Amitav Ghosh trails history for new book on India and China

Amitav Ghosh spent a part of August in China's south and east familiar to some of the characters of his Ibis trilogy. But unlike the greedy opium traders of his novels, he was there for a different purpose - giving talks at bookshops, meeting local writers over tea, signing copies of his books and taking photos with fans at a fair.

The Indian author has paid previous visits to China mostly to study the 19th-century opium wars that forced the country to open its ports to Western powers and cede Hong Kong to Britain, a period many historians call China's age of humiliation.

Ghosh's first book of the famous trilogy, Sea of Poppies, made the Booker shortlist in 2008. It is also his first work to be translated into Chinese. Ending with Flood of Fire, the trilogy follows the voyage of the schooner Ibis from British India toward the Chinese province of Canton in present-day Guangdong.