Horatio Clare, appeared at The Bookworm International Literary Festival, Beijing in March. In a series of four postcards published on our website this week, he shares his impressions:

"You have to see the Pandas," everyone said. We went. Pandas are fine phone-filler and beguiling toys but it was the signage around them I will remember. "All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful," hymned a big green hoarding, and caught itself. Cecil Francis Alexander, it signed off, shortly. So you remember the writer and forget his conclusion: "The Lord God made them all" - unless you sang the verse, years ago, in an old dispensation. When you land the first thing you do is get a VPN (a Virtual Private Network) so your phone can talk to the old world beyond the firewalls, while you consider the virtual nature of privacy. Bytes of the life you left come through in snatches, echoes from the past. That is Chengdu.

Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare has been selected to the Wales Literature Exchange 2014 - 2015 Bookcase, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation. His journey to China was organised in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers and supported by Wales Arts International.