Alec Ash

The Mountains Are High, Alec Ash's second book, is a literary memoir published in 2024. It narrates the first year of living in Dali, a rural valley in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, centred around a great lake and overlooked by the Cang mountain range. Here, Ash met the Chinese who are ‘reverse migrating’ from the cities to the countryside ― and joins them himself after leaving Beijing, in an inspiring journey of self-discovery. In Dali, bohemian hippies and political dissidents are rejecting the worst parts of modernity and living more simply, in tune with the natural world and away from the nexus of authoritarian power. The Mountains Are High is a reflective, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important, and taking a leap of faith to reach it, can genuinely transform your life.

BUY THE BOOK

• UK edition (Amazon) or from the publisher (Scribe)

• US edition (Amazon)

SELECTED PRAISE

"The Mountains Are High is a gorgeously written meditation on seeking freedom in an unfree country. Even if you think you know China, you will be surprised by Alec Ash’s exploration of an unlikely community of spiritual seekers, dreamers and dissidents, stoners and dropouts, tucked deep in the mountains of Yunnan Province."

– Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

"A fascinating story of modern China, told from the perspective of those trying to escape it. Alec Ash conjures up the paradise of Dali and the colourful characters that live there with an eye for the surreal. A writer of great talent."

– Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood

"An immersive, meditative, and constantly surprising search for meaning in a world beset by crisis. It beautifully and limpidly illuminates the extraordinary, eccentric complexity of contemporary China."

– Julia Lovell, author of Maoism

"A poetic, intensely personal account of a year-long stay in a town at the edges of China, a place geographically on the margins of the modern country, but one full of memories and meanings that go far beyond the horizon ... Humane and sensitive — two qualities desperately lacking in so much work on China today."

– Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese, King’s College London

PRESS

• Review in The Economist: