East of Siam

One of my jaunts up-country in Kwangtung Province dragged, and I missed the French liner at Hong Kong. Luckily the _Panama Maru_, bound on one of the trips around the world that...

The French move freely in and out of Indo-China without passports, but all “foreigners” are tightly bound with red tape. Germans and Russians are not yet admitted at all, and ev...

Soon after sunrise next morning Fords carried us off to some of the more distant ruins of the ancient city buried in tropical forest. With the heart of the day unbearable in the...

The efficient French manager of the _sala_ at Angkor, and those few of my fellow-guests who saw me set out on foot for Siem Réap that Sunday afternoon, gave me credit for being...

On a blazing Sunday late in January I was off at six on a little train that carried me, not uncomfortably, from daylight until dark, through a jungle country of few villages and...

We were off again by the same conveyance at four next morning. Long before daylight the road was alive with files of coolies, two loads bouncing at the ends of each shoulder-pol...

The river at Hué runs parallel to the sea, some twenty miles inland, and there is a screen of mountains to the south, the direction from which evil spirits come in Annam—just as...

I was called at six on the eventful morning, and as soon afterward as was consistent with that meticulous personal attention befitting an imperial audience I was whisked away to...

Of the eighteen to twenty million people of French Indo-China two thirds are Annamese. That does not mean that Annam has so many inhabitants. The Annamese are the predominant pe...

I was up at four the morning after the imperial ceremony, in sufficiently good mood to refrain from kicking the “boy” who had called me according to orders, and off in a heavy r...

Hanoï, northern capital of French Indo-China, is somewhat larger and less obviously tropical than its southern rival, Saïgon. It is quite a city, with expensive modern buildings...

Much as we all hate to be fed plain knowledge, preferring our learning disguised with the sauce of entertainment, like castor-oil in orange-juice, I fear we must taste a few of...

Early April found me back in Hanoï, this time as a family of five rather than a foot-loose individual. It was not the place I had left two months before. Constantly heavy skies...

With the influence of the lieutenant I managed at last to get under way again, not without hope that we might reach somewhere before nightfall, since the sun was still almost di...

Having ended on Saturday instead of Wednesday afternoon the first stage of a journey that at best had seemed in the beginning hardly possible in the time available, I made a tig...

Luang Prabang, venerable capital of the ancient kingdom of the same name, is a spacious town of a few wide French streets, softly paved, if at all, with narrow Laosian streets l...

From the capital of Luang Prabang I again broke all existing records by making the trip overland to Vientiane, the French capital of Laos, in five days. Normally this takes twel...

We were off again soon after dawn, by a road instead of a trail, a wide road that is by this time no doubt “automobilable,” though a car could hardly have gone over it then even...