Victorian pioneer who changed West's view of China

[Randy W]

A bit of a read, but interesting - in the SCMP

 

Isabella Bird, Victorian pioneer who changed West's view of China

An unmarried adventurer, Bird rewrote the rule book of travel journalism as she blazed a trail through China in the late 1800s, taking cheap transport and facing violent mobs. Stuart Heaver reports.

 

 

When she returned, in 1895, as a well-established literary superstar, Hong Kong was in the grip of bubonic plague.

 

By then, the observations of this indomitable widower informed prime ministers, monarchs and the reading public of Britain about a China witnessed by very few Westerners. Aged 64, she was about to undertake the penultimate and most challenging expedition of her illustrious career: a 13,000km journey up the Yangtze River by boat and then overland through Sichuan province to Tibet.

 

. . .

 

Despite arriving in the midst of the great fire of 1878, which consumed as many as 400 buildings in Central, Bird thought the city of Victoria was beautiful and even compared it to Genoa, in Italy: "It has covered green balconies with festoons of creepers, lofty houses, streets narrow enough to exclude much of the sun, people and costumes of all nations."

 

Guangzhou made even more of an impression: "Of all the places I have seen, Canton is the most overwhelmingly interesting, fascinating and startling. 'See Canton and die' I would almost say.

 

"I like the faces of the lower orders of Chinese women." This affection was to last for her lifetime.

 

. . .

 

When travelling through Sichuan, Bird revelled in understated accounts of being pelted with mud, attacked by mobs, assaulted with sticks and trying to sleep in damp, cold, squalid accommodation. Eventually she resorted to carrying a revolver, neatly concealed in her skirts. But she resisted the temptation to adopt a histrionic tone, even when trying to sleep in a darkened timber outhouse-cum-pig-sty shortly after a rowdy mob had been trying to beat her door down, accusing her of being a "baby-eater" and "foreign devil": "… and in the midst of the coarse shouts of rough men to hear a feeble accompaniment of rats eating one's few things".

 

In the final chapter of The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, published in 1899, Bird "gets a few things off her chest", as Ireland puts it.

 

"She writes the Yangtze book as a protest because almost everyone writing at the time about China with any authority had never actually been there," says Ireland. And Bird had the confidence to dedicate the book to the British prime minister of the day.

 

 

[Mick]

Great article, Randy. I was not familiar with this woman, nor her writing about China. It was great to see a photo from the old days in Shantou, where we lived for our last four years in China.

[Allon]

Yes, she was the one that attracted a whole movement of missionaries to China, led by the Hearst newspapers and then Henry Luce of Time magazine later. A very interesting account of that history is in James Bradley's book The China Mirage. He details how China was "opened" by a connection between the family that Chiang Kai-Shek married into and Henry Luce and even Teddy Roosevelt, who actually favored Japan then.

 

But Phyllis was the one those missionaries read about. Quite a woman.