Trekking more than 3,500 miles through mainland China promises to be one of the highlights of the Out of Eden Walk’s epic foot journey across the world.
Over the course of this year, I will be spanning the Middle Kingdom at boot level, hiking continuously from the subtropical forests of Yunnan Province in the south to the sub-Arctic peaks of Jilin province bordering Siberia in the far north. This historic walk will offer readers across the globe an intimate look at the landscapes and people encountered in some of the remotest corners of modern China, regions not often glimpsed by outsiders.
Now, to deepen that experience, a caravan of China experts and veteran storytellers will be checking in digitally with me, to hold roundtable discussions every few months along the trail. We’re calling these conversations “China Chats.” They will be convened on the Twitter Spaces social-networking feature, and everyone is invited to listen in—and contribute.
The walking party makes its way along a new highway in Sichuan.
Paul Salopek
Our first China Chat was broadcast from the Hengduan Mountains of Sichuan, an ethnic Tibetan highland region still roved by yak pastoralists. (I had to scale a snowy, 15,000-foot pass to reach a cell signal.) You can hear that discussion on SoundCloud, where all future talks will be archived.
Our panel of experts consists of:
· Neysun Mahboubi, a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, at the University of Pennsylvania.
· Evan Osnos, author, staff writer and former China correspondent at The New Yorker.
· Susie Jakes, a scholar and journalist at the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.
· Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times formerly based in Beijing.
· Kaitlin Yarnall, chief storytelling officer at the National Geographic Society.
China Chat’s themes will veer with the trail’s unpredictable compass bearings–from conserving China’s biodiversity to major new archaeological finds to the changing perceptions of foreigners in China at a time of strict COVID-19 controls and tense geopolitics. Watch the Twitter accounts of @outofedenwalk, @insideNatGeo, and @NeysunM for the next scheduled chat.
