What do you think?
To Peking: A Forgotten Journey from Moscow to Manchuria
When in 1934 at the age of twenty-seven, Peter Fleming set out for the Far East, his ultimate goal was to return from China to India overland - a journey he later described in the classic News from Tartary . On his outward journey Fleming travelled through regions which remain some of the most remote and least-visited in Asia and which, soon after his journey, became closed entirely to westerners. From Moscow, through the Caucasus to the Caspian, on to Samarkand and Tashkent, skirting the edge of Outer Mongolia to Vladivostok and winding his way down to Peking, Fleming tells of people encountered, places explored and of ways of life that have since been lost through revolution, war and the passage of time. Along the way he kept a diary that he never intended to publish and that lay forgotten *In the box-room* of his mind for fifteen years. To Peking is an unassuming classic of travel literature. Subtle yet sparkling with intelligence and humour, simple yet beautifully told, it illuminates a world that travellers - armchair or otherwise - can only dream of today.
200 pages, Paperback
Published October 13, 2009
About the author
Peter Fleming
33 books52 followersAdventurer and travel writer. A brother of James Bond author Ian Fleming, he married actress Celia Johnson in 1935 and worked on military deception operations in World War II. He was a grandson of the Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust and the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 30, 2016
Have to start by saying I'm a huge fan of Fleming, and his News From Tartary: A Journey From Peking To Kashmir remains my favorite travel book ever. But that only makes To Peking that much more disappointing. Granted, Fleming never wrote this as something for publication, and left it sitting for nearly twenty years - with good reason. This is really just a verbatim diary, and while it's Peter Fleming's diary, it's still just a compendium of "I went to this place, I ate this food, I met this person and I shot this animal" listings, combined with numerous references to minor British persons and events long forgotten. Without any editing or other preparation for publishing, this largely lacks the charm, organization, wit and any semblance of a story that would make this worth the effort. Towards the end, I was really just crunching pages to get through it - something I never thought I'd say about the author of such travel classics as News and Brazilian Adventure, or his later histories like Bayonets to Lhasa or The Siege at Peking.
The one spark of true Fleming-ness lies in his occasional footnotes, where he apparently recognizes and comments on the weaknesses of his text. Examples:
Text: "On the same boat the same sun, the same fish for lunch, the same self-disgust as last year."
Footnote: The diarist's reasons for being disgusted with himself, though doubtless sound enough, have been forgotten.
Text: "You reach it over a bumpy road running through a devastated area of munition stores and airfields. Lots of aeroplanes about."
Footnote: "Lots of aeroplanes about." The diarist's powers of detailed observation are not here deployed to full advantage.
Text: "And that only by dint of meteorological stations equipped with several aeroplanes and every sort of specialist. There are about fifteen in the area."
Footnote: Fifteen meteorological stations? Fifteen aeroplanes? Fifteen specialists? We shall never know.
The one spark of true Fleming-ness lies in his occasional footnotes, where he apparently recognizes and comments on the weaknesses of his text. Examples:
Text: "On the same boat the same sun, the same fish for lunch, the same self-disgust as last year."
Footnote: The diarist's reasons for being disgusted with himself, though doubtless sound enough, have been forgotten.
Text: "You reach it over a bumpy road running through a devastated area of munition stores and airfields. Lots of aeroplanes about."
Footnote: "Lots of aeroplanes about." The diarist's powers of detailed observation are not here deployed to full advantage.
Text: "And that only by dint of meteorological stations equipped with several aeroplanes and every sort of specialist. There are about fifteen in the area."
Footnote: Fifteen meteorological stations? Fifteen aeroplanes? Fifteen specialists? We shall never know.
Read
May 10, 2012Mr Fleming readily admits that this small publication is essentially a diary of jotted observations, and is not a fully finished and burnished product ready for mass consumption. It is instead the work of a twenty-seven year old, who in 1934 was accustomed to busily filling his notebooks, and posting his typewritten dispatches back to ‘The Times’ (London). The openness of his candour cannot be faulted when he admits his diary to be:
“Slapdash, superficial, and often obscure, it is very far from the urbane tradition of the carnets des voyage; but it does provide, here and there, a glimpse of peoples and places which the present generation are not likely to be able to see for themselves …”
Vaguely then like my glimpses of the TV coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, I conjectured. How curious that in our present day the Russians should continue to celebrate the same (?) International Youth Movement (http://yhrm.org/en/general_information, as mentioned by Fleming. And on the same date as the opening of the partridge season too!
This paperback-sized hardback is a record of a journey to China, through Eastern Europe to Moscow, and on to the Caucasus, Samarkand, Vladivostok, Mongolia, Jehol and Peking. In his Foreword, Fleming describes his rationale for the title; admitting that the detail of those five months of travel really had escaped him, until a later reading of his diary; though even then he profusely (guiltily?) regrets his inability to summon the precise level of detail desired to recast his material into: that “polished and more coherent form”. The result sings to the tune of another.
Where “A Forgotten Journey” IS instructive; is not merely for its hands-up observation (or lack of), but for sight of what Peter Fleming chose to record; what hooks and constructs he felt would enable him to later best reconstruct his memories, and so, perhaps, to build and flesh out a book perhaps on a par with “News From Tartary”.
Therein lies the nub of the problem as perceived by this reader; “News From Tartary” this ain’t. Instead, ”A Forgotten Journey” is a glimpse of life lived very much in the present, observed, sieved, strained, abbreviated and gloriously recorded (or not) as and whenever time and opportunity permitted. Snapshot observations, fleeting glimpses; it is those very quirks that appeal and do make this little book such a very rewarding read, despite its deficiencies. Yet one cannot help but dream and wonder what more it could, what more it just might have been, if, …. If only ….
Yes, I mostly enjoyed reading such promise; yet frustration in feeling like a carrion crow arriving late at the party, was there too. Hence I’d recommend any reader new to Peter Fleming to read him at his best in “News from Tartary” before tackling (not overlooking) “A Forgotten Journey”.
“Slapdash, superficial, and often obscure, it is very far from the urbane tradition of the carnets des voyage; but it does provide, here and there, a glimpse of peoples and places which the present generation are not likely to be able to see for themselves …”
Vaguely then like my glimpses of the TV coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, I conjectured. How curious that in our present day the Russians should continue to celebrate the same (?) International Youth Movement (http://yhrm.org/en/general_information, as mentioned by Fleming. And on the same date as the opening of the partridge season too!
This paperback-sized hardback is a record of a journey to China, through Eastern Europe to Moscow, and on to the Caucasus, Samarkand, Vladivostok, Mongolia, Jehol and Peking. In his Foreword, Fleming describes his rationale for the title; admitting that the detail of those five months of travel really had escaped him, until a later reading of his diary; though even then he profusely (guiltily?) regrets his inability to summon the precise level of detail desired to recast his material into: that “polished and more coherent form”. The result sings to the tune of another.
Where “A Forgotten Journey” IS instructive; is not merely for its hands-up observation (or lack of), but for sight of what Peter Fleming chose to record; what hooks and constructs he felt would enable him to later best reconstruct his memories, and so, perhaps, to build and flesh out a book perhaps on a par with “News From Tartary”.
Therein lies the nub of the problem as perceived by this reader; “News From Tartary” this ain’t. Instead, ”A Forgotten Journey” is a glimpse of life lived very much in the present, observed, sieved, strained, abbreviated and gloriously recorded (or not) as and whenever time and opportunity permitted. Snapshot observations, fleeting glimpses; it is those very quirks that appeal and do make this little book such a very rewarding read, despite its deficiencies. Yet one cannot help but dream and wonder what more it could, what more it just might have been, if, …. If only ….
Yes, I mostly enjoyed reading such promise; yet frustration in feeling like a carrion crow arriving late at the party, was there too. Hence I’d recommend any reader new to Peter Fleming to read him at his best in “News from Tartary” before tackling (not overlooking) “A Forgotten Journey”.
May 22, 2013
Peter Fleming is Ian Fleming's less-well-known older brother--less well known today, anyway, because in his time he was a relatively famous journalist and travel writer. To Peking is a briefly edited diary of a journey he took from Moscow to Peking and points between while researching a different book. The subtitle "A Forgotten Journey" refers to the fact that he put this diary in a drawer or a box somewhere and forgot about it until twenty-odd years later. He took it out, added some explanatory footnotes (themselves often hilarious) and simply published it.
There's a lot of enjoyable material here, if you can get past the sometimes bare listings of facts; some entries are naturally just notes he made from an interview with some official. Written in 1934, the diary is just enough pre-Nazi regime to sound foreboding, and exactly centered in the middle of Japanese aggression on the mainland. Fleming is not a politically correct guy and there's a white man's superiority in places, but what's remarkable is how few those places are. He was willing to sleep rough and share berths with scruffy Russians and drink yak's milk without commenting on the inferiority of tribal cultures, and he saves some of his most acid wit for his fellow Europeans. It's Communism and "forward planning" that he most denigrates, regardless of who's perpetrating it.
Fleming is also obsessed with hunting. (The introduction says that he even died while on a shooting holiday, so it was a lifelong obsession.) Probably a quarter of the book deals with the hunts his hosts organize for him and their other guests, all the way across Russia and Manchuria. He couldn't see a duck without thinking about how he'd shoot it if he only had a rifle. It was far more jarring than anything he said about "Japs" (and I didn't get the sense that he used that term in a racially pejorative way, because he wasn't any more racist about the Chinese and Mongolian people he encountered).
This was a diverting enough read that I'm interested to see what Fleming wrote when he was actually trying. However, I'm more interested in his sometime traveling companion, Ella Maillart--such journeys would have been far more hazardous to a woman, and Fleming records that she was even beaten up by some Japanese soldiers on a train. Both of them are fascinating characters.
