The historiography of Chinese tourism has so far focused on the travels of imperial literati, the “revolutionary pilgrimages” of the Red Guards, and the rise of tourism, both domestic and foreign, since the 1990s. Neither the Maoist state nor its Nationalist predecessor made an effort to develop tourism as a means to forge a fit and patriotic citizenry, as did the Soviets, the Nazis or the Fascists. Yajun Mo's Touring China makes the case that although the weakness of the Nationalists prevented them from such an effort, the commercial development of domestic tourism, linked to the agenda of nationalist intellectuals, was more significant in strengthening the sense of a national space amidst the territorial fragmentation of the Republican era than previously thought.

Only the first chapter of the book, however, is about the development of actual tourism. Although the first travel agents, sightseers and holidaymakers in early 20th-century China were Westerners, the adoption of the work-free weekend and public holidays created leisure time for urban elites, which domestic businesses, notably the China Travel Service (CTS) with its close ties to the Nationalist government, were eager to exploit. Apart from domestic package tours and hotels, CTS arranged overseas travel – including for pilgrims to Mecca – and educational packages in China for overseas Chinese children. The book's first chapter argues that businesses such as CTS helped create a national canon of tourist destinations. As subsequent chapters reveal, it relied heavily on the classical canon of scenic spots but added sites related to “revolutionary” history (as defined by the Nationalists) and to ethnic minorities, thus prefiguring the PRC's tourism scripts that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

The rest of Touring China is about how travel writing contributed to the imagining of a national space in Republican China despite the reality of political fragmentation and foreign occupation. While the second chapter deals with guidebooks and travel magazines intended for a wider readership, the remainder of the book relies largely on the travelogues of scholars, officials and businessmen about areas either geographically remote or politically sequestered from the Chinese heartland: the Northwest, the Southwest, Manchuria and Taiwan. Mo's reading of these travel narratives focuses on the various ways in which they affirmed the incorporation of places into national space and history: from archaeologists caught between better-equipped foreign colleagues-cum-competitors and local strongmen in Xinjiang, to explorations of Yunnan and Guizhou by Chinese intellectuals displaced to the southwest by Japanese occupation, to travellers impressed but unsettled by the Russian- and especially Japanese-led modernization of Manchuria and Taiwan.

Touring China persuasively shows how travel writing in the Republican era brought remote parts of China, previously seen as something of a barbarian wilderness, into national history and geography in ways that show remarkable continuities with the PRC's post-1989 tourism canon. In this sense, the book has unearthed a “missing link” between imperial and post-socialist travel. The light it shines on an early period of modern Chinese travel writing is particularly interesting when it is presented next to contemporary European, American and Japanese narratives, as in chapter five. But the homegrown “travel culture” that the book's subtitle and the introduction promises to show is left unexplored, and one doubts to what extent it existed. The social history of Republican-era travel remains to be written, if only to find out whether Chinese visitors to Manchuria learned the difference between the Chinese Eastern Railway's Soviet officials and the White Russian residents of Harbin – a difference apparently unnoticed by travel writers concerned with Russian imperialism.