Our sense of China's emergence in the Song dynasty (960–1279) from a medieval towards a modern world derives in part from the detail its writers provide in their miscellaneous jottings of the texture of their lives. Within this genre the travel journal reached mature form, evolving from records of travels to foreign lands in search of Buddhist texts, embassies (a mixture of descriptive writing, diplomatic record and intelligence report), and more contrived literary set pieces, often with a moral, of a day's excursion to out-of-the-way beauty spots. Fan Chengda (1126–93) contributed to this development. He was one of four pre-eminent poets of the Southern Song, an official who led an embassy to north China, then in foreign hands, and a traveller over a wide area of Southern Song China. Like other literati-officials, his career was a mixture of service at the imperial court and provincial postings, and consequently he spent long periods travelling, principally by boat for convenience and comfort, but also by horse, carriage or sedan-chair. The travails of travel were a commonplace in Song poetry; the novelty was in recording the minutiae of life, and the writer's reactions, along the way. Fan wrote a day-by-day report of his embassy to the Jin in 1170 (Lanpeilu), and had recorded his travels when banished to the south in 1172/3 (Canluanlu). His 1177 Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuanlu) described in diurnal form his journey from Sichuan down the Yangzi and Grand Canal to his home near modern Suzhou, loosely referred to by the historical toponym Wu.

Hargett has made a particular study of travel writing in the Song, having previously tackled Fan Chengda's other travel journals in his On the Road in Twelfth Century China (1989). That provided a historical introduction and full translation of Lanpeilu and Canluanlu. His latest work in a sense completes the task, with a full translation of the Wuchuanlu, backed with learned and helpful notes on a range of textual, historical and geographical points, an excellent glossary/index, and a map of Fan's route, though his publishers might have provided more generous illustrations: they are relatively few in number, grey and only loosely illuminate the content of the diary. But it is the translation that lies at the heart of the book, and this is another valuable contribution in a Western language to what one might call the Chinese minor classics, the classics proper having been pretty thoroughly covered.

In his earlier translations Hargett has shown a partiality for exotic and abstruse language (his simurghs, marchmounts and thills). Here he adopts a plain style which remains faithful to the sense of the original, with a careful analysis of the Chinese sentence structure conveyed into English, if only occasionally giving the sense that Fan was a leading writer of his day. He has also chosen the brave course of translating, rather than transliterating, most place-names and names of buildings. This is beneficial to the overall meaning, alerting the Western reader to the resonances of place and language. There are a few passages where one might quibble with the accuracy of the translation (and like many another he fails to differentiate between a ford and a ferry), but Wuchuanlu is now available in a readable and definitive English version for the first time, including the bonus of Fan's notes of a travel journal he came across by the tenth-century Buddhist Jiye.

There is an inevitable tension between satisfying scholarly demands for precision and textual apparatus and the need for many readers to see the broader context against which that text is set. Fan describes and comments on a host of subjects, boats and navigation (to take just one example, he mentions the flag signalling system for boats proceeding downriver), painting, religious observance, landscape, architecture, and much more that gives a window on Song life (though inevitably one longs for yet more of its mundane detail). Hargett's notes provide much additional information, as does the technical section of the introduction. He has written recently on the ascent of Mount Emei, and shows a sure grasp of topography throughout Fan's travels, with helpful identification of Song place names. One particular value of the book is the use made, in addition to the relatively small body of Chinese work on early travel journals, of unpublished scholarly theses. But the generalist looking for more historical, social and political background, and discussion of diaries as a genre, will have to turn to Hargett's less accessible earlier work on Fan.

We are promised in a future article a comparison of Fan Chengda and his friend and fellow poet Lu You. Lu wrote a diary of his east to west journey in 1170 along the Grand Canal and up the Yangzi; the contrasts and similarities will be worth exploring. Fan, it seems to me, excels in the set piece (his description of the Buddha manifestation on Mount Emei is a well-deserved classic); Lu You is more political (the struggle between peace party and revanchists under the Southern Song underlies some of his observations), keener to record the details of those he met on his journey (including long bureaucratic titles, a bore for many readers), has a wider frame of historical reference than Fan and is more apt to quote literary associations of the places he passes; but less interested in Buddhism. Fan tends to be more impressionistic: perhaps going downstream lent itself to the vivid and dynamic account; laboriously working one's way upstream allowed one to linger over the descriptive passages? Lu served under Fan in Chengdu in 1175–77 and it seems a safe assumption that Fan would have read Lu's diary before covering some of the same route, perhaps consciously fashioning his own journal to avoid repetition. One looks forward to Hargett's filling out of Fan's personality and the comparison with Lu You. And there is more to be said about the relationship of the diaries to the poetry both men wrote on their journeys.