Oasis interdites: De Pékin au Cachemire, une femme à travers l'Asie centrale en 1935

by Ella Maillart, Nicolas Bouvier (Preface)

Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

En janvier 1935, Ella Maillart quitte Pékin en direction de l'intérieur avec son compagnon Peter Fleming, correspondant du Times... Il s'agit de traverser la Chine d'est en ouest, d'atteindre les oasis interdites du Sinkiang, berceau voici mille ans d'une vieille culture d'origine arménienne, et de là de gagner le Cachemire, sur l'autre versant du monde, par les cols muletiers du Pamir et du Karakoram. Clandestinement, car le Turkestan chinois, dont la population est en majorité musulmane, est en plein soulèvement...

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, China, History, Asia, India, Adventure

333 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1937

About the author

Ella 'Kini' Maillart (February 20, 1903 – March 27, 1997) was a French-speaking Swiss adventurer and travel writer, as well as a sportswoman. She had been captain of the Swiss Women's ice hockey team and was an international skier. She also competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics as sailor in the Olympic monotype competition.

From the 1930s onward she spent years exploring oriental republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 in Soviet Turkestan. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. It was there that she met Peter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent of The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening in Sinkiang (then also known as Chinese Turkestan) where a civil war had been going on. Ella Maillart later recorded this trek in her book Forbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming's parallel account is found in his News from Tartary. In 1937 Ella Maillart returned to Asia for Le Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, while in 1939 she undertook a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of the Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The Cruel Way is the title of Ella Maillart's book about this experience, cut short by the outbreak of the second World War.

She spent the war years in the South of India, learning from different teachers about Advaita Vedanta, one of the schools of Hindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she lived in Geneva and at Chandolin, a mountain village in the Swiss Alps. She continued to ski until late in life and last returned to Tibet in 1986.

Ella Maillart's manuscripts and documents are kept at the Bibliothèque de Genève (Library of the City of Geneva), her photographic work is deposited at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, and her documentary films (on Afghanistan, Nepal and South India) are part of the collection of La Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Reviews

[BrokenTune · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Night was falling when the vast swarm of lights that was Paris appeared in the north....
Suddenly I understood something. I felt now, with all the strength of my senses and intelligence, that Paris, France, Europe, the White Race, were nothing.... The something that counted in and against all particularisms was the magnificent scheme of things that we call the world."

Forbidden Journey, Maillart's account of the trip that her travel companion Peter Fleming described in his book News from Tartary, was a bit of a revelation. I learned so much from this book - not just about the journey, China and the cultures of the Chinese in the 1930s, but also about perspectives and how they change - or stay the same over time.

Of course, Forbidden Journey describes the same trip from Beijing across China and into India via Kashmir that Fleming's more widely known account does. Like Fleming's book Forbidden Journey is the record of accomplishment of a trip that very few adventurers have managed to describe to a Western readership since the days of Marco Polo.

When Maillart set out on her trip in 1935, she soon had to abandon her plans of travelling alone. Because of the political upheaval in China at the time - Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the rise of the Communist army - roads were blocked and warrants issued for anyone who did not have the right papers, the right connections, or the right demeanor. It was at this point that Maillart joined forces with Peter Fleming, older brother of Ian and political correspondent for The Times, who had also planned to follow the Silk Road across China - by himself.

Neither of them wanted to join forces, but the alternative for both would have been to abandon the trip. Together, they could produce enough languages, life skills, money, and passports/visa to at least leave Beijing - and try and by-pass the official control posts.

Forbidden Journey may not be the most elegantly written one of the two books. Peter Fleming was evidently a more skilled writer than Maillart, but Maillart was the more diligent observer. She was the one that notices things - people's dress, people's demeanour, their circumstances. Maillart picked up on nuances of the everyday life that she and Fleming encountered and made time in her book to record them, sometimes comment, rarely judge. And this is the part that makes her book - and by reflection Maillart as a person - special: Maillart did not try to compare the things she sees with other things known to her. By that, she did not try to validate her observations and experiences against a Western belief system - at least not often. She rather took in everything she saw and tried to understand it against the background she encountered it in.

To my recollection, the only exception to this, where she did comment on something she saw is when she encountered Chinese women who had their feet bound. Maillart was upset by this and mentioned it a few times. Foot binding was officially banned in 1912 but was still common practice in rural areas into the 1930. But then, was Maillart moved by this because she thought it was wrong by European standards or was she upset to see the practice because there had been criticism of the practice throughout China since at least the 1870s? Having read Maillart's other books, I have no doubt that her concern was caused by her humanist approach to whatever people she met.

Anyway, I could go on fan-girling about Maillart, who was an extraordinary person, but I shall leave her biography to speak for her.

What did impress me at the end of the book, both books actually, were the different outlooks both Maillart and Fleming took away from the trip:
On arriving in India, both weary travellers, sun tanned, clad in what can only be described as rags after months of travail by foot, camel, horseback, they checked into a hotel and went to dinner. Both had hoped for months for this very moment that they could enjoy a meal prepared by a proper chef and a drink, but the enjoyment was somewhat spoilt by the reactions from the other hotel guests.

Soon after, Fleming returned to the UK by the quickest route possible to rejoin society. Maillart on the other hand, though returning to Europe, would make it her life's ambition to never again be part of an exclusive society. She did pretty well on that, too.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who aren’t aware, Forbidden Journey, by Ella Maillart and News From Tartary by Peter Fleming both describe the same journey, at the same time, taken together. They were somewhat reluctant companions, who both expressed their misgivings about undertaking the journey together.

”The jokes were flying. Somebody observed that Peter’s last book was called One’s Company, and the English edition of my last book, was Turkestan Solo. Now here we were, contrary to all our principles, going off together!”

In both Forbidden Journey and News From the Tartary the authors distance themselves from the greatness of their work. Fleming goes so far in his Foreword to say “Anyone familiar, even vicariously, with the regions which he traversed will recognise the inadequacy of my descriptions of them… we were no specialists. The world’s stock of knowledge – geographical, ethnological, meteorological, what you will – gained nothing from our journey. Nor did we mean that it should. Much as we should have liked to justify our existence by bringing back material which would have set the hive of learned men buzzing… we were not qualified to do so. We measured no skulls, we took no readings; we would not have known how. We travelled for two reasons only… We wanted to find out what was happening in Sinkiang… the second… was because we believed, in the light of previous experience, that we should enjoy it. It turned out we were right. We enjoyed it very much.”

Both these books were written in a fairy humble, self-deprecating way, something I hadn’t expected from Fleming in particular. I had found his One's Company: A Journey to China in 1933 written quite pretentiously, and I hadn’t enjoyed it much at all. News from the Tartary however is not written this way at all.

Both books come across as accurately written, where one omits detail the other picks detail up, but they don’t contradict each other. It may be that one author takes more from one encounter, or one location than the other, or one author is more involved in the conversation with a certain person, and therefore finds more to describe. At times an even that might take a chapter to explain in one book is bypassed with a sentence in the other book. I don’t think anything would be lost from reading only one or other of these books, but I enjoyed the novelty of reading them together .

It is fair to say that the journey was not unique – it was not the first time this route had been followed, but it was the first time for a number of years, and it would be a number more before it was repeated. To say that the journey of Maillart and Fleming was an inspiration for dozens of other intrepid travellers is no exaggeration.

Great books. I have opted to review them together… mainly due to the fact I read them together and can’t really separate them.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a classic of travel literature this is good. In 1935 Ella Maillart traveled predominantly by donkey, horse, camel and her own two feet from Peking, at that time under Japanese control, to Srinagar, Kashmir. This took seven months. She traveled with Peter Fleming - yes, the very brother of Ian Fleming who of course wrote the James Bond books. Peter and Ella were very different in character, beyond the fact that she was Swiss and he British. Each has written their own book. News From Tartary is Peter's. It was in fact Ella who agree to let Peter accompany her on hertrip; she points this out very clearly in the book! She travels on parts of the Silk Road. She encounters Japanese, Chinese, Turkic people, Tibetans and Mongols. She travels across the Tibetan plateau, through Xinjiang (a part of Turkestan) and over the Himalayas. Turkestan covers present-day Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang. Turkestan was not politically stable, there being conflicting Japanese, Chinese, Russian and British interests. What she did was an immense accomplishment!

From just this you understand the woman’s stamina, resourcefulness and determination.

Nevertheless I would not classify Ella as a talented writer. She does relate the facts clearly and adds historical information about the area and the political instability. There are notes, an index and a map. A large portion of the content is concerned with the difficulties of the travel arrangements rather than a depiction of the lands she traveled through. This wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. It still remains an interesting piece of travel literature.

[Pauline Fisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It had an enormous influence on my young life. I loved Maillart's intrepid spirit and equally was entranced by the wild open spaces which she encountered on her great journey into the west of China, and the extraordinary range of cultures and people that she met along the way. Her relationship with Peter Fleming, brother of Ian of James Bond fame, was wryly amusing. More disparate travelling companions could not have been found, and yet the journey worked. It was wonderful, and Maillart's telling of it was far better than his. I'd recommend this read to anyone who wants to know what China was like in the immediate years before the spread of Communism, and anyone else who loves the idea of wide open spaces and the chance to travel freely in the face of all obstacles.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful on its own, but even moreso if read together with Peter Fleming's more famous News From Tartary, which describes the same incredible journey.

