I arrived in Shanghai in July 2019 to deliver a series of lectures in the Sino-British Summer School of Philosophy, a venerable annual event that began in the 1980s and is organized jointly by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK. In 2019 the Summer School was held in the East China Normal University and its topic was Environmental Philosophy. I had agreed to participate on the understanding that my lectures would present strands of thinking about ecological civilization that I had been developing in a series of papers over many years. I was keen to try these ideas out with a group of Chinese students before condensing them into book form. Those lectures, duly written up, enlarged and updated, are the ones I offer here.

The stint at the Summer School was not my first trip to China. I had visited many times over the previous 15 years, attending conferences and workshops in environmental ethics as well as studying the traditional Daoist arts of taiji and neidan (internal alchemy) with various teachers on mountains and in temples. I seemed to have some ‘business’ in China. Invitations, often from unrelated parties, tended to arrive out of the blue. Overseas travel generally is not my forte; I have neither the constitution for it nor the keen professionalism that thrusts academics onto the international conference circuit – or at least did so until the Covid pandemic changed all that. I actually have no desire to leave Australia, or even the precincts of my own little stone mountain in my home state of Victoria. Like a good Daoist, I relish my seclusion. But China kept tugging at me, in a way that so touched my heart that I could not help but answer its call, though this forced me back into the punishing scenarios of vast airports and transport hubs – into states of alienation from all that I hold dear.

There is no mystical denouement to this story. My three weeks spent walking from the staff hotel to our classrooms on the modern, spacious campus of the East China Normal University did not change my life, any more than my earlier, more picturesque sojourns in the Wudang and Emei Mountains or my pilgrimage to the utterly numinous Queen of all Chinese mountains, Tai Shan, had done.