High Speed Railway in Color is a crowdfunded book about how the country developed its ambitious high-speed railway project.

The book is likely to hit stores in the second half of the year and has raised 30,000 yuan ($5,000) from the public within the first five hours of the project being announced on Zhongchou.cn, a popular funding platform in China established two years ago.

Since then, it has raised three times the initial amount from more than 1,400 people.

Written by an industry insider, under the pseudonym of Gaotie Jianwen－literally translating to "high-speed train knowledge", the book recounts the history of high-speed railway in China and the rest of the world.

It talks about how China imported the first bullet trains from Japan and finally developed its own technology to make them.

The book also compares China's high-speed train development program with those in other countries, such as Japan's bullet train network Shinkansen and Germany's InterCity Express.

"There are too many rumors and misunderstandings on the Internet about Chinese high-speed train network, such as whether it is safe and why it developed so fast," says the author, who gave his surname as Xu.

"I want to help the public to get a clearer picture and to know the real story."

Having graduated from Tsinghua University in 2006, Xu first worked as a reporter at China Transportation Newspaper for four years, and then joined CSR, one of the two leading manufacturers of high-speed trains in the country.