John Man writes mainly on Mongolian history, particularly on the relationship between Mongol and Chinese cultures. He did Mongolian as a post-graduate, and after a brief career in journalism (Reuters) and publishing (Time-Life Books), he turned to writing. He combines history with personal experience, an approach that made Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection a best-seller in 22 languages.
This book is based on his extensive travels in Mongolia, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, China’s vast northern province, once entirely the domain of Mongol herders, now dominated by Chinese settlers and an infrastructure of cities and roads. Research involved several crossings of Ordos, walks on the central parts of the Great Wall and journeys to the far north-east, where forests of the Khingan mountains merge into Manchuria.
His other main works include: Gobi: Tracking the Desert (1997), Attila the Hun (2005), Kublai Khan(2006), The Terracotta Army (2007, revised in 2018), The Great Wall (2008), Xanadu (2010, published as Marco Polo in the US to accompany the Netflix series), Samurai: The Last Warrior (2011), The Mongol Empire(2014), Saladin (2015), Amazons (2017) and Barbarians at the Wall (2019).
Agent: Doug Young