Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878/1879

HK$90.00

  • USD: US$11.50
  • CNY: CN¥82.98
  • GBP: £9.10
  • EUR: €10.62
  • AUD: AU$17.60

By Paul French
By Constance Gordon-Cumming, introduced and annotated by Paul French
 
No. 2 in the China Revisited series
 
Inveterate Victorian traveller and prolific artist Constance Gordon-Cumming, born in Glasgow in 1837, roamed far and wide from the Scottish Highlands to the American West; the islands of Hawaii to southern China. Even among her many adventures, her 1878/1879 trip to Hong Kong was momentous. Gordon-Cumming arrived just before Christmas 1878 to inadvertently witness the terrible “Great Fire” of Hong Kong that swept devastatingly through the Central and Mid-Levels districts.
 
She then moved on to explorations of the streets, temples and Chinese New Year festivities in Canton (Guangzhou). Her detailed descriptions of the teeming streets of the city’s commercial districts and New Year temple fairs contrast with her temporary residence in the relative calm of the foreign enclave on Shamian Island. Venturing out of the city on expeditions, Gordon-Cumming gives us perhaps one of the most complete descriptions of the now long-gone market gardens of Fa-tee with the famed nurseries that cultivated a bewildering variety of flowers and ornamental trees.

Finally Gordon-Cumming returns to Hong Kong to observe the annual “Derby Day” races at Happy Valley in February 1879, a major event on Hong Kong’s Victorian-era social calendar. Gordon-Cumming is at one and the same time that rare travel writer who, while plunging into the throngs and crowds, manages to observe the minutiae of life around her.

“The flames rapidly gained the mastery, suddenly bursting from fresh houses here and there, where least suspected, and spreading from street to street. That night we stood watching this appallingly magnificent scene – the flames rising and falling, leaping and dancing, now bursting from some fresh house, shooting up in tongues of fire, now rolling in dense volumes of black smoke.”

 

OR

SKU: 9789887554769 Categories: , , Tags: , ,

Description

Inveterate Victorian traveller and prolific artist Constance Gordon-Cumming roamed far and wide, from the Scottish Highlands to the American West, from the islands of Hawaii to southern China. Even among her many adventures, her 1878/1879 trip to Hong Kong was momentous: she arrived just before Christmas 1878 to inadvertently witness the terrible “Great Fire” of Hong Kong that swept devastatingly through the Central and Mid-Levels districts. She moved on to explorations of the streets, temples and Chinese New Year festivities in Canton (Guangzhou) before returning to Hong Kong for the horse races at Happy Valley in February 1879. Gordon-Cumming is that rare travel writer who, while plunging into the throngs and crowds, manages to observe the minutiae of life around her.

“The flames rapidly gained the mastery, suddenly bursting from fresh houses here and there, where least suspected, and spreading from street to street. That night we stood watching this appallingly magnificent scene – the flames rising and falling, leaping and dancing, now bursting from some fresh house, shooting up in tongues of fire, now rolling in dense volumes of black smoke.”

Additional information

Weight 100 g
Dimensions 112 × 182 mm
Pages

112

Binding

Paperback

About the author

Constance Frederica “CF” Gordon-Cumming was born in Scotland in 1837, the twelfth child of a wealthy aristocratic family. The Gordon-Cummings were seemingly all travellers and explorers – planters in Sri Lanka, explorers of the River Nile, travellers to the Canadian interior, and at least one big-game hunter in Africa. Gordon-Cumming’s first venture in foreign travel was a visit to her sister, who had married an officer stationed in India. She was a keen observer and self-taught landscape painter. Wanderings in China was first issued as two volumes in 1886.

Paul French, who has introduced and annotated this reprint, was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Stories from his Destination Shanghai were serialised on RTHK Radio 3.