In this book, I have decided to focus on something tangible,and very physical, as a way of telling my China story, but also illustrating this issue of difference, but how differences can aid the quest to make something more defined and knowable. Place is something that always fascinated, and continues to fascinate me, in my life in England. The relationship of particular places, for instance, to the lives of writers, something I mentioned at the start of this introduction, in Kent. The memory traces, as they are called, that are left after major events in places like fields where battles occurred, or buildings where major events happened, or cities or towns which testify to the many different kinds of lives that have been lived there over the generations.