Travel narratives of Asia, from China to Korea and Japan

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

• Ruy González de Clavijo, Récit de l'ambassade à la cour de Tamerlan (1403-1406)

  While the Ming fleet was opening up the Southern Seas, a Castilian ambassador journeyed to Samarkand, to the court of Tamerlane, between 1403 and 1406. His journal, precise and vivid, describes another superpower of this early fifteenth century and the splendor of a Central Asian capital. Where Fei Xin traveled by sea in the name of a Chinese emperor, Clavijo traveled across the steppes in the name of a king of Spain: two diplomacies of the same age, worlds apart from one another.

• Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci (1615)

  The Jesuit Matteo Ricci entered Beijing in 1601, after eighteen patient years in the southern provinces, and lived there until his death in 1610. His memoirs, put into Latin and published by Nicolas Trigault in 1615, revealed to Europe the China of the late Ming: examinations, bureaucracy, court rites, all-powerful eunuchs. Ricci knew the same Beijing as Gwon Beol sixty years earlier, the same administrative machine that could only be moved by petitions, visits and gifts. Both witnesses describe the same court from its margins, one as a tolerated missionary, the other as the envoy of a tributary kingdom come to seek redress.

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• Hendrik Hamel, Journal of the Wreck of the Dutch Ship Sparwehr on the Coast of the Island of Quelpaert (1653-1666)

  While Jacques de Bourges is crossing the Syrian desert, a Dutch bookkeeper is in his eighth year of captivity in Korea. Shipwrecked in 1653 on the island of Jeju with thirty-six companions, Hamel has been held by a kingdom that never lets a foreigner leave. He escapes in 1666, the very year the Account of the Voyage of Berytus appears, and publishes the first Western portrait of Korea. Two men, two Asian impasses: one cannot get in, the other cannot get out. The same sober style, the same attention to prices, to clothing, to the rules of politeness.

• Johan Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China (1655-1656)

  Here is the empire Lambert de la Motte will never reach, seen from within and in exactly those same years. Nieuhof accompanies the Dutch embassy that travels from Canton to Peking in 1655 and 1656, under the new Manchu masters. His book, published in 1665, offers hundreds of engravings and fixes for a century the European image of China. To read it against the Account is to measure the gap between missionary ambition and political reality: Canton, three weeks by sea from Ayutthaya, was already a port under close watch.

• Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata (1667)

  The German Jesuit Kircher published in 1667, at the very moment Hamel was waiting at Deshima, an illustrated compendium on China, based on missionary reports. His Korea was still largely imaginary. The publication of these two works in successive years is telling: learned Europe had its China; now it discovered its Korea.

• Hendrik Hamel, Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666 (1668)

  A little more than a century after Gwon Beol, the Dutchman Hendrik Hamel discovered Korea from the other end. Shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653, he was taken to Seoul with his companions, then held for thirteen years in the provinces before escaping to Japan in 1666. His journal, published in 1668, is one of the very first European accounts of the Joseon kingdom. It shows the administration Gwon Beol passes through, provincial magistrates, relay stations and corvées, but from the standpoint of a detained foreigner. In 1655 two of the castaways even threw themselves before a Manchu envoy passing through Seoul, begging to be taken to China, in vain.

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• Ferdinand Verbiest, Voyages de l'empereur de la Chine dans la Tartarie (1685)

  Thirteen years after Min Jeong-jung, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest, astronomer at court, accompanied the Kangxi emperor on his great tour of Manchuria in 1682: Shenyang, the tombs of the Manchu ancestors, then the northern forests as far as Ula. His letter, published in French in 1685, describes the immense retinue, the imperial hunts and the lands emptied by the conquest. The fifteen-year-old whom Min had glimpsed in Beijing has become a self-assured sovereign returning on pilgrimage to the land of his fathers. The two texts complete each other: Manchuria seen by an anxious tributary, then by the emperor's guest.