Already well-known for their independent travel writing (Maillart's previous book was titled Turkestan Solo, while Fleming's was One's Company), when paired together they became an "odd couple" match made in heaven - Hollywood really should do a film version of this trip, rather than constantly creating amped-up, fictional wannabe's like "Jungle Cruise" or "The Mummy." (Although that said, Hollywood would probably ruin this story by cramming in a non-existent romance.)

Sadly, both these author/travellers are largely forgotten today, but they perfectly embody a breed of mid-20th century "adventurers" (although they both hated that term) that we will never see again, in this world where literally every corner of the globe is instantly available on Google Maps.

This particular edition includes an insightful and delightful introduction by the unstoppable Dervla Murphy - but then when is Murphy ever not delightful?

[Julian Schwarzenbach · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book relates Ella's view of a journey undertaken with Peter Fleming in 1935 (and told in his book "News from Tartary"). It is interesting how much the two books differ, they could almost have been written about different trips!
Ella perhaps provides a better narrative of the different people met on the journey, however, what it does lack is the sense of it being a journey. Whilst, arguably, Peter's book does not spend as much time on the people, it does far better give a sense of a journey with a sense of tension over whether they will succeed or not etc.
Peter's book is generally an easy read with good and interesting narrative, however, Ella's book comes across as more of an academic text book.
One area where Ella's book is perhaps better than Peter's is the description of the political situation in Sinjiang in 1935, ostensibly the reason for the trip, although due to the complexity of the political situation both books struggle a bit in this area...

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This account has a bit of all the best things about the best travel writing: observation of customs and peoples, including honest but tactful accounts of travel companions, historical information, and vivid nature writing.

[Nataliya Borys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quel livre magnifique et récit passionant. Ella inspire et fait rever!

En janvier 1935, Ella Maillart quitte Pékin en direction de l'intérieur avec son compagnon Peter Fleming, correspondant au Times... Il s'agit de traverser la Chine d'est en ouest, d'atteindre les oasis interdites du Sinkiang, berceau voici mille ans d'une vieille culture d'origine arménienne, et de là gagner le Cachemire, sur l'autre versant du monde, par les cols muletiers du Pamir et du Karakoram. Clandestinement, car le Turkestan chinois, dont la population est en majorité musulmane, est en plein soulèvement...

Quel contraste prodigieux que de sauter de vingt à deux mille kilomètres par jour sans transition! J'avais tellement pris l'habitude de me déplacer comme on le faisait il y a mille ans au pas lent des chameaux, que maintenant j'ai peine à réaliser que chaque jour je survole de nouveaux pays, habités par des races différentes. Les siècles d'histoire, les berceaux des regilions, tout me semble si marassé su run petit espace, après que de Pékin aux Indes, l'Asie m'ait paru sans fin. Et malgré la petitesse de ce continent européen, plus que jamais la mésentente règne entre ses occupants...pourtant ils ont tous de l'eau douce et de l'herbe sur leurs terres!

[Grenadine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ce roman est un véritable coup de cœur. Le récit de ce voyage incroyable à travers la Chine est très bien écrit. Un superbe carnet de voyage qui m'a transporté dans les contrées reculées de l'Asie centrale, où la civilisation moderne semble inexistante ; un bout de terre hors du temps. Cette lente traversée nous fait peu à peu remonter dans le passé de la Chine rurale et traditionnelle.
Les descriptions de paysages sont à couper le souffle et donnent envie de prendre le large...
Les descriptions de paysages les plus extraordinaires les uns que les autres m'ont donné envie de prendre le large, de quitter cette réalité pour me perdre dans les terres ancestrales chinoises où rien n'existe sauf la beauté à couper le souffle des paysages.
La lenteur tranquille de son récit vient nous combler de sérénité. Comme le dit dans sa préface Nicolas Bouvier : "on a souvent plus de profit à lire les voyageurs qui écrivent que les écrivains qui voyagent".

[Diarmid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ella Maillart was a Swiss adventurer, journalist and sportswoman, who travelled through some of the remoter areas of Asia through the 1930s. 'Forbidden Journey' is an account of a journey Maillart took with an English journalist from Beijing to Xinjiang (also known as Sinjiang or Chinese Turkestan) and then on to India. Xinjiang is the westernmost province of China which was, during the 1930s, a semi-independent state, politically unstable and under the influence of both the Soviet Union and the British. Much of the political background of the book could be difficult to follow, but the descriptions of the journey and the people are fascinating and Maillart is an entertaining and enjoyable writer. Its not quite a lost classic, but it is worth reading.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Fleming's The News From Tartary a unique journey by train, truck and on horse/pony/camel-back across the Chinese Turkestan of the 1930s. This is the partner volume to Fleming's book. Two viewpoints, one unbeleivable nature hike.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading the World: Wow. Talk about roughing it!! Journalist Ella Maillart travelled overland - riding on horseback, camel, donkey, pony and/or walking through China in 1935 - from Peking to India (because of when the book was published, the place names are the old ones). Some of the journey is shocking - the desert sections and some of the river crossings in particular. (We learned about this remarkable woman when reading "Beyond the Great Wall" by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford.)

