Kassia St Clair’s The Race to the Future (John Murray, 2023) might just be the perfect read for the China history buff and/or “Petrol Head” in your life, telling the incredible story of the 1907 Peking to Paris car race
In 1907, some very, very optimistic Europeans — including an Italian Prince, a French racing driver, and a conman or two – gathered in the French Embassy in Beijing to start their long journey across the Gobi, into Mongolia, across the vastness of Russia into Europe and finally down to Paris. Bandits, wolves, angry locals and petrol thieves all added to their problems, as well as cars that were, to say the least, not always totally reliable.
But The Race to the Future is not just about a car race, it’s about a changing world, from one we wouldn’t recognise to one we most certainly do. And it’s about China’s introduction to that now long ubiquitous invention of the modern age – the combustion engine. Paul French caught up with the book’s author Kassia St Clair to talk cars, China and modernity…but not to give away who won the race!
First of all, the race itself. Who had the idea, what were the rules and why on earth start in Peking of all places where cars were virtually unknown and roads basic to say the least in 1907?
The idea came from the Parisian newspaper Le Matin, possibly in collaboration with the owner of the De Dion Bouton car brand, who was brilliant at marketing his vehicles and always keen to make a splash. It was organised in a hurry, and the planning phase was short and a bit chaotic. The result was that there were few concrete rules, and because these shifted over time, drivers were unsure about them. For example, they didn’t really know how long they were expected to stick together as a team and where and when it went from ‘group endeavour’ to ‘race’. The route was something of a classic: it had been done by other writers previously on horseback or using the train. People of that time liked the alliteration and the idea that they were travelling from the ‘capital’ or ‘heart’ of the East to that of the West.
Who were the competitors, and did any car brands we might still recognise today take part?
The competitors were a mixed bunch. The best-known was an Italian prince from the Borghese family. This was one of the most prestigious families in Italy: the Borghese gardens in Rome are named after them, and one ancestor had been a pope. Car enthusiasts, particularly those interested in the early days, would recognise the De Dion-Bouton name; this was one of the best-known car brands of this time (a 1907 De Dion-Bouton car is featured in the lead image of this article). The Itala was also very prestigious; it was an Itala vehicle that was used to open the Brooklands track that same year. The others – the Contal and the Spyker – were more obscure.
Had anyone in China actually seen a car yet in 1907?
Yes! Although the journalists and the drivers flattered their readers back home in France, Britain and Italy by suggesting that theirs were the very first vehicles in China, we know that wasn’t the case. Articles about car parades and letters complaining about reckless drivers in Shanghai and other large cities were being sent to newspapers in the years before the race. We also know that Empress Dowager Cixi owned an early American Duryea vehicle.
So many new technologies were in play during the race, new technologies China was to both occasionally fear and sometimes embrace wholeheartedly. How did race updates get back to Europe and America from China?
This race was as much about the telegraph system as it was about the automobile. The route selected was the one that cleaved to the telegraph wires, so that journalists could send articles back as often as possible, and reports and updates were reprinted all over the world, from Hawaii to Tasmania. By the time the cars had reached western Russia, people knew exactly who the racers were and were often lining the roads to greet them because they’d been reading reports of their progress.
I’m frankly amazed the cars didn’t fall apart ten minutes outside Beijing – no expressways or Ring Roads then! But also there was no infrastructure to support cars – how did they get spare parts, and more importantly, petrol?
So, not all the cars survived the journey, and it also wouldn’t be true to claim that the cars drove the whole way. In lots of places, particularly in the mountain passes to the north of Beijing, they had to be physically dragged by pack animals and teams of people. The motorists carried a lot of spare parts with them, but fuel and oil had to be transported separately and left in caches along the route. In Russia and Europe, this was done largely by train and horse and cart, but in China and Mongolia, fuel and oil were transported by camel and mule.
The cars, the telegraphs… it must have all seemed incredibly modern to the often anti-modern Qing Dynasty (on its way out, but still in power). What did the Chinese government take away, if anything, from this display of modernity in the imperial city?
The Qing Dynasty leaders were deeply suspicious of the entire affair; lots of the motorists had some army experience, and the Chinese officials seemed to have feared that the automobiles were being used to scope out the territory. While the journalists and diplomats protested loudly and vigorously that these suspicions were groundless, we do know that the military applications of the automobile were being seriously considered. For example, a Russian government official explicitly linked the success of the Peking to Paris race to the possible use of cars in warfare. Ultimately, however, the Qing dynasty was unable to resist the pressure from foreign diplomats to allow the race to continue, and the idea of motorcars rushing across China became a really strong symbol of Western power and modernity in the accounts written by contemporaries. It was also obvious that China was a lucrative potential market: one of the entrants actually returned to China not long after the race to open a motorcar concession.
