Ms. Hollingworth was also one of the first Western journalists to report regularly from China, opening The Telegraph’s Beijing bureau in 1973.

Her other major scoops included a 1963 article for The Guardian in which she cautiously identified the British intelligence agent Kim Philby as the long-sought “third man” in the ring of Soviet spies then known to include the Englishmen Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. Another was a 1968 article for The Telegraph in which she reported the United States’ incipient plans for peace talks with Vietnam. (The talks opened in Paris later that year and were concluded in 1973.)

Ms. Hollingworth was never so happy, she often said, as when she was roaming the world equipped with little more than a toothbrush, a typewriter and, if need be, a revolver. Embedded long before the term was applied to journalists, she slept in trucks and in trenches, at times buried up to her neck in sand for warmth on cold desert nights. She once held off an armed Algerian policeman by threatening to hit him about the head with a shoe.

Had her eyesight not begun to fail some 20 years ago, it was a life, Ms. Hollingworth made clear, that she would gladly have continued to the end of her days.

“I must admit that I enjoy being in a war,” she told The Telegraph in 2011, on the eve of her 100th birthday.

In 1989, though nearly 80 and nominally retired, Ms. Hollingworth, attired in a safari suit, her working uniform of choice for 60 years, was spotted in Tiananmen Square shinnying up a lamppost for a bird’s-eye view of the government’s violent crackdown against civilian protesters.

She periodically slept on the floor of her home in Hong Kong well into her 90s, just to keep from going soft.