I always have a little difficulty with translations. I'm always worried that I'm missing something so even though my French is on the shaky side, I was a little sorry not to be able to easily look at the original French version. I did manage to find this passages online:

from Chapter IV "By Lorry":

    Comme ceux du Honan, les misérables paysans du Shensi habitent des cavernes qu'ils creusent dans les falaises de terre jaune et poreuse. Leurs champs sont pauvres ; chaque pluie entraîne des terres qui s'en vont combler, très loin de là, le grand fleuve Jaune et provoquent peu à peu ses redoutables changements de lit. Pour réparer le méfait des pluies, les hommes, comme des fourmis, transportent infatigablement de la terre dans des paniers suspendus à leurs balanciers. Plus aucune forêt ne régularise le climat, n'atténue les précipitations ; pour se chauffer, pendant des siècles, les fils de Han ont déboisé : il ne reste plus un arbre.
    Cette terre impalpable donne sont caractère le plus marquant au paysage chinois. Elle coule sous l'averse, elle fuit entre les mailles des paniers dans lesquels les paysans la transportent. La notion même d'un roc, d'un caillou, semble ici appartenir à une autre planète. (Troglodytes)
    As in Honan, so in Shensi, the wretched peasants live in caves scooped out of the pourous yellow earthen cliffs. Their fields are poor. Every fall of rain carries off land which goes to heap up the bed of the Yellow River, far from there, and, bit by bit, to provoke the terrible shiftings of its course. To make up for the losses caused by rain, the men work tirelessly, like ants, bringing new earth in baskets hanging from yokes. There are no forests left ot temper the climate or provide a brake in the case of landslides. For centuries the sons of Han used wood for fires, cutting down treees and cutting down trees, until to-day there is not a tree left.
    This earth that is, as it were impalpage, gives its most marked characteristic to the Chinese landscape. It slips away under a shower of rain, slips away even through the chinks of the baskets in which the peasants are carrying it. Here, the very notion of rock, of a pebble even, seems to belong to another planet. (Troglodytes)

Sound familiar? How is it that close to 100 years since this was written, we have learned nothing from this clear-cutting and rape of the planet? And yet, we're still allowing it to happen to the forests that are managing still to stand on this continent....

Sadly, the public library book that we read does not contain any photos, even though it seems clear from the text that both she and her fellow traveller, Peter Fleming took photos.


Some favourite passages:

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land. It includes no bones, is prepared so as to be eaten with chopsticks, triturated, cooked for hours and hours in delicious sauces, and appears at last, looking like a variety of dumplings, served in little heaps in which nothing is whole and entire. Tou-fu, the sole diet of millions of peasants, is a kind of flabby, yellowish custard made with bean-flour. (p33, Chapter IV "By Lorry")
......................
We pitched our tent on the bank of a limpid stream. Women wearing long, straight linen garments, came with wooden bowls of sour milk and, in a cloth, yellow bannocks of meal bread hot from the oven. If ever I have had a moment's unmixed happiness it was there, surrounded by kindly faces and with those sweet-smelling, savoury natural gifts before me. I noticed light-coloured hair and eyes hear and there and had a sense of finding myself amongst hitherto unknown, distant cousins. (p170, Chapter V "Adam Djok! Adam Bar?)
......................
Groups of peasants, in garments of white cotton, were weeding in the cornfields. Here and there one of them wore a rose over the ear. As they weeded, two of their number made music with a viola and a little drum. Under the shade of a tree in a courtyard further on, a dying man lay on a divan rug. His family knelt round, silent, fanning him, looking on him for the last time. The cemetery was very close by, its tombs surrounded by a wooden palisade and surmounted by a horse's tail. (p179, Chapter VI "Cherchen Celebrities")
......................
To Peter's great joy, Abd Rakhman brought us a folding table on which a typewriter could be placed. The typewriter itself was to send our visitors into ecstasies. [...] The aksaka himself waited on us every day, bringing rice with fat, chicken, eggs, sour milk, very sweet tea, dainties of one kind or another, and piles of bread, round and flat like pancakes. We stuffed ourselves shamelessly. (p180, Chapter VI "Cherchen Celebrities")
......................
As it was still early afternoon, I set off to attack the nearest spur of the mountains. It was very steep and great tufts of grass made a series of ledges which I had to clamber up. At the end of an hour I passed some sheep on their way down. At the end of two hours the yurts looked no bigger than three little brown mushrooms. I was out of breath and stopped for a while, admiring the gentinas, and the edelweiss—it had such long stalks here—and listening to the silence of the desert regions of the world, that silence twhcih I miss so much when I am amongst human beings, a deep silence which fills the heart with a sense of immensity. (p268, Chapter XIV "On the Pamirs")

"Paris n'est rien, ni la France, ni l'Europe, ni les Blancs... une seule chose compte, envers et contre tous les particularismes, c'est l'engrenage magnifique qui s'appelle le monde." - Ella Maillart


(Question: Does this count as "China" or "Switzerland" in the 'Reading the World' category?)

