The event, hosted by TWOC chief editor Chu Dandan and marketing director Dragos Cacio, also featured speeches from Chen Mingming, vice-president of the China Translation Association and former Chinese ambassador to Sweden and New Zealand, and Gu Qing, general-manager of The Commercial Press. “It’s quite unlike any book about China’s provinces that I’ve ever seen,” said Chen in his speech.

“You took the photos yourselves, and wrote the text yourselves—it wasn’t translated from Chinese—and as a result, the book is highly readable,” Chen, one of the book’s consultants and first readers, told the team behind the project. “Coming in at the end of the project, my job was to see if the writing was good, but when I was reading the book, I forgot what I was supposed to do. I was engrossed.”

TWOC editor Alex Colville read an excerpt from the book on Chagan Lake’s ice-fishing tradition, which was adapted from the magazine article “Of Ice and Men” by Tina Xu and featured photography by Xu that won an honorable mention in the Excellence in Photography category at the 2021 Society of Publishers in Asia Awards.

TWOC managing editor Hatty Liu and deputy managing editor Sam Davies discussed what it was like to travel in Jilin and work on the book, agreeing that snow sports and hospitable locals—some of whom towed the writers’ car out of a muddy ditch, then treated them to a midnight feast, on one eventful research trip near Baicheng—are the biggest draws for tourism in the region.