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• Lorenz Lange, Journal de la résidence du sieur Lange, agent de Sa Majesté impériale de la Grande Russie à la cour de la Chine, dans les années 1721 et 1722 (1726)

  When the embassy leaves in March 1721, Unverzagt stays in Peking with the resident Lorenz Lange, and it is the continuation of that stay that Lange's journal recounts, published in French at Leiden in 1726, then translated into English as an appendix to John Bell's account. The tsar's only representative at court, Lange records his visits to ministers, the evasive replies, the trade soon suspended and the affair of the Mongol defectors that blocks everything. Here is Unverzagt's city again, but seen from the files: the patient, often bitter reverse side of the banquets and the New Year fireworks.

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• Ippolito Desideri, Notizie istoriche del Thibet (1727-1733)

  While Izmailov negotiates with Kangxi, the emperor is playing another game far to the west: in 1720 his armies enter Lhasa to drive out the Dzungars, who have held the city since 1717. The Tuscan Jesuit Ippolito Desideri, who reached Lhasa in 1716, lives through these war years in Tibet, learns the language, studies in the monasteries and debates doctrine with the scholars, before being recalled in 1721. His account, written after his return and unpublished until the twentieth century, ranks among the great European descriptions of Tibet. It shows Kangxi's empire from its margins, while Unverzagt discovers it at its centre.

• John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763)

  Unverzagt's best reading companion walked at his side: the Scottish physician John Bell belonged to the same Izmailov embassy. He published his account in Glasgow in 1763, more than forty years after the journey, with the hindsight of a man who had already followed the Russian mission to Persia. In it we find Tobolsk, Lake Baikal, the Mongolian steppe, the entry into Peking and Kangxi's audiences, told by an adult attentive to plants, peoples and the negotiators' arguments. To read the two books together is to see the same procession through two pairs of eyes: the dazzled young man's and the observant practitioner's.

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• Pak Chi-won, The Jehol Diary (1780)

  Sixteen years after Kim Jong-jeong, the scholar Pak Chi-won passed through Shenyang in his turn with the Korean embassy of 1780, on the way to Beijing and Jehol. His Yeorha ilgi, translated into English as The Jehol Diary, devotes famous pages to the city: shops, signboards, night-time conversations with Chinese merchants. The contrast with Kim is striking. Where the investigator of 1764, humiliated and suspicious, sees in the Manchu capital nothing but barbarism and corruption, Pak Chi-won finds a prosperity and a technical skill from which, he argues, Korea should learn. The same city, two moods, and the beginning of a debate that would run through Korean scholarship.

• George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797)

  In 1793 Lord Macartney led the first British embassy to China, to the court of the Qianlong emperor, and his secretary George Staunton published the official account in 1797. The quarrel that made it famous concerned the kowtow: Macartney refused to perform the prostration required of every tributary envoy, Koreans included. Read beside Gwon Beol's journal, the English narrative shows the other face of the same ceremonial. What the Korean ambassador performs without demur, as the price of an ancient relationship, appears to the Englishman as a humiliation to be negotiated, and the failure of his mission foreshadows a century of conflict between China and the West.

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• Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt (1803-1807)

  A German physician and naturalist, Langsdorff sailed aboard Krusenstern's Nadezhda on the first Russian circumnavigation. He landed at Petropavlovsk in 1805, in the port where Lesseps had bidden farewell to the Astrolabe eighteen years earlier, then set out for Russian America and California. Back in Kamchatka, he returned to Europe overland, following Lesseps's itinerary almost exactly: Okhotsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Tobolsk, as far as Moscow in the spring of 1808. His Remarks, published in Frankfurt in 1812, combine the eye of the scholar with that of the traveller, and show a Kamchatka still very close to that of the Kamchadals and their dogs.

