Isabella Bird

The Golden Chersonese is a travel book written by Isabella Bird, the greatest travel writer of the 19th century. It recounts her travels in 1883 through southern China and into the interior of the Malay Peninsula—which in the age of Ancient Greece and Rome was known as the Golden Chersonese. It was ground-breaking reportage at the time because many of the places she visited were totally cut off from the outside world.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. Isabella Lucy Bird, married name Bishop, 15 October 1831 - 7 October 1904, was a nineteenth-century English explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist. With Fanny Jane Butler she founded the John Bishop Memorial hospital in Srinagar. She was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Bird left Britain in 1872, going initially to Australia, which she disliked, and then to Hawaii, her love for which prompted her second book (published three years later). While there she climbed Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. She then moved on to Colorado, then the newest state in the USA, where she had heard the air was excellent for the infirm. Dressed practically and riding not sidesaddle but frontwards like a man (though she threatened to sue the Times for saying she dressed like one), she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873. Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine The Leisure Hour, comprised Bird's fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.

Isabella Bird was the greatest travel writer of the late nineteenth century and she undertook her journey into western Tibet in the early summer of 1889, when she was already in her late fifties. But she was not the slightest bit fazed at the prospect of discomfort and possible death. And nearly die she did, at least once, before the trip was over. Isabella travelled over several months through some of the remotest places on the planet and her descriptions of the journey, the sights she saw and the people she met, transcend the times and continue to entertain and inform.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan - An Account of Travels on Horseback in the Interior is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1881. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

First published in 2003. Isabella Bird's account of her journeys in Korea in 1898 represents one of the very rare accounts of that country in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time Korea was virtually a forbidden land and had only been open to foreigners for about ten years. It was and had been under Chinese influence for centuries. The trip was very difficult but so fascinating that, true to character, Isabella adored it. She undertook many arduous journeys by land and river, observed the breathtakingly beautiful countryside, visited the Buddhist monasteries and had many audiences with the Korean king and his soon to be assassinated queen. While Isabella was on her journey the Japanese invaded Korea and she had to leave hastily, ending up in China, penniless.

Even in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Isabelle Bird, by then an established travel writer, was able to refer to the Malay Peninsula as an almost unknown land. Travelling back from Japan, the intrepid travel writer stopped off in Singapore where the British Colonial Secretary offered her the opportunity to vist the native states of the Western Archipelago. Because she had such a good introduction, she went and was taken everywhere by local officials. And so Miss Bird's journey was less rugged than her many other trips, but, rather more comfortable and well connected, she enjoyed it immensely.