Which Guide Book To Assign?

[xianu]

Hi all,

I am putting together the syllabus for a faculty-led study-abroad course for next summer. The bulk of the course takes place in Xi'an (4 weeks) and ends with a one week tour to Hainan and Guangzhou. Outside of the intensive langauge portion of the course in Xi'an, we also organize a bunch of excursions in and around the city to sites of historic and cultural significance. The site visits are incorporated into a course on Chinese thought (the course is actually called "great traditions of Asia" - a really lame title, if you ask me, but I didn't write it), which explores Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist thought (and Hinduism in the pre-trip on-campus course) throughout Asia. Then, we visit appropriate sites, and learn more about them. I want the students to have good historical and cultural background prior to the visit, so that they aren't going in "cold" and I want them to also have a fall back book for when they want to explore the cities on their own. I used LP as a student when I traveled around, and found it invaluable for the independent traveler, as long as I took some of their opinions with a grain of salt. It was great for logistics, and seemed (at the time, long before I got the PhD in Chinese lit) to be pretty decent also in terms of providing historical information about the sites. Plus, speaking Chinese with locals also helped with logistics and background information. Now LP seems really paltry, at least in historical and cultural data. In the past, I have assigned _Lonely Planet China_, and have supplemented a lot of the historic information with online readings. Now I am wondering whether I should switch to the _Eyewitness guide_ (which people seem to be pretty happy with), instead? I worry, though, that there won't be enough of that crucial "get your bearings" information that the LP had in the _eyewitness_ guide. Students will have a good deal of time on their own and *should* explore as much as possible without me, and I feel more inclined to assign only one big book, rather than two in the interest of both cost and space/weight. Does anyone have any opinions on this? Suggestions? What would you want, were you a student in my group, or were you the one designing the course?