Impressions of a Trip to the China

Impressions of a Trip to the China. - Adolfo de Mentaberry

The diplomat and Basque writer Adolfo de Mentaberry (1840-1887) occupies an excellent place between the Spanish travelers who, during the XIXth century, opened his interest horizons towards East, contributing news first hand on regions of the world practically not known for his contemporaries.

After his first diplomatic destinations in damask and Istanbul, Adolfo de Mentaberry was nominated in 1869 the first secretary of the legation of Spain in Peking. A few years after his return to Madrid he publishes his Impressions of a trip to the China (1876), where he narrates his long long journey from Valencia up to the capital of China, across the Suez Canal, with scales in ceilán, Singapore, Saigon and Hong-Kong - cities that it describes with notable keenness - as well as his personal experiences and comments about the society, the culture, the history, or the politics of the Celestial Empire, frames in a period of enormous instability so much in the geopolitical panorama of Europe as of the Far East.

The intellectual personality of Adolfo de Mentaberry, as it is reflected in his texts, ranges between two worlds. The trips literature with clear romantic character and the representation of the national interests in a moment in which the colonialism was raising like strategic target the mastery of the Distant east. Fruit of both perspectives is this book, Impressions of a trip to the China, which edition has been realized by Pablo Martín Asuero, who has already published in the same collection other texts of Spanish travelers of the XIXth century.

Mentaberry, Adolfo. - Impressions of a Trip to the China - Kapok tree. Madrid. 2008

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