Riding the Iron Rooster (1988) is a travel book by Paul Theroux primarily about his travels through China in the 1980s. One of his aims is to disprove the Chinese maxim, "you can always fool a foreigner". It won the 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.^[1]

Theroux travelled through China for a year, ending his journey in Tibet after visiting Mongolia, Xinjiang and Manchuria. He was accompanied by a bureaucrat who acted as a chaperone.^[2]