The skies are grey and it’s overcast. Two hundred years ago, on this very Pearl River, I picture British ships loaded with opium on their way to Canton (now Guangzhou). Soon after come the British warships from the South China Sea, fighting for their right to sell opium to the Chinese people. I read these waterway scenes from Amitav Ghosh’s fantastic historical novel River of Smoke set during this time :

“...the greatest of Canton’s suburbs is the river itself! There are more people living in the city floating bustees than in all of Calcutta... their boats are moored along the water’s edge, on either side, and they are so numerous you cannot see the water beneath.”

Today there are no bustee boats and no people. Instead, my very first view of Mainland China is barges full of containers and gigantic construction cranes that line both sides of the river and in the distance, factory chimneys and rows of skyscrapers.

I am reading The Water Kingdom by Philip Ball, an absorbing journey of geography, music, poetry and painting, all through the lens of China’s rivers. This connection between water and Chinese identity seems even more real as I sail into the country on this grey morning.

Guangzhou feels like Mumbai with its traffic jams and its cluttered mix of buildings. Every morning we take the hotel bus for the Canton Fair where we spend all day, walking crowded aisles filled with everything from sensors and smart rings to cuddly Easter rabbits!

Passing displays of camera clad robots that look like guard dogs, I feel I have jumped ahead in time. This shift feels starker after reading Once Upon a Time in the East - a heartbreaking real life story of the writer Xiaolu Guo who grew up in the fishing village of Shitang in South Eastern China.

Xiaolu is first abandoned and then raised by an emotionally stunted mother, one of the dreaded Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She has malnutrition and finally discovers drinking pig’s blood helps her get her iron levels up. She describes how she is goaded by this hardship to make it into the Beijing Film Institute and then to London where she becomes a well known writer.

Looking around at the hi-tech aisles of the Canton Fair, I find it unbelievable that all this happened just fifty years ago, and that China could have changed so much and so soon.

And then I read The House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company, and I understand how this happened.

Here’s how founder Ren Zhengfei grew Huawei to what it is today - leading by example, channelling the Chinese hunger to catch up with the Western world, sending Huawei engineers to war torn zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes even working with rogue regimes, learning from the West by employing IBM as a consultant, and using the Chinese government support to grow Huawei to where it is today.

Surely this is the story of so many giants in Chinese innovation, the AI DeepSeeks and the electric car maker BYDs of the modern world and this book is a fascinating glimpse into how this happened.

When we drive to Shenzhen, I look at the cluster of skyscrapers around me very differently. Once a fishing village opposite the bay from HK, here (and in close by Dongguan) is where Huawei has its head offices.

Here speciality chefs make food for their customers - like South Indian food for engineers from Bengaluru. Heads of state and film stars, everyone from Kim Jong II of North Korea and actor Scarlett Johansson have visited.

I know all this from reading House of Huawei - the best book I have read this year, a riveting lesson in geopolitics, tech and on the history of China through the last hundred years, all captured through the history of Huawei, a company that started making switches and now makes everything from smartphones and undersea submarine cables to surveillance equipment and EV cars.

One evening, we have dinner with Chinese colleagues at a Michelin star restaurant. We use Google Lens on our phones to translate, choosing interesting but less adventurous Chinese dishes, sidestepping frogs legs and geese delicacies, using chopsticks to feast on delicious barbecued pork and prawn dumplings and spicy pepper noodles.

The talk inevitably turns to the US-China trade war, and of tariffs. People are incredulous and bewildered.

“245 per cent tariff - now no US trade,” says one, shaking his head.

“The US is becoming more and more closed. And China is now open,” says another. And there it is again - like the Opium Wars, like the Cultural Revolution, these trade wars too have real human dimensions.

Leaving Guangzhou, I look back at the Pearl River —the same waters that once carried opium clippers now mirror China’s technological ascendance in their barges full of shipping containers.

What strikes me most is both the stunning pace of transformation—from Xiaolu’s struggle with malnutrition to world tech domination in a single lifetime—and also the continuities - water trades, the East versus the West, and the ways the historical wounds of colonialism still influence today’s trade disputes.

Here’s my list of books that bring together these complex realities - see below my top five non fiction books on China. Next week, in Part 2 of Reading China, I bring you fiction set in the Middle Kingdom - family sagas, historical novels and murder mysteries, each of which reveal deep truths in different ways.

5 Must-Read China Books (non-fiction)

1. The Water Kingdom by Philip Ball.

2. Once Upon a Time in the East (also called Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China) by British Chinese writer by Xiaolu Guo

3. The House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company by Washington Post reporter Eva Dou

4. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos

5. India’s China Challenge: A Journey through China’s Rise and What It Means for India by Ananth Krishnan

What is your favourite travel reading? And also your best books on China - do write in with recommendations.

(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)