Across Asia On A Bicycle: The Journey Of Two American Students From Constantinople To Peking [Anglais] [Relié]

Their goal was to complete their college education by getting to know the people of the world face to face, unhampered by guides and translators. To do that, they chose to travel by a new invention, the modern bicycle. Everywhere they went, their bicycles opened doors, simulating a curiosity that served far better than any passport or letter of introduction would.

This book, back in print for the first time in over a century, is their description of their trip across Asia in 1891-92. In many cases, these two young men provide us with one last glimpse of cultures that would soon be forever altered by the arrival of the rail and telegraph.

The change in circumstance they experienced from one day to the next was often amazing. One day they might sleep in a bug-infested hovel and wash in a typhoid-infected ditch. The next they might find themselves being entertained by a Persian khan, catching fleeting glimpses of his harem, or being fed lavishly by a Chinese mandarin. Throughout their trip they talked with and bought food from the poorest of the poor. Yet at the end of their Asian journey, they were interviewed by Li-Hung Chang, the most powerful man in the world's most populous nation.

Along the way and almost incidentally, the two men became the first Americans to scale Mount Ararat in Turkey (16,940 feet or 5165 meters high). At that time only six other parties claimed to have climbed the mountain and the most recent ascent had been fifteen years earlier.

Unfortunately, the arrival of the automobile put a quick and unfortunate end to the age of globe-circling bicycle travel. As a result, this book has been out of print since the 1890s.

This newly typeset edition contains all the original text plus additional notes describing the people they met and places they visited. There are also two additional chapters. One is the reprint of a 1899 article in Outing magazine describing their adventure. The other is a short biography of each author based on information collected by the college they attended, Washington University.

This volume is made up of a series of sketches describing the most interesting part of a bicycle journey around the world--our ride across Asia. We were actuated by no desire to make a "record" in bicycle travel, although we covered 15,044 miles on the wheel, the longest continuous land journey every made around the world.

The day after we were graduated at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., we left for New York. Thence we sailed for Liverpool on June 23, 1890. Just three years afterward, lacking twenty days, we rolled into New York on our wheels, having "put a girdle around the earth."

Our bicycling experience began at Liverpool. After following many of the beaten lines of travel in the British Isles we arrived in London, where we formed our plans for traveling across Europe, Asia and America. The most dangerous regions to be traversed in such a journey, we were told, were western China, the Desert of Gobi, and central China. Never since the days of Marco Polo had a European traveler succeeded in crossing the Chinese empire from the west to Peking.

Crossing the channel, we rode through Normandy to Paris, across the lowlands of western France to Bordeaux, eastward over the Lesser Alps to Marseilles, and along the Riviera into Italy. After visiting every important city on the peninsula, we left Italy at Brindisi on the last day of 1890 for Corfu, in Greece. Thence we traveled to Patras, proceeding along the Corinthian Gulf to Athens, where we passed the winter. We went to Constantinople by vessel in the spring, crossed the Bosporus in April, and began the long journey described in the following pages. When we had finally completed our travels in the Flowery Kingdom, we sailed from Shanghai for Japan. Thence we voyaged to San Francisco, where we arrived on Christmas night, 1892. Three weeks later we resumed our bicycles and wheeled by way of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to New York.

During all of this journey we never employed the services of guides or interpreters. We were compelled, therefore, to learn a little of the language of every country through which we passed. Our independence in this regard increased, perhaps, the hardships of the journey, but certainly contributed much toward the object we sought—a close acquaintance with strange peoples.

During our travels we took more than two thousand five hundred pictures, selections from which are reproduced in the illustrations to this volume.

Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben