Chiang yee cows in derwent water

An exhibition opens next week in the English Lake District, which celebrates the work of a Chinese artist, poet and travel writer who visited the area in the 1930s.

Chiang Yee, who grew up in Jiangxi, wrote an illustrated journal about his visit to the area in 1936, which was published the following year with the title The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland.

Chiang wrote about ‘the particular joy’ of his time in the Lake District, which is now a national park, saying it was ‘the most agreeable period of all my English experience’.

He describes it as ‘constantly green, beautiful and peaceful’ and at the end of his visit, he wrote ‘I leave this Lakeland, and with longing seek to return’.

The exhibition, at Low Wood Bay Resort Hotel on the shores of Windermere, England’s longest lake, will include illustrations and poems from the book.

It will run from 16 February to 31 October 2015.

Chiang, who had left China in 1933, missed the lakes and mountains that he had grown