Riding the Iron Rooster

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First edition (publ. Putnam) RidingTheIronRooster.jpg
First edition (publ. Putnam)

Riding the Iron Rooster (1988) is a travel book by Paul Theroux primarily about his travels through China in the 1980s. One of his aims is to disprove the Chinese maxim, "you can always fool a foreigner". It won the 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. [1]

Theroux travelled through China for a year, ending his journey in Tibet after visiting Mongolia, Xinjiang and Manchuria. He was accompanied by a bureaucrat who acted as a chaperone. [2]

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