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Connections are rarely established between Roland Barthes and Nicolas Bouvier, writers whom recent commentators on post-war French-language travel literature (such as Michel Le Bris) have routinely situated in diametric opposition to each other. In an often overlooked detail of L'Empire des signes, however, a concrete link exists, for Bouvier provided a number of the photographs to which Barthes's text responds. The article will take this (albeit loose) association as the starting point of a contrastive consideration of the two authors' divergent engagements with Chinese and Japanese cultures in the 1960s and early 1970s. Barthes and Bouvier use their contact with the cultures of post-war China and Japan to explore the (im)possibilities of intercultural dialogue and to foreground challenges to the identity of the Western traveller when faced with a radically different set of cultural codes. Drawing on a range of texts (Barthes's L'Empire des signes, Journal de voyage en Chine and Alors la Chine?; Bouvier's Chronique japonaise, Le Vide et le Plein and Xian), the article will explore the contexts of the two authors' differing engagements with China and Japan, and underline the convergences and divergences present in their respective approaches to and textualizations of the cultures through which they travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]