• Peter Dobell, Travels in Kamtchatka and Siberia (1812)

  Born in Ireland and later in Russian service, Peter Dobell lived for a long time in China and stayed in Kamchatka. In 1812 he undertook the crossing of Siberia as far as Tomsk, by the same posts, the same rivers and the same horse relays as Lesseps. Published in two volumes in 1830, his account mixes practical observations on trade, furs and transport with a long portrait of China, which he knew from the inside. A generation later, we find again the Russian administration, the Yakuts and the long road to Irkutsk, seen through the eyes of a merchant rather than a diplomat.

• John Dundas Cochrane, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary (1820-1823)

  A half-pay captain in the Royal Navy, Cochrane decided in 1820 to walk around the world. He crossed Russia and Siberia, pushed on to the Kolyma and the Arctic Sea, then reached Okhotsk and Kamchatka, where he gave up the idea of crossing to America. There he married a young woman born in Bolsheretsk and brought her back to England. His account, published in 1824 and often reprinted, follows much of Lesseps's route in reverse, with a humour and endurance that make it one of the most singular narratives of eastern Siberia. The ostrogs, the sledges and the storms have hardly changed.

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• Egor Timkovski, Voyage à Péking, à travers la Mongolie, en 1820 et 1821 (1827)

  Exactly a century after Unverzagt, Egor Timkovsky, an official of the Russian Asiatic Department, escorts the new Orthodox ecclesiastical mission to Peking, just as Izmailov's embassy had already led an archimandrite there. Setting out from Kiakhta in 1820, he follows the caravan road through Urga, the Gobi and Kalgan, then spends the winter in the Qing capital. His account, translated into French in 1827, abounds in observations on the Mongols, the lamas, the steppe relay stations and the city of Peking. One can measure what has changed in a hundred years, a fixed frontier and trade regulated at Kiakhta, and what endures: the same ceremonial and the same mistrust.

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• Évariste Huc, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet et la Chine (1850)

  In 1844, the Lazarist priests Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet leave their mission at Xiwanzi, north of the Great Wall, not far from Kalgan where Unverzagt entered China. Dressed as lamas, they cross the Mongolian steppes with their camels, sharing the yurts, the tea and the festivals of the nomads, then press on to Lhasa, from which they are expelled. Their account, full of humour and lived detail, was one of the great bestsellers of the century. It brings to life what Unverzagt notes in passing: the camps, the lamas, the caravans and the immensity of the steppe between China and the Russian world.

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• George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia (1865-1867)

  At twenty, the American George Kennan joined the team charged with surveying the route of a telegraph line that was to link America to Europe across the Bering Strait and Siberia. He landed in Kamchatka, went up the peninsula, then spent two winters in Koryak country around Gizhiga, Lesseps's Ingiga. Reindeer-skin tents, dog sledges, storms, nomads by turns wary or hospitable: nearly eighty years later, he crosses the same white deserts. Published in 1870, his lively and often funny book is the best companion to Lesseps's Koryak chapters, down to the abandonment of the project when the transatlantic cable made it pointless.

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• Nikolaï Prjevalski, Mongolia i strana tangutov (1875-1876)

  In 1870, the Russian officer Nikolai Przhevalsky sets out from Kiakhta, close to the Selenginsk where Unverzagt awaited Chinese permission, and crosses the Gobi by way of Urga and Kalgan to Peking. It is the start of a three-year expedition that carries him on into the Ordos, the Alashan, the Koko Nor and the borders of Tibet. A naturalist as much as a soldier, he describes the steppe, the wells, the sandstorms, the birds and the plants with new precision. His book, translated into English as early as 1876, moves the road of the embassies from court narrative to exploration: the same steppe, now regarded for its terrain and wildlife rather than its ceremonial.

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• Percival Lowell, Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm (1886)

  Percival Lowell, later famous as the astronomer of Mars, spent the winter of 1883-1884 in Seoul, after accompanying the Korean diplomatic mission of 1883 to the United States. His book, published in 1886, describes the capital, its gates closed at nightfall, its palaces and its court life, just as the kingdom was beginning to open to Western treaties. The Seoul that Gwon Beol left in 1539 amid farewell cups is still, in essence, the one Lowell photographed: the same walls, the same rites, the same scholars. But the road to Beijing is no longer the kingdom's only door, and the world centred on the Chinese imperial court is beginning to come apart.

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• Henry E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or, A Journey in Manchuria (1888)

  In 1886 the British official Henry E. M. James travelled through Manchuria with the officer Francis Younghusband and the diplomat Harry Fulford, as far as the Changbai Mountains, the Long White Mountain sacred to the Manchus. His book, published in 1888, describes the Chinese settlers now moving onto formerly reserved lands, the inns, the markets and the cart roads. Min Jeong-jung had crossed a ruined Liaodong in 1669, emptied by the conquest; two centuries later James found a region resettled and cleared. The comparison measures how far this frontier had travelled, from military wasteland to pioneer country.

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• Anton Tchekhov, L'Île de Sakhaline (1890)

  In the spring of 1890, Chekhov, already famous, set out alone for the penal island of Sakhalin. Before reaching it, he crossed Siberia by tarantass on the great road that Lesseps had taken in the opposite direction: Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, with mud, ferries, relay stations and convoys of deportees. On the island, he himself counted thousands of convicts and settlers, card after card. The book, which appeared in 1893 and 1895, is a relentless inquiry into the Siberian exile that Lesseps had only glimpsed: the exiles who haul his boat on the Lena and run away, the galley convicts met on the road to Nerchinsk, here become the very subject of the journey.

• Isabella Bird, Korea and Her Neighbours (1898)

  During her Korean journeys of 1894 to 1897, the English traveller Isabella Bird pushed on as far as Mukden in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War. Her book, published in 1898, describes the city Kim Jong-jeong had known, now filled with soldiers, wounded men and missionaries. The comparison shows what a hundred and thirty years had changed: Manchuria, guarded by the Eight Banners and closed by the Palisade, had become a battlefield between empires, and Korea, which Kim had defended inch by inch before the Manchu judges, had ceased in 1895 to be China's vassal. The foreign eye records the end of an order the journal of 1764 believed eternal.

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• Dugald Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden, 1883-1913 (1914)

  A Scottish medical missionary, Dugald Christie settled in Mukden, the former Shenyang, in 1883 and stayed thirty years, founding a hospital and then a medical school. His memoirs, published in 1914, tell the story of the Manchu capital from within, through epidemics, the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer rising, the Russo-Japanese War and the plague of 1910-1911. We find again the city, its yamens and its courts, where Kim Jong-jeong watched his prisoners' confessions being rewritten, this time through the eyes of a foreigner who cared for its inhabitants and shared their trials for a generation.

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• Daniel Bouchez, Connaissance des Religions de Corée

  The French orientalist Daniel Bouchez, who taught Korean studies in France from the 1960s to the 2000s, offers in this book a synthetic introduction to the religions of the peninsula. Essential reading for understanding the soldier-monks, the beguinages and the royal rites that Hamel describes without any interpretive key.

• Luigi Barzini, La metà del mondo vista da un'automobile. Da Pechino a Parigi in 60 giorni (1908)

  On 10 June 1907, Prince Scipione Borghese launches his Itala in the Peking-to-Paris race, and the journalist Luigi Barzini keeps the crew's chronicle. The car leaves China by way of Kalgan, crosses the Gobi, passes through Urga and Kiakhta, skirts Lake Baikal, goes through Irkutsk, Tomsk and the Urals, then reaches Moscow and Saint Petersburg: Unverzagt's itinerary, or nearly, in reverse and in two months. Barzini tells of broken tracks, collapsing bridges, Siberian villages and crowds rushing out to see. Two centuries later the same road is still an ordeal, but it is now run for speed rather than for a treaty.

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• 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 Japan. His travel letters, first published in Bengali magazines and collected in 1919 as Japan-Jatri, tell of the storm in the Bay of Bengal, the deck passengers who came aboard at Rangoon, then a country that modernized without giving up its beauty. Twelve years after Mallick, another Bengali looks at East Asia as a mirror held up to India, between admiration for the energy of peoples and unease before the European model.

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• André Eckardt, Geschichte der koreanischen Kunst (1929)

  The German Benedictine Eckardt lived in Korea from 1909 to 1929. His great history of Korean art, published in 1929, is the first European work to treat the artistic culture of the peninsula seriously, two and a half centuries after Hamel had merely brushed its surface without understanding it. Eckardt named what Hamel had only glimpsed from afar: painting, ceramics, palace architecture.

• Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (1932)

  After travelling through Manchuria in 1929 and 1930, among Chinese settlers, Mongols and forest peoples, Owen Lattimore published in 1932 a book drawn from his roads and encounters. He presents Manchuria as a succession of frontiers, where the Willow Palisade, which Kim Jong-jeong crossed in 1764, once separated the lands reserved for the Manchus from those open to Chinese farmers. The book appeared just as Japan was seizing the region. It sheds light, a century and a half later, on the logic of partition that the Korean investigator endured at every guard post without naming it.

• Henri Michaux, Un barbare en Asie (1933)

  In 1930 and 1931, the Belgian poet Henri Michaux travels through India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. A Barbarian in Asia, published in 1933, is nothing like a guidebook: it is a series of vivid, partial notes on gestures, faces, crowds, theater, writing and religions. Like Mallick before the Chinese of Hong Kong and Amoy, Michaux marvels at Chinese energy and restraint, wonders about the place of women and the power of written characters, and constantly compares what he sees with his own world, with a humor that spares no one, not even himself.

• Peter Fleming, One's Company: A Journey to China (1934)

  In 1933 the young journalist Peter Fleming reached China by the Trans-Siberian and crossed Manchukuo, the state created by Japan a year earlier, before heading south to the war zones between Nationalists and Communists. One's Company, published in 1934, is a funny and clear-sighted narrative. On the lands Min Jeong-jung crossed under the eye of the victorious Manchus, Fleming watches a new conqueror install his garrisons and his officials. Nearly three centuries after the fall of the Ming, Manchuria remains what it was for the Korean ambassador: a land of passage, held by force and by those who wield it.

• Pak Wan-so, L'Arbre nu (1970)

  A novel, to leave behind the foreigner's eye. Pak Wan-so tells of the Korean War from occupied Seoul. This book, published in 1970, gives the country from within: the city that Hamel discovered with astonishment in 1654 would be destroyed in 1950 and rebuilt, and Pak Wan-so keeps its memory.

• 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. His book, published in 1975, has become a classic of modern travel writing: compartment companions, platform conversations, rails crossing countries at war or on their last legs. Seventy years after Mallick, the same mosaic of peoples parades between Rangoon and Singapore, and the same taste for portraits caught on the fly, tender or cruel, holds the whole narrative together.

• Jan Morris, Hong Kong (1988)

  Jan Morris, who had covered the conquest of Everest in 1953 for the British press, devoted a major book to Hong Kong in 1988, nine years before its handover to China. She tells of the colony's birth after the Opium War, the rule of the great trading houses, the sampans of the harbor, the Peak and its villas, Kowloon and the frontier, and the Chinese crowd that keeps the city alive under the British flag. The settings Mallick discovered at the turn of the century, the funicular, the botanical garden, the opium customs house, take on their full historical depth here, down to the twilight of Empire.

• Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun (1997)

  The American historian Cumings published in 1997 a modern history of Korea that situates the Joseon isolation within a longer perspective. The chapter on the seventeenth century sheds light on the political choices that turned the kingdom into an enclave: the decision to close itself off after the Hideyoshi and Qing invasions. Hamel, without knowing it, was an unwitting witness to this.

• Patrick Maurus, Histoire de la littérature coréenne

  Maurus, who directed Korean studies at Inalco, offers a literary history of Korea from its origins to the present day. The Joseon chapter sheds light on the world of letters in which Hamel lived without access to it: for the sailors of the Sperwer could not read Korean, and everything published around them remained invisible to them.