A Murder in Yunnan
Who did kill British diplomat Augustus Raymond Margary on the remote China-Burma border in 1875? It could have been agents of the Burmese king, eager to stop the British from undermining his own country’s trade with China, or local Chinese, scared that Margary was spearheading a British invasion from Burma. Some suspected a plot going right back to the xenophobic Chinese governor, Cen Yuying, or perhaps Margary had simply run foul of bandits – and how was a tribute envoy of Burmese elephants involved? Against a background of ethnic uprisings, colonial arrogance and cultural incomprehension, A Murder in Yunnan: The Unsolved Killing of a British Diplomat on China's Southwestern Frontier unpicks the complex tangle of official reports, rumour, suspicions and unreliable newspaper rants clouding the facts behind Margary’s death – an event which brought Britain and China to the brink of war.
Due late 2024/early 2025
Paper Horses
Back in nineteenth-century China, “paper horses” – woodblock prints of folk gods, used for home worship or burned at special ceremonies – were made and sold in their millions. Intended to be destroyed within hours of purchase, few have survived.
Using a recently discovered album of these prints, Paper Horses: Woodblock Prints of Gods from Northern China explores Chinese folk belief through biographies and full-colour images of 93 wealth and weather gods, door guardians, fox spirits, deified warriors, bodhisattvas, patrons of industries, and even goddesses of smallpox and toilets.
Available through all your favourite online bookstores, or direct from the publisher, Blacksmith Books (with free postage in Southeast Asia).
“In bringing a previously unknown collection to light, David Leffman provides a service to the field of Chinese popular print studies, while introducing the casual reader to the extraordinary qualities of Chinese popular symbolism and religious iconography.”
Professor James Flath, author of The Cult of Happiness.
The Mercenary Mandarin
The extraordinary true story of British adventurer William Mesny (1842–1919), who ran off to sea aged twelve and wound up at Shanghai during the devastating Taiping Uprising. Mesny spent the rest of his life – another fifty-nine years – in China as a smuggler, customs official, arms dealer, decorated general in the Chinese military, traveler, journalist and adviser to several historically significant statesmen. Twice married to Chinese women, he survived an assassination attempt and in later life published an exhaustive weekly magazine of his experiences, Mesny’s Chinese Miscellany.
Available through all your favourite online bookstores, or direct from the publisher, Blacksmith Books (with free postage in Southeast Asia).
“Scholarly in its approach... Leffman’s telling of this tale is well-paced, his writing elegant and his knowledge of China impressive.” – Richard Lord, South China Morning Post
“David Leffman writes about Mesny with insight, warmth, and modesty... The Mercenary Mandarin is more than just a well-written biography of a fascinating life; it’s also a panoramic look at the last half-century of Qing-dynasty China” – John Ross, Jottings from the Granite Studio
“A rigourous historical work” – Professor Chen Xiaoping, The Paper
Rough Guide to Iceland
People usually laugh when I trot this one out; Iceland is so out of character with my Asia-Pacific interests. But I first visited this Nordic outpost in 1981 and have always enjoyed covering somewhere a little less demanding than my other titles: the first edition took just six weeks to research in the late Spring of 2000, and only three months to write. Even better, I didn’t have to learn yet another language, as nearly everyone speaks English – though in deference to national pride, I’ve done my best to master Icelandic pronounciation. Iceland remains one of my favourite places, small enough to be accessible, yet raw enough to inspire a sense of solitude and discovery. I updated every edition until 2018, and also authored Top 10 Iceland for Dorling Kindersley.
Rough Guide to Hong Kong & Macau
I took over the Rough Guide to Hong Kong & Macau from the original author in 2005, nudging the text away from its British expat perspective towards a more Chinese viewpoint. Being in Hong Kong for extended periods allowed me to moonlight in martial arts studies between the usual pleasures of road-testing restaurants and hiking surprisingly rugged trails across the New Territories (where I literally tripped over cobras, abandoned villages and overgrown gun emplacements from WWII). The title was shelved indefinitely in 2012, though for the next few years I continued to work on a cut-down spinoff, the Pocket Guide to Hong Kong & Macau.
Rough Guide to Indonesia
I was living overseas when the other authors got together in London to plan this book, so I got left with the bits nobody else wanted: Sulawesi, most of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and Maluku, the far-flung “Spice Islands”. But things worked out brilliantly. I saw some fabulous wildlife – orang-utan, proboscis monkeys, flying lizards, birds of paradise and green tree pythons – spent time with an exorcist and a carpenter who kept his grandmother’s skull on the mantlepiece, footstepped one of my zoological heroes, Alfred Wallace, dived on some pristine reefs and generally spent six months travelling off the map. It would have been better if I hadn’t developed shingles or been beaten up during a riot in Ujung Pandang, but you can’t have everything your own way. Unfortunately Indonesia collapsed into violence just after the guide’s release in 1998, and the book was later discontinued.
Rough Guide to China
Back in 1995, cheerfully ignoring the fact that China is as large as Europe or the USA, my employers split the country between just three of us, with a freelancer covering Tibet. Not surprisingly this first edition took two years to research and write, when I did nothing but eat, breathe and live China. In later editions I subcontracted out some of this immense workload and focused on the southwestern regions – Sichuan, Chongqing, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi – though by swapping with other authors I managed, at one time or another, to cover most of the rest of the country (I’ve still never made it to the northeast). Spending an average of six months on the road for each research trip, I stuck with the book until after the eighth edition in 2016, clocking up over four years in China’s backblocks and authoring (and updating) several other related guidebooks along the way. It’s impossible to give a brief account of how thoroughly China has wormed its way into the rest of my life, but a look at the rest of this website might begin to give an idea.
Rough Guide to Australia
Published in 1993, this was my first guidebook, and one that taught me a lot about my newly-adopted home. I covered Queensland and the northern parts of South Australia, bouncing my kidneys to jelly along rough Outback tracks in my ancient Toyota Landcruiser. One of the highlights was making it to Cape York, right at the very northernmost tip of Australia, but every night spent camping in the bush, the air thick with that uniquely Australian scent of gum trees and red dust, was an unforgettable bonus. I also learned to scuba dive, abandoned beer for Bundaberg rum, discovered a historic shipwreck, fossicked for gemstones, saw tree kangaroos, survived a shark attack and a diet of roadhouse burgers, and still believe that Surfers’ Paradise is the sleaziest place in the country. I updated every edition of the guide (eight of them) until I left Australia in 2009.