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impressed: ‘How women can be induced to make such disgusting frights of themselves I cannot conceive.’ 1 Despite the great changes being wrought by Emperor Meiji, Carnegie was not enamoured of Japanese culture: ‘the odour of the toyshop pervades in everything, even their temples’. 2
    From Japan Carnegie and Vandervort sailed on 27 November 1878 to Shanghai, via Nagasaki. The port of Nagasaki was a complete contrast to Tokyo. Here Westerners had set up shop from the days when the first Portuguese merchant ships arrived in 1571, to spew out guns, goods and Christianity. The steep streets, the vistas, the gardens impressed Carnegie, who caught the magic of the place that would inspire Giacomo Puccini to site his opera
Madame Butterfly
(1904) in the city.
    Setting up base at the Astor House in the American Settlement at the treaty port of Shanghai, in the fertile delta of the Chang Jiang River, Carnegie and Vandervort obtained their first view of China. They were to spend nine days in the port, before taking a mail steamer to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong for Christmas Day. Carnegie voiced his opinion of China as the year came to a close. For him China outshone Japan, for the Dragon Empire had forged a depth of civilisation that impressed him and he liked the fact that it was the scholars who held pride of place in society. He believed that the rapid Westernisation of Japanese society would lead it to disaster, but not so for the Chinese:
    Here in Asia the survival of the fittest is being fought out. . . . In this struggle we have no hesitation in backing the Heathen Chinese against the field. Permanent occupation by any western race is of course out of the question. An Englishman would inevitably cease to be an Englishman in a few, a very few, generations, and it is therefore only a question of time when the Chinese will drive every other race to the wall. No race can possibly stand against them anywhere in the East. 3
    From Hong Kong they travelled across the South China Sea to Saigon (modern Ho Chi Minh City) and thence to Singapore, part of the British colony of the Straits Settlements, which Sir Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company had leased from the Sultan of Johor. Apart from the heat making their bulky clothes uncomfortable, Carnegie was unimpressed by what he saw in this part of South East Asia.
    An English mail steamer from Singapore on 14 January 1879 carried them across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), a British possession since 1796. Coffee plantations had been widely devastated by disease in the 1870s and Ceylon tea was now the great export commodity. As Carnegie sipped the flavoured brew, which had been a luxury in his Dunfermline childhood, he reflected more on the Buddhism he had first encountered in Japan and which had marched alongside the national religion of Shintoism. In Ceylon too, he absorbed the concept of making happy discoveries by accident – serendipity. The Arab traders had called Ceylon ‘Serendip’, a name which English author Horace Walpole adapted for the adjective in 1754.
    A three-day journey by mail steamer along the Coromandel coast brought them to Madras, once a centre for the British East India Company as Fort George, with the oldest town charter in India (1688) and the oldest English church (1678). From here they sailed across the Bay of Bengal to the port of Calcutta. Here, in the capital city of West Bengal, they saw British India in all its magnificence, now two years into its role as the imperial capital after the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Trade in cotton, silks, indigo and opium interested Carnegie, though he found India’s public bathing and open-air cremation of the dead disturbing.
    A train journey to Benares (Varanasi), the ancient and holy Hindu city, on 6 February introduced the travellers to the real culture of the Ganges, with its bathing ghats and cremations, and the mazes of narrow city streets and hundreds