There's a lot of enjoyable material here, if you can get past the sometimes bare listings of facts; some entries are naturally just notes he made from an interview with some official. Written in 1934, the diary is just enough pre-Nazi regime to sound foreboding, and exactly centered in the middle of Japanese aggression on the mainland. Fleming is not a politically correct guy and there's a white man's superiority in places, but what's remarkable is how few those places are. He was willing to sleep rough and share berths with scruffy Russians and drink yak's milk without commenting on the inferiority of tribal cultures, and he saves some of his most acid wit for his fellow Europeans. It's Communism and "forward planning" that he most denigrates, regardless of who's perpetrating it.
Fleming is also obsessed with hunting. (The introduction says that he even died while on a shooting holiday, so it was a lifelong obsession.) Probably a quarter of the book deals with the hunts his hosts organize for him and their other guests, all the way across Russia and Manchuria. He couldn't see a duck without thinking about how he'd shoot it if he only had a rifle. It was far more jarring than anything he said about "Japs" (and I didn't get the sense that he used that term in a racially pejorative way, because he wasn't any more racist about the Chinese and Mongolian people he encountered).
This was a diverting enough read that I'm interested to see what Fleming wrote when he was actually trying. However, I'm more interested in his sometime traveling companion, Ella Maillart--such journeys would have been far more hazardous to a woman, and Fleming records that she was even beaten up by some Japanese soldiers on a train. Both of them are fascinating characters.
January 26, 2017
Прекрасный том дневников, «забытых» автором лет на 15, но все же изданных. 1934 год, Флеминг пускается в свое второе (после «В собственном обществе») путешествие по Азии (Москва и Кавказ не в счет — там та же азиатчина). Довольно потешные приключения под видом «охоты» — охотится у нас автор везде, занимательнее всего — на Кавказе. К сожалению, во Владивостоке и Имане он тоже охотится, отчего те несколько десятков страниц, что посвящены родному городу, несколько теряют в описательности, хотя советский мерзостный бардак, свойственный казенным учреждениям, отображен довольно отчетливо.
Но прелесть такого чтения — еще и в том, что в ДВ Атлантиде постоянно встречаешь знакомых. Например, здесь описано несколько встреч с Борисом Бринером в Харбине (тот в должности консульского служащего даже поучаствовал в разборках Эллы Майяр с японскими солдатами, которые в поезде навешали ей люлей ни за что ни про что: этот случай подробнее описан в «Вестях из Татарии», но там не названы имена). Здесь же подтверждения тому, что Феликс служил у Колчака («в британском мундире»), а Катя Корнакова тосковала по МХАТовской сцене и ненавидела Комиссаржевскую. Сам же Борис по-прежнему сокрушался о потере загородного дома под Владивостоком. Так что от меня нынешнего до брата отца Джеймза Бонда — натурально три рукопожатия, что отдельно приятно.
В те же дни ноября и начала декабря Флеминг — да-да — встречался, само собой, с Рерихом: сначала в Харбине, затем в Шанхае. Называет его «distant», что бы это ни значило, сочувствует тому, что харбинская русская пресса шельмует его «масоном» (ха, знала бы пресса… одним масонством дело бы не ограничилось). Больше ничего особо примечательного не сообщает, но и это нам дает богатую почву для спекуляций. В общем, книга весьма рекомендуется, ее было бы и перевести неплохо, там много занятного не только для ДВ-жителей.
Но прелесть такого чтения — еще и в том, что в ДВ Атлантиде постоянно встречаешь знакомых. Например, здесь описано несколько встреч с Борисом Бринером в Харбине (тот в должности консульского служащего даже поучаствовал в разборках Эллы Майяр с японскими солдатами, которые в поезде навешали ей люлей ни за что ни про что: этот случай подробнее описан в «Вестях из Татарии», но там не названы имена). Здесь же подтверждения тому, что Феликс служил у Колчака («в британском мундире»), а Катя Корнакова тосковала по МХАТовской сцене и ненавидела Комиссаржевскую. Сам же Борис по-прежнему сокрушался о потере загородного дома под Владивостоком. Так что от меня нынешнего до брата отца Джеймза Бонда — натурально три рукопожатия, что отдельно приятно.
В те же дни ноября и начала декабря Флеминг — да-да — встречался, само собой, с Рерихом: сначала в Харбине, затем в Шанхае. Называет его «distant», что бы это ни значило, сочувствует тому, что харбинская русская пресса шельмует его «масоном» (ха, знала бы пресса… одним масонством дело бы не ограничилось). Больше ничего особо примечательного не сообщает, но и это нам дает богатую почву для спекуляций. В общем, книга весьма рекомендуется, ее было бы и перевести неплохо, там много занятного не только для ДВ-жителей.
December 4, 2023
Fleming admits that these notes from his 1934 travels were never meant to be published. He was right. The best bits were the sarcastic comments he added two decades later after reviewing his forgotten travel diary.
September 24, 2024
A bit disappointing. It read as a list of things done in many parts.
June 13, 2012
A wonderful traveling companion ...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews