I was prepared not to like China, Portrait of a Country, the large-format photographic essay of China just out from Taschen. Like many, I am feeling a bit China’d out by all the pre-Olympic programs and publications coming at us. I also don’t gain any pleasure from viewing staged, adoring images of dictators in leisurely settings; or fake pictures of their made-to-look-happy subjects; or alarming views of violence, anger, and poverty. We get enough of all of that in our daily news. I don’t need it on my coffee table.

It took only a few minutes of leafing through China, Portrait of a Country, though, to see that it stands apart. It was masterminded and edited by Liu Heung Shing, an esteemed photojournalist and longtime Associated Press correspondent and Time magazine contributor who, in 1992, shared the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography of the Soviet Union. In 2005, the French Photo magazine also named him as one of the one hundred most influential figures in contemporary photography. Liu was born in Hong Kong and educated in China and the US. He now lives in Beijing.

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Isn’t half the fun getting lost? When you’re in a distant land, don’t you love the sense that around each corner some unforetold adventure awaits? Do you really want your every footstep moulded and charted before you even make it?

Call me a naïve innocent if you will, but the only time I’ve ever felt the need of a travel guide was when I journeyed to Central and South America for six months. And even then the paperback oracle I’d so carefully selected was promptly swallowed by the Pacific when I nearly drowned crossing a treacherous bay at what I thought was low tide. (You could say if I’d done more research into where I was, I’d never have embarked on such a daft escapade in the first place, but that’s hardly the point.)

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