As a long term project I’ve been working on recreating a voyage to Shanghai from London as it would have been undertaken around the turn of the century (1900 that is). I posted previously on the state of the old Port of London departure dock for passenger liners to the east – Gallion’s Reach – previously. Boats also sailed from Liverpool and Glasgow.
I recently dug up this postcard (above) of Port-Said from around that time in a stall on London’s Portobello Road and just got around to scanning it in. This is the Quai François Joseph and you can see the Thomas Cook’s and the Eastern Telegraph companies offices advertising ‘Telegraph Anglais’
Ships stoppedat different locations, the first being usually either Marseilles or Gibraltar and then often Malta. But most stopped at Port-Said in Egypt, more than 2,000 miles from London. Port-Said was definitely a sign you were moving east, as one traveller wrote in their diary in 1900 – ‘There we moored and visited the city of Cairo with its famous Kahn El-Khalili bazaar. Here was the Orient we had longed for: the cries of shopkeepers in enchanting tongues, the hammering of carpenters and cobblers, the exotic fragrance of spices, the smoke and the teas. Later, we mounted the electric tram along the Pyramid Road to Gizah. We climbed the first stone of the Great Pyramids and had tea at the Mena House.’
As someone who divides his time pretty evenly writing about China now and China back then this seemed like a place to throw all the interesting bits that fall through the cracks somehow and never get used anywhere else. It's basically the stuff that doesn't get used in my writing about modern China or in the books I do about old China — i.e. probably of little interest to anyone but me and therefore ideally suited to an obscure blog up a dark cul-de-sac of the Internet - Paul French
Leave a Reply