Isabella L. Bird - The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither

The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither

By Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

ISBN-13: 978-988-8552-11-5

2018 Graham Earnshaw

Cover design: Jason Wong

HISTORY / Asia

EB115

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Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

Foreword

By Graham Earnshaw

Isabella L. Bird , one the greatest travel writers of all time, found it hard to stay away from Asia. In the late 1870s, the traveled extensively in East Asia, and write several books based on her letters and journals, including this wonderful book, The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither.

It is not an exaggeration to say that travel writing as we know it today to a large extent owes its style to Isabellas work, and this book is a classic of the style. She first made her name with travel writings about the Rocky Mountains and the American Midwest and then Hawaii, and during her extremely busy lifetime she sampled many other parts of the world, including Morocco, Persia and Turkey. But it was Asia that attracted her most consistently, and her descriptions of life, people and places over the last decades of that now-distant century are both hugely entertaining, and also useful as a source of descriptions and information from a reliable observer.

This particular trip started in Hong Kong, where she witnessed a fire that destroyed a large part of the colonial settlement. She then went into China, and most memorably visited a courthouse and jail in Canton. Fully a third of this book involves descriptions of Hong Kong and China, while the rest covers Singapore and the Malay peninsula, then mostly terra incognita to the outside world.

The trip, as usual, was dangerous, but her writing reveals a woman of calm courage, a no-nonsense and formidable Victorian woman who obviously commanded respect from all who met her. She was thankfully not limited by any need for political correctness in her descriptions, and there is an honesty in how she phrases things which is refreshing. She was, as are we all, a creature of her times and background.

As to that background, Isabella was born in Yorkshire, in the north of England, the daughter of a clergyman. She was small in stature, and suffered from various health problems as a child, leading to an operation at the age of nineteen to remove a tumor from her spine. After the operation, she suffered from insomnia and depression, and her doctor recommended that she travel. So in 1854, went to North America and stayed there for several months and on her return wrote her first book about her experiences called The Englishwoman in America.

She continued to travel and to write, but it was visit to the Hawaiian islands in 1872, in her early forties that changed her life. She was on a ship from San Francisco heading for New Zealand, but decided to get off in Hawaii, and spent six months there, visiting all the main islands, riding horses up the volcanoes and writing about an island chain and a culture which at that time was still very much like the one found by Captain James Cook when he had visited a century before. Her book, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, was published in 1875 and was, like her other books, a best-seller. She then spent time in the west of the United States, and spent several months snowed into a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains, an adventure told in her book A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains, published in 1879. She then sailed across the Pacific again to Japan and traveled for several months through the country with an interpreter, reaching the northern part of Hokkaido where she stayed with the Ainu tribe, the original inhabitants of the Japan islands. Her book on this experience, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, was published in 1880. She then went to Hong Kong , Canton, Saigon, Singapore and the Malay peninsula, in 1878 and 1879, and of course wrote another book on that trip.

On her return to England , she found herself to be famous. Her sister died of typhoid soon after her return and Isabella married the doctor who had taken care of her, Dr. John Bishop, in 1881. The Golden Chersonese was published in 1883, during that short period when she was not a single person. Mr Bishop died only five years after the marriage, and Isabella resumed her travels. In 1888, she was in India, and traveled to Kashmir and on into the border lands of western Tibet.

She died in Edinburgh in October, 1904.

To a Beloved Memory

This Volume Is

Reverently And Sorrowfully

Dedicated

Preface

In presenting to the public the last installment of my travels in the Far East, in 1879, I desire to offer, both to my readers and critics, my grateful acknowledgments for the kindness with which my letters from Japan were received, and to ask for an equally kind and lenient estimate of my present volume, which has been prepared for publication under the heavy shadow of the loss of the beloved and only sister to whom the letters of which it consists were written, and whose able and careful criticism, as well as loving interest, accompanied my former volumes through the press.

It is by her wish that this book has received the title of the Golden Chersonese, a slightly ambitious one; and I must at once explain that my letters treat of only its western portion, for the very sufficient reason that the interior is unexplored by Europeans, half of it being actually so little known that the latest map gives only the position of its coast-line. I hope, however, that my book will be accepted as an honest attempt to make a popular contribution to the sum of knowledge of a beautiful and little-traveled region, with which the majority of educated people are so little acquainted that it is constantly confounded with the Malay Archipelago, but which is practically under British rule, and is probable destined to afford increasing employment to British capital and enterprise.

The introductory chapter, and the explanatory chapters on Sungei Ujong, Slngor and Prak, contain information of a rather more solid character than is given in my sketches of travel, and are intended to make the letters more intelligible and useful. The map by Mr. Daly is the result of the most recent surveys, and is published here by permission of the Royal Geographical Society.

As I traveled under official auspices, and was entertained at the houses of officials everywhere, I feel it to be due to my entertainers to say that I have carefully abstained from giving their views on any subjects on which they may have uttered them in the ease of friendly intercourse, except in two or three trivial instances, in which I have quoted them as my authorities. The opinions expressed are wholly my own, whether right or wrong, and I accept the fullest responsibility for them.