There are two Englishmen at present living in Shanghai who have travelled overland from Europe to China. I was told, when there, that these gentlemen are continually receiving letters from England asking for information relative to the journey from Petersburg to Pekin and vice versâ , and in the Gobi Desert and Siberia. It is mainly owing to this circumstance that I publish these pages, for I fear the general reader will find little to interest him in this record of our monotonous pilgrimage thr

“From China to France overland! Why, surely it’s impossible. I thought one could only get to China by sea!” Such was the remark made by a young lady whom I had the honour of taking down to dinner a few days previous to embarking upon the voyage of which I am about to narrate my experiences. Although I trust there are not many educated persons who, like my fair friend, are unaware that Pekin and Paris are actually undivided by sea, I imagine there are but few who, if put down at Calais, and told

It was only in the year 1421 that Pekin became the capital of the Chinese Empire. It was up to that period merely the chief town of Northern China, as its name “Pe,” north, “Ching,” city, denotes; but when Nankin, the ancient capital, was abandoned, the seat of government was transferred to its present situation. A worse site for a capital, both commercially and socially, can scarcely be imagined, for although connected by canal with the Peiho river, and thus in summer with the rest of the civil

We had decided, upon leaving Pekin, to spend the greater part of the day in the sedans. The very name of this vehicle has a luxurious sound, and we looked forward to pleasant hours of travel at any rate as far as the Great Wall of China. But man is doomed to disappointment. For fatigue and discomfort, amounting at times to sheer physical pain, commend me to a Chinese mule litter, which is simply a kind of box or covered chair, hung on two long and slender poles. To it are harnessed, before and b

We had intended making a stay of four or five days, at the most, at Kalgan. This, we thought, would give us ample time to get carts, camels, and men for the crossing of the Great Gobi Desert; for, we had been led to believe, when at Tientsin, that there would not be the slightest necessity for remaining more than a day or so at the frontier city, unless we particularly wished to do so. But, alas! as at Pekin, fresh difficulties cropped up hourly; and when we broached to M. Ivanoff our intention

The population of Mongolia, an elevated plateau lying about four thousand feet above sea-level, is roughly estimated at between three and four millions, but the difficulties of obtaining anything like an accurate census of the tribes inhabiting this vast tableland are obvious. Of this number, over thirty thousand inhabit Urga, the capital and residence of the “Kootookta,” or living God of the Mongol religion, “Buddhism.” The power of this human deity is purely nominal. He is allowed to reign on

Ourga can scarcely be called a city in the true acceptance of the term. Its Mongol name, “Ta Huren,” or “The Great Encampment,” better describes the huge cluster of tents that compose the Mongolian capital, dwellings precisely similar in shape and size to those in the desert, save that here they are surrounded by rough wooden palisades, eight to ten feet in height, as a protection against the thieves and marauders who in the caravan season nightly infest the streets. The population of Ourga, whi

A square , whitewashed room, its walls and uncarpeted floor reeking with filth, and devoid of all furniture save a table and two hard, straight-backed chairs, and an overpowering smell of sewage from a cesspool beneath the open window, through which a crowd of shock-headed Siberian boys watch our every movement. An old man, in greasy rags and redolent of garlic, who resolutely refuses to allow us to enter even this fetid den unless the lodging-money is prepaid. No bed, no food, no drink, no wash

There is probably no country in the world of which the generality of English people are so ignorant as Siberia. The very word conveys to the mind visions of frozen steppes and lonely pine forests, with nothing to break the monotony of the white and dreary landscape but an occasional gang of prisoners or pack of wolves. Many asked, on my return to England, if I had not suffered terribly from the cold, and seemed quite surprised to hear that the Siberian climate is, in summer, often too warm to be

The shock-headed youth who fulfilled the duties of chambermaid awoke me one morning at the Moskovskaya with the news that that day (the 19th of August) was to witness in Siberia a total eclipse of the sun. I did not learn till afterwards that scientific men had been sent from London, Paris, Berlin, and Petersburg, to Krasnoiarsk, a town about six hundred versts west of Irkoutsk, to witness and report on the eclipse, but the expedition was a failure, the weather at these places being dull and ove

Let the reader picture the neighbourhood of Aldershot with its undulating pine-clad hills suddenly transplanted into the depths of the black country lying around Newcastle-on-Tyne. For stone buildings let him substitute filthy, tumble-down houses of unpainted wood, almost undistinguishable at a distance from the dark, greasy soil around them. People these villages with dirty, wild-looking men clad in sheepskins and gaudy-coloured rags, and still dirtier, half-naked women. Conceive a sickly smell

The city of Tomsk, which is situated on the river Tom, a branch of the Obi, contains over 40,000 inhabitants. Though scarcely as large as Irkoutsk, it is a more imposing place at first sight. The streets are broad and, though unpaved, in good order, notwithstanding the incessant stream of caravan traffic that pours through them in the tea season. The public buildings are fine, even handsome (of two, three, and four stories high), without the draggled, unfinished appearance of those at Irkoutsk a