Across Asia on a Bicycle: the Journey of Two American Students from Constantinople to Peking Book

In June of 1890, two young men left on an epic journey. The day after graduating from Washington University, they set out to circle the world on bicycles. Over the next three years they would travel over 15,000 miles, completing what was at that time the "longest continuous land journey ever made around the world." 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.Read More