Hidden Asia · Modernised and illustrated edition
Journey to China
Modernized, illustrated English edition of Chin Bhraman by Indumadhab Mallick (1904-1905).
Via Rangoon and Malaya, a Bengali reaches Qing China in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War.
Read more ↓- about 230 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 20th century
Countries covered: Myanmar (Burma) · Hong Kong SAR China · China · Malaysia · Singapore
About this book
Winter 1904-1905. A Calcutta physician goes to sea for the first time in his life and watches the land of India fade away off Sagar Island.
Indumadhab Mallick follows the steamer route to the East: Rangoon and its great golden pagoda, Penang and its quarries where a sick coolie toils, Singapore and its Chinese crowds, then the China Sea, its storm, its sick and its dead given back to the waves. In Hong Kong, he chats in pidgin with a boatwoman, pushes open the door of a Japanese painter's studio, and shares the tea and opium smoke of a wealthy Chinese family. In Amoy, at the gates of Qing China, his friend Suichin opens to him his home, his temples and his alleyways.
From port to port, news of the Russo-Japanese War runs along the quays. And everywhere the traveler compares: the health of bodies, the work of women, food, the energy of peoples, with Bengal always held up as a mirror. Curious, warm, often mischievous, he casts on Asia a gaze that is rarely heard, that of an Indian of the British Empire discovering it for himself.
First serialized in the Calcutta press and collected in a volume in 1906, this account had never been translated into English. It leaves one question open: what becomes of Asia when Europe holds its ports?
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- Hidden Asia
- The author
- Indumadhab Mallick
- Date of the journey
- 1904-1905
- Modern edition by
- Thierry Ruolz
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 230
The author
Indumadhab Mallick
Indumadhab Mallick was born on 4 December 1869 in Guptipara, in the Hooghly district of Bengal, into a Baidya family. Trained as a philosopher, a physicist, then a physician and jurist, he taught at Bangabasi College in Calcutta before practicing medicine. In the winter of 1904-1905, he went to sea for the first time and reached China by way of Rangoon, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong, a journey from which he drew Chin Bhraman, published in 1906. He is also known for devising, in 1910, a steam cooker that bore his name, and he died in Calcutta on 8 May 1917.
All books by Indumadhab Mallick →The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
-
Rabindranath Tagore, Japan-Jatri (1919)
In May 1916, Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature three years earlier, leaves Calcutta aboard the Tosa Maru, a small Japanese cargo ship, and follows Mallick's route through Rangoon and the seas of Asia to…
Read a free edition → -
William Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)
In 1922 and 1923, William Somerset Maugham lands at Rangoon, travels through Burma to Mandalay, then goes by mule to the Shan States and the Siamese border, before continuing through Bangkok and Cambodia to Haiphong.
-
Henri Michaux, Un barbare en Asie (1933)
In 1930 and 1931, the Belgian poet Henri Michaux travels through India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan.
-
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
In 1973, the American Paul Theroux leaves Victoria Station in London and reaches Tokyo almost entirely by train, through Iran, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, before returning on the Trans-Siberian.
The modern editor
