The rickshaw, says Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler, is the 'true Asian taxicab'. Developed as the 'person-powered vehicle' or jinrikisha in about 1870 in Japan, it metamorphosed throughout Asia into the cycle rickshaw, the trishaw, the sidecar, the pedicab, the cyclo, the becak and many other local versions. Despite government opposition and competition from many faster modes of transport, they remain among the most popular ways to get around in many Asian cities - though not Hong Kong.
Wheeler is a former engineer who was inspired by a trans-Asia expedition with his wife Maureen in 1972 to set up Lonely Planet Publications. Since then his company has expanded from just producing travel guides to books on a theme, and the latest is an unusual one. He and Richard l'Anson, a travel photographer based in Melbourne, Australia, visited 12 Asian cities from Agra to Yogyakarta - including Macau, Hong Kong and Beijing - in search of rickshaws of every type and their idiosyncratic drivers. The result is the beautifully illustrated Chasing Rickshaws.
'The 12 Asian cities . . . cover the whole spectrum of the rickshaw and cycle-rickshaw story,' Wheeler writes in the introduction. 'In Beijing they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution only to reappear in the 1980s. In Penang the riders are old and fading, while in Manila they're often teenagers dreaming of moving on to jeepney driving. In Dhaka the cycle-rickshaws are both everyday transport and moving art galleries. In Singapore they're disappearing as day-to-day transport but simultaneously being reborn as tourist attractions. In Hong Kong they're both city icon and endangered species.' Each chapter focuses on one city, and as Wheeler explains in the section on Hong Kong, the colony was among the first to take the 1870 invention outside Japan, with 700 registered by 1895. Numbers then took a roller-coaster ride: there were probably more than 5,000 during World War I, falling to a few hundred between the wars, yet soaring again to 8,000 registered in the late 1940s. Now, says Wheeler, there are eight, waiting day after day to carry a few tourists around the Star Ferry area and costing $50 a year for a licence: 'The remaining rickshaw 'boys' are now old men and ready to entertain offers from any collector who might care to buy their steeds'.
Wheeler also considers the general design and history of the vehicle and the people involved with them, from riders to repairers and manufacturers. Beijing and Manila were the only two cities where he encountered women riders.
In design terms, Hong Kong's few remaining rickshaws are hand-pulled, whereas Calcutta is the only city where this type is still used for proper transport. The cycle rickshaw varies. The seat may be at the bicycle's side like a side-car, as in Singapore, Manila, and in Rangoon, where passengers ride back-to-back. In Beijing, the cycle pulls from the front, whereas in Hanoi and Yogyakarta, for instance, the bike pushes the passengers who sit, 'sometimes frighteningly, out front, watching oncoming traffic hurtling towards them'.
The book, with its colour illustrations, is an unusual celebration of a form of transport dying out.