Eighteen months after founding Magnum Photos, the author left for Beijing to make a reportage commissioned by the American magazine Life on the fall of the Kuomintang government and the consequent founding of the People’s Republic. He was forced to leave the city after only ten days; from there he moved to Shanghai and witnessed the gold rush, from which comes his most famous frame of the crowd pressed at the doors of the banks, and so decided to stay another ten months in order to follow the flow of events. He was struck by Chinese civilisation, by its culture and its tradition — he would convert to Buddhism — and partly for that reason chose to return ten years later. The book lets us see a precise way of working: he documents political events, notes down sensations and states of mind, writes letters to his parents and keeps in touch with the most important magazines of the world, tying everything punctually to the images.