Travel writing is generally written by foreign tourists, who with various degrees of panache, wit, and erudition emphasise the exotic in their destination. Gao Xingjian does none of these things. As a northern Chinese traveller in South West China, he requires no special cultural or linguistic training, still less does he travel in disguise.

No time is wasted in comical pidgin dialogue with uncomprehending visa officers and bus drivers. Yet Soul Mountain (HarperPerennial, £7.99/offer £7.59) is a description of a place that is to him troublingly alien. He has followed the instructions of an accidental acquaintance, up an unknown river to some sizeable towns, about which even the inhabitants know little. These are “semi-barbarian” lands, but the tea-house sign holds evidence of millennia of Chinese imperial administration: “Erected during the Song dynasty in the first month of spring...repaired during the great Ching dynasty...”

This is also a land of tribal hunters and hermits, of bandit gangs and timber smugglers. Here in the remote fringes, Xao finds a Chinese identity and a history that has long vanished in the heartland.

Peter Hessler's River Town (Vintage, £9.99/£9.49) is based in another remote Chinese river landscape. In his case, he is a peace corps volunteer, teaching English literature at a university in the 1990s. He is woken by the chants of the Communist Youth on parade, teased by the locals for his early morning runs, challenged in class by the prudery and prejudices of his provincial students. The book is generous to his perplexing hosts, revealing of the limits, the contortions and power of contemporary Chinese culture and is very funny.

The best recent British portrait of the fringes of China is Colin Thubron's Shadow of the Silk Road (Vintage, £8.99/£8.54). His prose is more ornate and his perspective more romantic and historical than Hessler or Xao's. But as he travels overland around the Taklamakan desert, he too becomes a local participant: quarantined by the Sars epidemic, moving past nuclear testing sites and the wind-warped stumps of Buddhist stupas, spending time with a female mayor. These are insights that he could never have gained in a library.

Peter Fleming's News from Tartary (Birlinn, £9.99/£9.49) records a journey through the same territory in the 1930s, during a time of civil war, beginning with a scuffle on a Japanese troop train during the invasion of Manchuria and moving through medieval walled cities held by Chinese warlords into the territory of Central Asian nomads.

From the Times Archive: 1936: Peter Fleming's journey through Central Asia, the inspiration for 'News from Tartary'

The Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, described by Peter Hopkirk in the book of the same name (John Murray, £9.99/£9.49), crossed the same territory before the First World War. They uncovered a mysterious Manichaen civilisation that combined the artistic styles of the classical Mediterranean and China and “saved” ancient Buddhist frescoes by carrying them back to Berlin, where they were then destroyed by Allied bombing.

From the Times Archive: 1984 announcement of 'The Foreign Devils on the Silk Road'

Sir Francis Younghusband sums up the ideal in his description of meeting Sven Hedin in Kashgar. Hedin was almost the sole survivor of his 1895 expedition in the Taklamakan, (his companions died of thirst): “He impressed me as being of the true stamp of exploration - physically robust, genial, even-tempered, cool and perservering. I envied him his linguistic ability, his knowledge of scientific subjects and his artistic accomplishments.”

From the Times Archive: 1926 Sir Francis Younghusband's views on Buddhist remains in India

Rory Maclean's Magic Bus (Penguin, £8.99/£8.54) travels in the opposite direction, south of the Himalayas, following in the tracks not of the armies of Genghis but of the hippy buses of the 1970s. Near Istanbul, camel caravans have given way to a “suburban terminal, belching hot exhaust...over discount satellite shops.” But he finds Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan are in many ways less open, easy and “Western” today than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a lively account of how the ideals of Kerouac metarmorphosed into back-packer travel: organised by Lonely Planet guides, fed with banana pancakes, and connected by hotmail from Peru to Phnom Penh.

Wilfred Thesiger, a tall, broken-nosed, taciturn boxer seems at first glance a startling exception among these writers. In Arabian Sands (Penguin, £9.99/offer £9.49), he crosses the largest sand desert in the world in the company of sheep-rustlers and bandits and visits the chivalrous nomad chief, Sheikh Zayyed, who died as the ruler of the sky-scrapers of Abu Dhabi.

Thesiger went to the same school as Fleming and Thubron; like Fleming and Eric Newby, he served as a special forces officer during the war. Like Xao or Hessler he attempts to portray the society as a participant from within. But as a man travelling across Asia in the Sixties and Seventies without a regular job or income, Thesiger looks less like the last explorer and more like the first of Maclean's hippies.

From the Times Archive: Wilfred Thesiger on his book 'Arabian Sands'

Rory Stewart is the author of Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq. He lives and works in Kabul.

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