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Ella Maillart, one of the great travelers of the 20th century
Ella Maillart (orElla K. Maillart; 20 February 1903,Geneva – 27 March 1997,Chandolin) was aSwissadventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman.[1]
Ella ‘Kini’ Maillart was the second child, born to a wealthy fur trader from Geneva. Her father was Swiss and her mother was Danish. At the age of 20 she and a friend sailed fromCannes toCorsica, then toSardinia,Sicily andGreece. She competed in the1924 Summer Olympics as asailor in theOlympic monotype competition where she was the only female competitor and finished ninth out of 17. At this time she was also the captain of the Swiss Women'sfield hockey team and was an international skier.[2]
From the 1930s onwards she spent years exploring Muslim republics of theUSSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written inFrench but later she began to write in English.Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 inSoviet Turkestan. Photos from this journey are now displayed in the Ella Maillart wing of theKarakol Historical Museum. In 1934, the French dailyLe Petit Parisien sent her toManchuria to report on the situation under theJapanese occupation. It was there that she metPeter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent ofThe Times, with whom she would team up to crossChina fromPeking toSrinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening inXinjiang (then also known as Sinkiang or Chinese Turkestan) where theKumul Rebellion had just ended. Maillart and Fleming met theHui Muslim forces of GeneralMa Hushan. Ella Maillart later recorded this trek in her bookForbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming's parallel account is found in hisNews from Tartary. In 1937 Maillart returned to Asia forLe Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, while in 1939 she undertook a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of fellow Swiss writer,Annemarie Schwarzenbach.The Cruel Way is the title of Maillart's book about this experience, cut short by the outbreak of theSecond World War.[3]
She spent the war years atTiruvannamalai in the South of India,[4] learning from different teachers aboutAdvaita Vedanta, one of the schools ofHindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she lived in Geneva and atChandolin, a mountain village in the Swiss Alps. She continued to ski until late in life and last returned to Tibet in 1986. She was pioneer ofcolor photography before the Second World War.[5]
Parmi la jeunesse russe – De Moscou au Caucase (about her stay in Moscow and crossing the Caucasus in 1931)
Oasis interdites - De Pékin au Cachemire, une femme à travers l'Asie centrale en 1935 (her trek across Asia with Peter Fleming in 1935)ISBN978-2228895170
La vie immédiate (Ella Maillart's photographs and texts by Nicolas Bouvier)
Ella Maillart au Népal (photographs taken in 1951 and 1965 during a trek to the base camp of Mount Everest)
Cette réalité que j'ai pourchassée (letters to her parents, 1925–1941)
Ella Maillart sur les routes de l'Orient (the most evocative photographs she took during her travels)
Chandolin d'Anniviers (photographs and texts about her mountain village)
Envoyée spéciale en Manchourie (a series of articles written in 1934 for the French dailyLe Petit Parisien)
Ella Maillart, écrivain. Un entretien avec Bertil Galland, 54 min., Les Films Plans fixes, Lausanne, 1984
Ella Maillart chez Bernard Pivot (émissionLa vie est un long fleuve tranquille), INA, France, 1989
Entretiens avec Ella Maillart: Le Monde mon héritage (radio interviews and the filmLes itinéraires d'Ella Maillart, a 1973 Swiss TV production), 2009.
"Double Journey" 43 minutes. A documentary about her 1939 trip by auto from Switzerland to Afghanistan in the company of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The film was presented[1] at the National Gallery of Art in Washington by its director Antonio Bigini in March 2016.
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