Today few readers have heard of Chiang Yee, the expatriate Chinese painter and writer who — among other feats — coined the still-used Chinese name for Coca-Cola, winning a contest and some much-needed money at a time when a Blitz bomb destroyed his rented Hampstead home. Chiang had chucked an official post in Republican China and sailed to England, where Puyi’s English tutor helped get him a job teaching at the University in London. A trip to the Lakes District spawned a series of captioned watercolors, which led to a book, and then a series of best-selling and well-reviewed travelogues documenting his flaneur character The Silent Traveller’s socially-distant observations of Edinburgh, Paris, Boston, San Francisco and other Western cities, including New York. Here’s a link to my fan letter to this book. Originally written for the New York Times Book Review, and then, orphaned, accepted by the New Yorker‘s website, it eventually landed at Pulitzer-winner and longtime China correspondent David Barboza’s new publication The Wire China, which is worth checking out, and not only for its fine taste in books.