate the multigenerational narrative, this comprehensive edition presents this ancient tale in the grand style that it deserves.

Red Dust: A Path Through China

By Ma Jian, Flora Drew

In 1983, at the age of thirty, dissident artist Ma Jian finds himself divorced by his wife, separated from his daughter, betrayed by his girlfriend, facing arrest for "Spiritual Pollution," and severely disillusioned with the confines of life in Beijing. So with little more than a change of clothes and two bars of soap, Ma takes off to immerse himself in the remotest parts of China. His journey would last three years and take him through smog-choked cities and mountain villages, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquility. Remarkably written and subtly moving, the result is an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both insider and outsider in his own country could have written.

To Change China: Western Advisers in China

By Jonathan D. Spence

From “the best known and most talented historian of China writing in English today” (Los Angeles Times), an examination of a diverse collection of Western foreigners who attempted “to change China”
 
"To change China" was the goal of foreign missionaries, soldiers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and revolutionaries for more than three hundred years. But the Chinese, while eagerly accepting Western technical advice, clung steadfastly to their own religious and cultural traditions. As a new era of relations between China and the United States begins, the tales in this volume will serve as cautionary histories for businessmen, diplomats, students, or any other foreigners who foolishly believe that they can transform this vast, enigmatic country.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler

By Peter Hessler

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation.Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in search of freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whose tragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

By Leslie T. Chang

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.

China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls , Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language by Deborah Fallows

By Deborah Fallows

Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language—a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar—became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China.

Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones—the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning—is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them.

In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer

By Michael Meyer

A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes. Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has. Nobody has been more aware of this than Michael Meyer. A long-time resident, Meyer has, for the past two years, lived as no other Westerner—in a shared courtyard home in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan, on one of its famed hutong (lanes). There he volunteers to teach English at the local grade school and immerses himself in the community, recording with affection the life stories of the Widow, who shares his courtyard; coteacher Miss Zhu and student Little Liu; and the migrants Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu; among the many others who, despite great differences in age and profession, make up the fabric of this unique neighborhood. Their bond is rapidly being torn, however, by forced evictions as century-old houses and ways of life are increasingly destroyed to make way for shopping malls, the capital’s first Wal-Mart, high-rise buildings, and widened streets for cars replacing bicycles. Beijing has gone through this cycle many times, as Meyer reveals, but never with the kind of dislocation and overturning of its storied culture now occurring as the city prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years through his narrative, Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present. With the kind of insight only someone on the inside can provide, The Last Days of Old Beijing brings this moment and the ebb and flow of daily lives on the other side of the planet into shining focus.

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

By Rob Gifford

Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.

The Search for Modern China

By Jonathan D. Spence

"A remarkable achievement...vivid...fluent, graceful.... A publishing event."―Boston Globe In this widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency. Praised as "a miracle of readability and scholarly authority," (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

By Peter Hessler

In the heart of China's Sichuan province lies the small city of Fuling. Surrounded by the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, Fuling has long been a place of continuity, far from the bustling political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. But now Fuling is heading down a new path, and gradually, along with scores of other towns in this vast and ever-evolving country, it is becoming a place of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. As the people of Fuling hold on to the China they know, they are also opening up and struggling to adapt to a world in which their fate is uncertain.

Fuling's position at the crossroads came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. He found himself teaching English and American literature at the local college, discovering how Shakespeare and other classics look when seen through the eyes of students who have been raised in the Sichuan countryside and educated in Communist Party doctrine. His students, though, are the ones who taught him about the ways of Fuling — and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.

As he learns the language and comes to know the people, Hessler begins to see that it is indeed a unique moment for Fuling. In its past is Communist China's troubled history — the struggles of land reform, the decades of misguided economic policies, and the unthinkable damage of the Cultural Revolution — and in the future is the Three Gorges Dam, which upon completion will partly flood thecity and force the resettlement of more than a million people. Making his way in the city and traveling by boat and train throughout Sichuan province and beyond, Hessler offers vivid descriptions of the people he meets, from priests to prostitutes and peasants to professors, and gives voice to their views. This is both an intimate personal story of his life in Fuling and a colorful, beautifully written account of the surrounding landscape and its history. Imaginative, poignant, funny, and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

By Jung Chang

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.

An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler

By Peter Hessler

From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China. In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center. Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

By Pearl S. Buck

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

By Dai Sijie , Ina Rilke (Translator)

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

Farewell My Concubine (1993)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

China in the 1920s. After her father's death, Songlian is forced to marry the wealthy Master Chen. With three wives already, each living in a separate house, there is fierce competition for his attention and the privileges that are gained.

The Last Emperor (1987)

English

Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar-winning dramatization of China's eleventh and final monarch of the Qing dynasty: Emperor Puyi.

Hero (2002)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

A defense officer, Nameless, was summoned by the King of Qin regarding his success of terminating three warriors.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

A young Chinese warrior steals a sword from a famed swordsman and then escapes into a world of romantic adventure with a mysterious man in the frontier of the nation.

To Live (1994)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

After Fugui and Jiazhen lose their personal fortunes, they raise a family and survive difficult cultural changes during 1940s to 1970s China.

The Grandmaster (2013)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

The story of martial-arts master Ip Man, the man who trained Bruce Lee.

Red Cliff (2008)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

The first chapter of a two-part story centered on a battle fought in China's Three Kingdoms period (220-280 A.D.).

The Painted Veil (2006)

English

Dr Walter gets married to the beautiful Kitty but soon finds out that she is cheating on him. Battling his way through problems, he heads to China to fight a dreaded disease spread in a small village.

Shower (1999)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

A young wealthy businessman's icy attitude toward his working-class background is about to thaw as he is forced to reconnect with his elderly father and mentally challenged younger brother, who together run a public bathhouse.

Still Life (2006)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

Ash Is Purest White (2018)

International (Mandarin, with English subtitles)

In an industrial city in China, a young dancer named Qiao falls in love with a mobster named Bin. When a fight breaks out between rival gangs, Qiao uses a gun to protect Bin and is sent to prison for five years.