Roads Toward a Supreme Fiction

In the spring of 2017 writer Matthew Crompton set off alone on a bicycle into the mountains of Tibet. Armed with GPS maps, a tent, a camera and a keen eye, he would spend the next four months exploring and documenting some of the least-visited and most fraught areas of China and Central Asia.

Over more than six thousand kilometers of hard travel, he'd tangle with police in the locked-down Chinese province of Xinjiang, accidentally sneak into a military base in Tajikistan, experience a revers...