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To Peking: A Forgotten Journey from Moscow to Manchuria

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Unfortunately, this book is not comparable with Fleming's other travellogues, but a kind of diary written partly in short note form. Fleming wrote his diary in 1934, when he travelled from Moscow through the Caucasus, along the Turksib and the Transib, and finally through Japanese occupied Manchuria to Beijing. In particular, the last third of the book is a little exhausting to read, since is it not written any longer in full sentences, but only in headlines and abreviations.
The best and funniest part of the book are the footnotes, in which the author wittily comments on his own accomplishments when the books was first published twenty years later. Since this diary is certainly a unique document, it is a real pitty that Fleming did not use his notes to develop them into a fully fledged book like One's Company: A Journey to China in 1933 or News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir (Marlboro Travel). Instead, he forgot his notes in a drawer, and when he recovered them, he had lost all the details.