There have been numerous photographic albums featuring 'Steam In China' produced over the past twenty or thirty years, many of them featuring stunning photography with QJs at work in the north-east during winter, billowing exhausts and clear blue skies. This is not such a book!

This present volume follows upon the successful photographic diary style used by this Author in his books covering India, Zimbabwe and East Germany. Furthermore, it covers a very early pioneering visit (in 1981) to South-East China, an area very rarely visited. The weather was sometimes problematic and freedom of movement was certainly not what it became in subsequent decades, although this visit was astonishingly successful in meeting its aims.

With eighteen different classes photographed, the coverage of Chinese steam in this book is unlike any other. The primary focus is on China's superb FD 2-10-2s, which were then well into their twilight years The FD
2-10-2s, considered by this Author to be China's finest looking steam design, originally worked in Russia as 5'00" gauge machines (1520mm to be precise) and over 1000 of them were converted to operate on China's standard gauge network in 1958. This quest, one of the very first successful visits to the steam operations of China, was designed to place a great deal of emphasis on finding and photographing the FDs, which were already well into a rapid withdrawal program even at this date. It was indeed fortunate that they remained at work on heavy front line freight services to the end. All too soon after this visit they were but a memory and only a handful of 'pioneer' enthusiasts ever photographed the FDs. To the best of the Author's knowledge, no other book features them at all. This book features FDs in about a third of the 200 photographs that are contained in its 146 pages. Even absolutely unique photographs of, for example, a TH1 4-6-0 and XH 0-8-0s, almost certainly the only published photographic record that exists anywhere