About the book: 2013 / Author of the duology "Under Storm Clouds" and "In the Wild West of Huge China" - Alexandra David-Neel (1868– 1969), French writer and traveler who gained worldwide fame. This amazing woman surpassed the wildest fantasies of Jules Verne, visiting places where no white man had ever set foot. She was the first of the women to visit Lhasa, forbidden for Europeans at that time, and other protected corners of the Land of Snows, for almost three years she was a recluse in a mountain cave in Sikkim, learning local magic, lived in the monasteries of China and Tibet, becoming familiar with the wisdom of the Buddhist East; met with the 13th Dalai Lama himself, as well as with thinkers, spiritual teachers and other outstanding people of her time. This publication is a Chinese odyssey of a brave Frenchwoman and her adopted son. The journey through China lasted almost nine years (from 1937 to 1946), during the period of Japanese aggression and World War II. The world knows few works of such a dramatic fate: the book was written during the bombings and in the brief lulls between air raids. The woman talks about her wanderings along the roads of China among millions of refugees, about a long and painful seclusion in the border city of Dajianlu in the far west of the country, where she completed the manuscript. The reader will see a veritable carnival of the most colorful characters: robbers and swindlers, vagabonds and holy fools, all kinds of “miracle workers,” fooling simpletons. This is not just a personal diary of a writer who witnessed a tragic period in the history of a great country, but also a kind of encyclopedia of the life, customs and morals of the Chinese in the first half of the 20th century.