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

By Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben18946 chapters116 images

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Contents

• I. Beyond the Bosporus (opens in a new tab)

  On a morning early in April 1891 the two Washington University graduates trundle their bicycles off the Stamboul steamer at Haider Pasha and begin a seven-thousand-mile inland ride to the Pacific, recalling how Minister Lincoln at the American legation in London reluctantly wrote to the Chinese minister on their behalf. Escorted by baksheesh-hungry mounted zaptiehs, they pass Ismid (ancient Nicomedia), Geiveh and the Angora plateau of the long-fleeced goats, are raced into Kirshehr by local horsemen who take the bicycle for a "devil's carriage," and are seen off by the Vali on the road east toward Kaisarieh and Sivas.
• II. The Ascent of Mount Ararat (opens in a new tab)

  A digression on Ararat as the traditional landing-place of the ark and on the earlier climbs of Parrot, Antonomoff, Abich, Chodzko and James Bryce, whose ascents the local Armenians refuse to believe. Setting out from Bayazid with an Armenian muleteer, two donkeys, Turkish zaptiehs and Ararat Kurds, the authors bivouac at eleven thousand feet and reach the eastern summit at dawn on the Fourth of July, firing a salute over the great chasm before glissading six thousand feet down the snow slope in under an hour.
• III. Through Persia to Samarkand (opens in a new tab)

  Leaving Bayazid on July 8 amid universal disbelief in their climb, they ride into Persia, where Sachtleben is laid up a month at Tabreez with typhoid and nursed by the American missionary ladies, and where they overtake a disgraced court official being carried to Teheran in a mule-borne palanquin at the Shah's summons. After a run over the new military road to Meshed and Askabad, General Kuropatkine, Governor-General of Transcaspia, entertains them at dinner and grants free passage across the Russian empire; they break their rail journey to see Bokhara and reach Samarkand, terminus of the Transcaspian railway, on November 6.
• IV. The Journey from Samarkand to Kuldja (opens in a new tab)

  On November 16 they leave the blue domes of Samarkand, ford the "Snake" defile, pass the Gate of Tamerlane and the Kizil-Kum steppe, cross the Sir Daria by rope-ferry and winter at Tashkend while waiting on Baron Wrevsky for a Turkestan passport. In spring they ride on through earthquake-shattered Vernoye, rebuilding under the French architect Paul L. Gourdet, accompanied for fifty-five miles by a fascinated Cossack courier, are entertained by the Taranchis and Dungans, and splash across the Khorgos river past a Russian sentry into the Chinese empire at Kuldja.
• V. Over the Gobi Desert and through the Western Gate of the Great Wall (opens in a new tab)

  At Kuldja the Russian consul and the Chinese Tootai visé their passports for Peking while three Afghan visitors are arrested and a German traveller is refused; the pair drill themselves in spoken Chinese, having neither guide nor interpreter. Riding by Manas, Urumtsi, Gutchen, Barkul and the Hami oasis, they strike the Great Gobi on August 10, and one of them nearly dies of fever and thirst before they stagger into Ngan-si-chou; beyond it they pass through the Kiayu-kuan or "Jade Gate," the extreme western gate of the Great Wall, and are hailed in English by an auburn-queued mandarin on the road to Su-chou.
• VI. An Interview with the Prime Minister of China (opens in a new tab)

  From Lan-chou they follow the imperial highway between the bends of the Hoang-ho through opium-sodden Kan-su, cross the Yellow River by flat-boat at Tong-quan, endure mobs and extortion in Shan-si, and on the evening of November 3, 1892 sight the walls of Peking, closing a 3,116-mile Chinese stage by riding through the mud of Legation street. A house-boat down the Pei-ho, enlivened by a lunar eclipse the boatmen blame on the Great Dragon, brings them to Tientsin, where Consul Bowman and his secretary Mr. Tenney arrange an audience at the yamen with Viceroy Li-Hung-Chang, who cross-examines them on Russia's Transcaspian railway, the bicycle, their ages, parents and party politics.