This is a gentle satire of English aristocrats, intellectuals and the bureaucracy as reported in the letters of a purported Chinese philosopher to his family and friends back in China.

I can't in good conscience give more than 3.5 stars to anything THIS derivative (by modern standards, basically plagiarized from a prior French version), but this is a delight. Lien Chi Altangi, possibly the type of a certain naive yet steadfast Eastern traveler character that lives right up to the present day in e.g. Jackie Chan. And Lien Chi does less kung fu fighting, but his encounter with a prostitute in London (she flummoxes him), his obervations on English women generally (white teeth, big feet), his little parable of English selfrighteousness (the debtor is for liberty, the porter hates slavery, the blaspheming soldier will lay down his life for Christ), and his hi-larious sequence of newspaper clippings from the nations of Europe are among the higlights here. Epistolary fun! ( )