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For 12 years from 1985 he worked in Hong Kong and in those years he visited every corner of China, including Mohe in Heilongjiang province, Weihai in Shandong province, Hainan island and the Kashgar area of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

In 1997, he traveled the length of the Yangtze River, from Shanghai to Mount Gelan Dandong in the Tibet autonomous region, for a book called The River at the Center of the World, published that year, and which, he says, is the book he has drawn the most satisfaction from writing.

Like many others, he is struck by the huge changes in China in recent years.

"The changes in modern China are obvious, and very fast－maybe too fast for the comfort of all. Were I to use three words to describe my feelings about today's China, I would say: headstrong, forgetful and careless."

Winchester, who now lives in the US, plans to visit China in August to research his current book on the Pacific Ocean, and says he plans to write more books on China.

His next book will probably be about the history of precision, and on mankind's adoration of things that are precise, such as machines.

"China, by contrast, still has some residual veneration for imprecise materials－bamboo, for example. I am interested in the contrast between societies that have become slaves to precision and to those that still have some respect for the fuzzy imprecisions of nature."