As a lover of China and its culture I'm proud to be what the Chinese themselves approvingly call a "Zhongguo tong" -- what we might call a Sinologist or an "old China hand". Growing up in York, however, my first twenty years were spent a world away from the wonderful chaos of China. In the late 1980s I embarked on a degree in Mandarin and Classical Chinese at Oxford, graduating from there to study Ancient Chinese History amongst the cherry blossoms of Shanghai's Fudan University.My travels to China began in 1991 when I first crossed the border from Hong Kong as a student, and over the years I've lost count of the times I've been drawn back. I've spent time in most of the nation's provinces and regions, visited its four most distant compass points, navigated the entire 1,115 miles of the Grand Canal from Hangzhou to Beijing, and been taken into custody while searching for traces of the First Opium War in what turned out to be a People's Liberation Army base.... A single lifetime isn't enough to do justice to a country larger than continental Europe, with 3,000 years of recorded history and 1.3 billion inhabitants, but each year I try to add a few new pages to my travel diary.After spells working with the top-end tour operator Voyages Jules Verne and with BBC Haymarket in London, at the age of 30 I swapped my briefcase for a rucksack and became a full-time traveller and writer. Since then I've been recording my experiences of a changing, modern China. In 2006, just days before a three-month trip to investigate the Grand Canal of China, I married Rebecca, my supremely understanding and indulgent girlfriend of ten years. We live in the picturesque old town of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, in the heart of England.