Travellers' Checks | When first female solo traveller Ida Pfeiffer visited Hong Kong in 1847
- The Austrian travel writer paved the way for famous solo female travellers such as Nellie Bly and Isabella Bird
- ‘One of the most remarkable travellers who ever lived, she circumnavigated the globe twice
While it might have impressed early tourists with “a large number of palace-like houses built of stone”, Hong Kong struggled to retain longer-term residents – at least according to Ida Pfeiffer, who visited the colony in the summer of 1847. “The Europeans who have settled here, and who are not more than two or three hundred in number, are far from being contented,” the Austrian writer reported. “Many of them erected, as I before mentioned, splendid edifices, which they would now be glad to sell for half the cost price.”
Then aged 49, Pfeiffer was in the middle of the first of her two round-the-world journeys, and she is often recognised as being the first woman to have circled the globe alone. Whether or not this is true, she was certainly one of the best-known female travel writers of her time, and quite likely inspired later 19th century solo female travellers, such as Isabella Bird, Constance Gordon-Cumming, Nellie Bly and Annie Londonderry, each of whom visited Hong Kong on their travels.
In promoting his new book, Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist, Singapore-based scholar and historian John van Wyhe describes the travel writer as “one of the most remarkable female travellers who ever lived”. He also suggests that she was, for a time anyway, one of the most famous women in the world – and “the first budget traveller to boot”.
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