Project results

The project results will be provided successively for download on this page.

Travelling by train from Berlin via Moscow, Reismüller, who was accompanied by his wife, had arrived in Mukden (today’s Shenyang) in North-East Chinese Manchuria on 5 October 1928, travelling on to Beijing before embarking to Japan in November, while his wife had remained in the Hotel du Nord in Beijing. After visits to Kyoto, Tokyo, Kobe and Kagoshima, he travelled back to Beijing via the Korean peninsula and went from there via Tianjin, Xuzhou and Pukou to the then capital Nanjing, where he participated in the first imperial congress of the Chinese Library Association as of 28 January 1929 as a guest of honour. The journey back to Beijing took place after a brief visit to Hangzhou, where he spent the Chinese New Year on 10 February 1929, by sea to Qingdao and from there over land to Jinan and through the province Hebei.

He continued his travels In April 1929 via the German mission stations Tai’an and Yangzhou to Shanghai, and from there to Hong Kong by ship passage. Subsequently, Reismüller ferried from Hong Kong via the coastal cities of Shantou and Xiamen to the Japanese colony Formosa (Taiwan), in the capital of which, Taipei, he spent several days, before making a second visit to Japan as the last station of his East Asia journey after a three-day ship passage from the Taiwanese port city of Keelung. In Japan, Reismüller travelled from Kobe via Kyoto to Tokyo on 17 May 1929, finally boarded a ship to Hawaii in Yokohama on 25 May 1929 and returned to Europe by ship passage from New York.

Kramer, Ralf: Georg Reismüllers Erwerbungsreise nach Ostasien (1928/29): Vorbereitung, Verlauf und Ergebnisse. München, 2022.  (PDF, 730 KB)

Gratzl’s journey of several months, on which he embarked in October 1913 in Munich, was expressly conceived as a study trip serving predominantly private purposes, not the principal aim of acquiring manuscripts on behalf of the library. He had first travelled from Italy via Greece to the Ottoman Empire, where he visited Constantinople and Konya and reached Adana via the Cilician Gates in the Taurus mountains. From there, he continued his journey via Mersin and Alexandrette through the Levant to the south, visited Tripoli, Beirut and Damascus, as well as Palestine, before travelling northward again via Amman, Damascus and Baalbek and reaching Aleppo, where first purchases of manuscripts by him are documented to have taken place on 9 December 1913. After visiting Beirut again, he travelled back to Cairo via Jaffa and Port Said. Between 5 and 7 January 1914, Gratzl again purchased a number of manuscripts in Cairo, proceeded further to the south up to Khartoum, before he finally left the African continent and ferried from Aden on the Arabian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent.

In India, the second big section of his journey started with visits to the urban centres of Bombay and Ahmedabad, before Gratzl turned to Rajasthan in order to visit Udaipur and Jaipur. He finally reached Bengal via Delhi, Agra and Varanasi, where he made a short detour from Kolkata to the British Hill Station Darjeeling. Gratzl concluded his journey with visits to Peshawar and the Khyber Pass in the west and to Lahore and Karachi, before he returned to Cairo via Aden again and embarked on his journey home to Europe from Port Said, in order to arrive back in Munich in May 1914.

Kramer, Ralf: Handschriftenerwerb auf Emil Gratzls Orientreise (1913/14). München, 2023.  (PDF, 1.19 MB)