On 15 September 1872, a young Mongol girl was chosen from a number of candidates to be wife and Empress to the seventeen-year old Tongzhi Emperor of China. She was Xiaozheyi, and was well-educated, attractive, and displayed a talent for poetry, music and art.

The forthcoming nuptials set the International Settlements abuzz with excitement, and such was the interest in Europe that one of the leading British newspapers of the time, The Illustrated London News, decided to send a correspondent to China specifically to report on the spectacle. The man chosen was WILLIAM SIMPSON, who had already achieved some fame as a correspondent and illustrator in the Crimean War, in India and in Abyssinia.

Simpson, however, rapidly seized the opportunity to extend the trip to a round-the-world journey from London through France, Italy, Egypt, the Suez Canal, Ceylon, Malaya, and several months in China. He then continued eastwards to Japan, America (where his timely arrival in California enabled him to observe the US Army's campaign against the Modoc Indians), and finally back to England.

Meeting the Sun, his account of this journey, was published in 1874, a few months after the publication of Jules Verne’s popular Around the World in 80 Days. The similarities between the two books are interesting, even though one is a work of fiction and the other of fact; indeed, it is highly likely that Simpson’s earlier newspaper accounts of these travels in the Illustrated London News and the Daily News, formed a significant part of Verne’s source material.