About the book: year / I’ve been thinking about traveling to China for a long time. Back in 1997, when developing a route to India, I made a choice: should I go there through Iran or through China? The first path turned out to be easier and shorter. In February 1998, ten of us hitchhiked from Moscow through the Caucasus, Iran, Pakistan to India, and the Chinese version was postponed until later. A few years later, Russian hitchhikers, having ridden a lot first in Europe, and then in the countries of the Middle East, began to penetrate and to the Far East. In the summer of 1998, the book “The Path of the Wild Donkey” was published, it was written by a certain Vladimir Dinets, who now lives in America. The book described the adventures of the author, who hitchhiked around China, on trains, buses and on foot. “The Wild Donkey” aroused people’s interest in China, and soon Sergei Fokin, Valery Shanin, Grigory Kubatyan and other travelers visited there. Everyone told some information about the country, albeit fragmentary, but almost no one wrote anything. China seemed to me an interesting and vast country, and I myself also wanted to observe it and talk about it. In the summer of 2004, over twenty hitchhikers (including me) - residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg and other cities - went to “Chong- guo”, the Middle Empire, as the Chinese called themselves from ancient times. It so happened that we all did not meet in China: everyone had their own interests, their own route, their own travel dates. It also turned out that Demid, a young hitchhiker from Engels, who had just entered the 11th grade, traveled with me the entire 14,000-kilometer road, from Yekaterinburg (where we met) through Astana to the Chinese border, then all over China and back to Russia up to and including Irkutsk - where he separated from me and went to study in his 11th grade. So we had a trip from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk with a 10,000-kilometer trip to China - you will read about this trip. In the whole story, we were the only characters - although I hope that other people who have stayed in China longer have adventures and observations should be more complete and interesting. Let them tell them, and for now I’ll tell you about what happened to us. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Demid for his company on this journey..