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been fascinated by the Silk Road, Inner and Outer Mongolia and the Takla Makan desert. The closest I have been to them is Beijing and I don’t expect to go any nearer despite the comforts offered by NYTimes trips and the like. This fascinating book, however, offers the perfect journey to the region for an armchair traveler because it recounts a journey made at a time when a journey from Peking, as it then was, to Srinagar, India took you through the area when the native tribes and ethnic groups lived a traditional often nomadic life largely able to ignore mandates from Peking, pursue trade with whomever their closest neighbors were and repel by force any group tried to threaten its domain and alliances.
Maillart is not exaggerating when she calls it a `forbidden’ journey. In January 1935, preparing to set out from Peking, she is thwarted at every turn when she tries to get visa for the journey and people with knowledge of the area tell dark stories of the experiences of previous travelers and diplomats in the area. She manages to obtain a visa to go a small part of the way and sets out figuring that she would deal with the issue of further permissions as they arise. It’s never easy but somehow she always finds a way to get the permissions she needs often through sheer persistence and an uncanny talent for figuring out who really runs the show.
Dervla Murphy, an intrepid traveler herself, in her 1982 introduction to this 1937 best seller, theorizes that the reason woman dominated adventure travel in the 1930s was that travel to remote places was a way woman of the period could gain independence and a sense of achievement. According to Murphy after WWII men took over dominance of adventure travel because women now had more freedom in their normal lives. I’m not sure I agree with this, but it is clear from 31-year-old Maillart’s account of her 1935 journey that feeling her own mistress was a key motivation for starting on this physically and mentally challenging expedition.
Hitching rides on lorries, riding on horses, camels and donkeys, and frequently forced to walk, Maillart’s descriptions of the journey make you feel you are there every hard-won mile of the way. They also make you feel glad that you can reach over and take an apple from the fruit bowl or pour a drink of clean water to refresh yourself as you read. I never really had an image of `trackless wastes’ until I read her compelling descriptions of the terrain which ranges from high desert, and endless swamps to 16,000-foot passes with precipitous drops.
One of the reasons this book is book is enthralling is its account of the relationship of Maillart and her traveling companion journalist Peter Fleming, someone she did not know well before they set off. She would rather be alone but as intrepid as she is she realizes that travelling alone is out of the question. She likes having an interesting companion but, “it nevertheless deprived me of the greatest thrill, the sense of discovery had given me on previous journeys. I had lost the intense joy, the intoxication of blazing my own trail and the proud sense of being able to get through alone, which I had become accustomed to.” She recounts the accommodations she must make to keep the peace with him, often galling for this ardent feminist. However, the biggest difference she learns is that while she wants to experience every moment, learn about the people they encounter and open herself to the different cultures, Fleming just wants to have completed the trek, to be able to show that he could do it.
This is a great read for any armchair traveler, or indeed for someone who is planning to follow the Silk Road.. The conditions of the terrain and people may have changed with the passage of time, but what she writes about still matters.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just to get the giddy, ridiculous flattery out of the way - I LOVED Forbidden Journey. Loved it! Loved, loved, loved, loved it. Absolutely loved it. Loved it.

I stumbled upon this book through a Goodreads list for travel journals written by women in the early 20th century (very specific, but that was what I was looking for). I have to admit that I'd never even read the name Ella Maillart. There just simply aren't many travel books by women during this time period (and the ones that do exist are incredibly hard to find). Women either couldn't take or weren't afforded the opportunity to go on expeditions like this, and because of that, records like Maillart's offer a unique perspective that should be more celebrated than they are.

There are some wonderful travelogues in the world that focus on Tibet, Nepal and the Indian Himalaya. But due to sheer remoteness and significant political intricacies (especially in the 1930's!), there are only a handful that document travels to the immediate North, through the arid regions of what it now Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang (especially in the years prior to construction of road and communications infrastructure).

Ella Maillart was a journalist by trade, and in Forbidden Journey, it shows. What becomes immediately apparent is that Maillart utilizes a natural curiosity and professional set of observation skills to bring perfectly articulated, vividly detailed and beautifully flowing narratives to the world as she travels through it. Maillart gives equal consideration to the socio-cultural history, landscape and current affairs of the region, while never losing focus from the adventure of the journey itself. Her sense of humour comes across in spades, never taking herself too seriously, and finding skillfully nuanced ways of documenting both her and her hilariously dramatic (read: proto-hipster) travel buddy Peter Fleming (who wrote his own account of the journey: News from Tartary) struggling through the culture-shock of such a complicated cultural landscape.

The closest comparison I can come up with are the superb works of Ryszard Kapuscinski who employed a similarly-skilled, journalistic point-of-view to his work and travels. But what Maillart is able to bring to her work is a wonderfully casual honesty about the added complexities of traveling as a woman in this time and place. That being said, if you are a Kapuscinski fan, you will absolutely love Maillart.

One final note - it doesn't look like anyone other than Hesperides Press still publishes this book, and older editions don't seem to exist anywhere. The Hesperides Press edition is oddly expensive, considering it is literally just a photocopy of an earlier English edition of the book. Sadly, Maillart's incredible (and rare) photographs are completely destroyed through the photocopying process. It's an enormous shame.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing that really stood out to me in reading The Forbidden Journey was how Maillart characterizes Peter Fleming (her companion on this trip who wrote a book about the same journey). He is frequently described as a man interested in being on the move rather than someone who takes in the places they visit (as opposed to Mailart's own approach to travel). Maillart's voice is very strong, incorporating cultural and historical information alongside what must have been a trip quite unlike any taken today. I sometimes wondered about some of the information she cited but that may be less Maillart than the time she was writing and traveling across China in the 1930s.

The fact that two foreigners came to China and traveled from Beijing to Kashmir in 1930s China is rather interesting on its own given the tensions and issues of the time. That alone made the reading interesting to me but Maillart has an anthropologist's eye for details wherever she goes as is demonstrated in her other book "The Cruel Way" and provides a unique perspective on the people she meets and the sights she sees. She was not simply a sightseer, though anyone signing up to cross 1930s China generally would be pretty adventurous. All around, good read both in terms of subject matter and voice.

[Bruno Menetrier · Rating 5 out of 5]

L'auteure, le livre (416 pages, 2018) :
Quelle folie que celle de la suissesse Ella Maillart, quasiment née avec le siècle (le siècle dernier, le vrai), qui s'en va du haut de ses trente ans traverser l'Asie centrale depuis Pékin jusqu'aux Indes à travers des contrées hostiles et encore mal connues même encore aujourd'hui : les grands déserts d'Asie, l'immense marais salé du T'saïdam, le désert du Taklamakan, ...
Oasis interdites est le beau récit de cette belle épopée.

On aime :
❤️ La prose de l'auteure qui va nous accrocher : une écriture lumineuse, humaniste, simple et modeste mais riche et documentée. Un véritable régal, une rare pépite parmi les récits d'aventures ou d'exploration.
Contrairement à nombre de récits d'écrivains voyageurs, aucun nombrilisme, aucune pédanterie, ne viennent entacher la prose d'Ella Maillart..
❤️ Une fort belle voix de femme, chaleureuse et lumineuse, qui nous parvient depuis les déserts d'Asie par-delà les montagnes les plus hautes.

Le contexte :
Une région (le Xinjiang) qui revient sur le devant de l'actualité depuis les nouveaux démêlés des Ouighours avec le pouvoir chinois, un conflit ancré dans l'histoire depuis fort longtemps.

L'intrigue :
Nous voici donc dans les années 30, embarqués dans l'aventure aux côtés d'une suissesse et d'un anglais (plus british tu meurs) qui va se joindre à elle : il s'agit de Peter Fleming, qui inspirera son frère Ian pour le personnage de James Bond !
Peter Fleming était journaliste globe-trotter mais sans doute également appointé par le MI6 !
Pour traverser le far-west chinois, un long et difficile voyage attend les deux compères, à dos de chameau ou à dos d'âne, à pied parfois. Il leur faudra contourner aussi bien les déserts que les tracasseries administratives de ces régions sous tension où ils risquent la prison si leur laissez-passer ne convient pas aux potentats locaux.
Ils longeront les grands déserts d'Asie, éviteront les cités trop contrôlées et remonteront à rebours la route qu'avait empruntée la fameuse Croisière Jaune de Citroën quelques années auparavant à travers le Pamir entre les sommets inaccessibles du Karakorum et de l'Hindu Kush.

[...] Je suis toute à la curiosité de cet avenir incertain, au sentiment d'être délivrée désormais des obstacles des hommes ; toute à la joie de sentir que chaque jour, maintenant, sera neuf, et qu'aucun ne se présentera deux fois ; toute à mon application de n'observer qu'une seule règle : celle de marcher droit devant moi.
[...] Peter me trouve trop sérieuse et je ne saisis pas bien l'humour britannique (ce qui est aussi grave aux yeux d'un Anglais que "perdre la face" pour un Chinois).

On y croisera la route du Pantchen Lama, on y verra les fleuves ne plus dévaler vers la mer, on y entendra des peuplades dont la langue connait quatre genres et vingt-huit pluriels, on y traversera des rivières qui ne coulent que la nuit lorsque les neiges des hauteurs ont suffisamment fondu en journée, on y verra des carcasses de chameaux, d'ânes et de moutons, et même une auto Citroën abandonnée.
Quelques cartes postales choisies parmi tant et tant d'autres mémorables :

[...] Pour la dernière fois j'avais vu couler l'eau vers la mer : dorénavant, pendant des mois, nous marcherions dans les bassins fermés d'Asie centrale.
[...] Les eaux du lac étant sacrées, la navigation y est interdite, et c'est pourquoi les lamas qui habitent sur l'île du KouKou Nor ne peuvent être ravitaillés qu'en hiver, lorsque la glace crée une route naturelle.
[...] Au centre du Tsaidam, nous sommes à trente ou quarante jours de la ville la plus proche.
[...] Nous sommes au bord d'un nouveau versant de l'Asie, avec de nouvelles mœurs et de nouvelles races. Les cadavres n'y seront plus abandonnés aux oiseaux de proie comme ceux des Mongols, la farine sera cuite au four au lieu d'être mélangée au thé, les prières monteront vers l'invisible Allah au lieu d'être marmonnées devant des bouddhas de terre cuite.
[...] Pendant l'hiver il n'y a que trois vieilles femmes à Dzoun. J'ai croisé l'une d'elles qui s'en allait, toute rabougrie, sa poitrine nue et décharnée hors du manteau de mouton. Sa peau couleur de chocolat, où des cicatrices laissaient des traces violettes, faisait penser aux coloris de Gauguin.
[...] Une fois de plus il faut attendre : c'est décidément la seule qualité que nous acquerrons dans ce pays.
[...] Lors de la première rencontre ils nous avaient demandé si nous n'étions pas japonais, notion que nous nous étions empressés de rectifier. À Lanchow déjà, un agent chinois nous avaient pris pour tels, et je suppose qu'en Asie centrale ce terme est synonyme d'étranger venu de par-delà les mers.
[...] Compatissantes, les sœurs me laissent m'enfermer dans leur dispensaire avec un seau d'eau chaude et je me livre à une battue en règle contre les parasites qui troublent mon sommeil, ce qui m'était impossible dans notre caravansérail.
[...] Le bonheur le voilà : cette ivresse que crée un instant d'équilibre entre un passé qui nous satisfait et un avenir immédiat riche de promesses.
[...] Une fois de plus, comme au cours des nombreuses heures vides de ce voyage, je me demande ce qui me pousse vers les quatre coins du monde ?
[...] À Tashgourkan, quatre pays se touchent presque : la Chine, les Indes, l'Afghanistan et la Russie. Leurs frontières ont été délimitées en 1905 [...] c'est alors que l'étroit territoire du Wakhan fut donné à l'Afghanistan afin que Russie et Indes ne soient pas en contact.

Pour profiter pleinement du voyage, on ne saurait trop vous conseiller de prévoir de bonnes chaussures et quelques cartes de cette région méconnue.
PS : on avait déjà croisé brièvement la route de l'intrépide Ella Maillart aux côtés des Alpinistes de Staline.
Pour celles et ceux qui aiment les aventurières.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked her style of writing, her descriptions of people & places she went, her attitude about travel at a time & in a place where any sort of travel was not easy much less the sort she & Fleming were undertaking, & I liked learning more about a part of Asia I know little about. Good book, well worth the read

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy reading about adventure, especially those by women, and this one is a classic. In a way she so underplays the hardships that it is a little too subdued in tone. For example, at the end of the book she blithely says, "at the end of a day's march of nearly forty miles, we came out into the valley Gilgit". At this point they are no longer on foot, or dragging camels or donkeys or horses, but after months of grueling, dangerous travel she throws off forty miles like it was nothing. Next up, to read Peter Fleming's account of the same journey and compare them. They couldn't have done it without each other though they usually traveled solo. The introduction to this volume commented that Peter got the best of the bargain.

[Rrlgrrl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely travelogue of an interesting region of the world. The writing reminded me of Freya Stark's travelogues, but for some reason, I was much more engaged reading Ella Maillart's story. I actually Google mapped her trek outlined in the book, and it is amazing she made this journey in the 1930's. An inspiration for traveling to remote places and experiencing different cultures.

[Caro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fleming's "The Road to Tartary" tells of the same journey. Like Fleming, Maillart makes light of the many difficulties and is an astute observer of the characters and the terrain. It's fun to meet Fleming again, portrayed here as an impatient but charming man.

[Cullen McHael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Cannot recommend enough for lovers of fantasy fiction as well as historical or travel stories. This is a real life journey through a vanished world, describing the sorts of things people in fairy tales do all the time.

[Isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un voyage dans un monde perdu

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably a very interesting book but I am not a fiction reader

[Brad Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book and Peter Fleming’s book on the same trip back to back; I preferred the Fleming book as a more clear narrative and also more humorous, although this book had its charms

[Bookguide]

When Swiss photographer Ella Maillart planned a journey along the ancient Southern Silk Road, she knew the logistics would be difficult. Reluctantly she joined forces with Peter Fleming. When they started, they had no idea if they would reach their destination. Maillart wrote about the people they met, the forces at play, but most importantly, about the traditions and beliefs of the various people she met along the way.

When I saw that Ella Maillart’s book was published in 1937, I was excited to read it for the 1937 Club as it is the account of a journey across the remote top of China, Tibet and into Kashmir at a time of upheaval. Maillart’s travelling companion was Peter Fleming, a British journalist and quite possibly a spy, perhaps the inspiration for James Bond; Ian Fleming was his brother. Many years ago, I read his account of the trip, News from Tartary and had never expected to have the opportunity to read the book written by the Swiss photographer who travelled with him. When I was deciding what to read for the 1937 Club, I discovered that Maillart’s book was supposedly available in a Dutch public library somewhere, but when I tried to reserve it, I wasn’t allowed. However, both Maillart and Fleming’s travelogues are available online via the Internet Archive. Sadly, Maillart’s photos are virtually unrecognisable because it is a scan of what is probably a photocopy, but the details of the account more than make up for that.

Forbidden Journey is chock full of fascinating observations. Not so much about the landscape or the accommodation, but Maillart was herself fascinated about how people lived, their beliefs and traditions. My review isn’t really a review. As is my wont, I took detailed notes to help me remember where they went and what they saw. Because I am interested in customs myself, I have often included direct quotes from Ella Maillart’s book; why paraphrase when she wrote so well herself?

See more on my Market Garden Reader book blog, including lots of quotations.

[Magda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ella Maillart è stata una intrepida viaggiatrice della prima metà del 1900, in un'epoca in cui le esplorazioni erano appannaggio quasi solo degli uomini. In questo memoriale, la ginevrina racconta il lungo percorso da Pechino al Kashmir che fece, intorno al 1935, in compagnia di Peter Fleming, allora conosciuto esploratore di cui diventerà amica, attraversando le più desertiche zone del nord della Cina, toccando il Tibet. Il libro ha toni piuttosto romantici, niente a che vedere con i report di viaggio, ma rispecchiano perfettamente lo spirirto della giovane donna, che vedeva nelle esplorazioni di terre poco conosciute il sogno di grandi avventure. Questo viaggio durerà mesi: mesi di fatica, di privazioni e di incertezze, ma quello che Ella Maillart più di tutto sa trasmettere è una grande serenità e una fiducia in sé e nel futuro che pochi altri esploratori hanno saputo fare.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Soudain, je comprends quelque chose : je sens maintenant, par toute la force de mes sens et toute celle de mon intellect, que Paris n'est rien, ni la France, ni l'Europe, ni les Blancs... une seule chose compte, envers et contre tous les particularismes, c'est l'engrenage magnifique qui s'appelle le monde."
- Liban, septembre 1936.
Dernières lignes d'Oasis Interdites, Ella Maillart. Je les trouve frappantes et magnifiques.
Lecture boulversante et sublime.
Prendre conscience du monde sous un angle différent, au rythme emprunté il y a des millénaires et si peu de temps par les caravaniers, mules, chameaux et ânes.

[P-E L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Récit du voyage de Maillart et Fleming. leurs rencontres, la recherche de guides et animaux pour les accompagner, d'absurdes situations aux frontières – auront-ils le visa suffisant pour passer? leurs cadeaux suffiront-ils à corrompre les gardes frontières ?
c'est un double saut dans le temps : 1937, l'année du récit et mille ans plus tôt avec la façon dont elle se déplace et les peuples qu'elle rencontre.
on l'accompagne dans ses pensées, doutes, joies, sa relation amicale avec Flemming pas toujours facile. c'est calme et nivelé bien qu'elle ait dû vivre des aventures extraordinaires.

[Polinux]

Passionnant voyage de Chine au Cachemire et Turkestan, en 1935. Sont évoquées les conditions de vie, au fil des rencontres, des autochtones, qui tentent de survivre durant cette période de transition entre la fin de la colonisation par les occidentaux, et l'irresistible ascension de la pensée, et de "La Grande Marche" dirigée par Mao et supposée libératrice.
Le récit est "daté" et les allusions racistes sont légions.

[Bunza · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast-paced account of a journey through Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang, with an exit to Kashmir, during China's warlord era. Interesting material on Soviet (and British) influence in Xinjiang, warlords, Islam in China, Russian refugees, and the reach of the Kuomintang government's power during this time period.