The famous line was:

‘Before Liberation in 1949, Wangfujing Lu (Goldfish Lane) was known as Morrison Street.’

Setting aside the witlessness of helping to spread CPC propaganda to a mass foreign audience by using terms such as ‘Liberation’, Wangfujing is a Dajie, not a Lu; its meaning is ‘Avenue of the Princes’ Well’ (‘Goldfish Lane’ is close, but no opium pipe); and Wangfujing was only known as Morrison Street to the small number of foreign residents in the late 1800s and earl 1900s, and certainly never as that to the Chinese, who might have been thought to count for something in their own capital. Readers might also reasonably expect to find out who Morrison was (an Australian who was the principle China correspondent of The Times, and regarded, despite not having a word of Mandarin, as oracular on China, not least by himself). Otherwise what’s the point of mentioning him? Unfortunately if the author actually knows, he doesn’t tell us.

And there was a great deal more of the same kind of embarrassing nonsense in the book, which had actually appeared in two editions without any of Frommer’s remarkable editorial staff picking up on any of it.

To be fair to ‘international travel writing’ awards, a dubious bunch of PR exercises for destinations at the best of times, and although we’re constantly pestered to allow ourselves to be entered for them so we can describe ourselves as ‘award-winning’ writers, they didn’t sink to Brown’s level. The award was from a Chinese government tourism agency, and, of course, the only kind of writing likely to win that would be the kind of breathless ooey gooey chop suey writing that did. I don’t think it was called the Propaganda Award, but it probably should have been. Production is always up and the minorities are always happy (they sing and dance).

Unfortunately with guide books you rarely get what you pay for, and it’s the publishers, who so often care about nothing except getting something with ‘China’ on its front on the shelves as quickly as possible and for as little cost as possible, who must carry at least as much of the blame as the halfwit authors they recruit with insufficient examination of their qualifications, and no fact-checking of the resulting material. Or, as in the example given above, even a check for common sense and simple readability.