A digital album of antique prints, photos and postcards featuring Japanese Geisha Girls and women in beautiful, traditional kimono costume dresses. Many images in color. Includes portraits, domestic scenes, music and dance, tea ceremonies, and ladies from the Number 9 house...

Ideal addition to your portable library - of special interest to postcard collectors, connoisseurs of Asian history, fashion and Japanaiseries... Supplied in PDF ebook format, for Acrobat Reader, with optional rolling slideshow functions and random transition effects between images. Includes free samples from some of our sister titles.

Buy it online for only $3.49! 

Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon

Sir Samuel White Baker

The original evocative and amusing text, from this ripping colonial adventure. Hunting and fishing stories from 1845, plus ethnic observations, annotated with biographical notes, plus vintage photos, prints and maps of 19th Century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Highly recommended entertainment!

Buy and download it for $2.99

A classic Victorian travelogue from the Indian Raj, by a real-life Great White Hunter

"One great peculiarity in Newera Ellia is the comparative freedom from poisonous vermin. There are three varieties of snakes, only one of which is hurtful, and all are very minute. The venomous species is the "carrawellé," whose bite is generally fatal; but this snake is not often met with. There are no ticks, nor bugs, nor leeches, nor scorpions, nor white ants, nor wasps, nor mosquitoes; in fact, there is nothing venomous except the snake alluded to, and a small species of centipede. Fleas there are certainly - indeed, a fair sprinkling of fleas; but they are not troublesome, except in houses which are unoccupied during a portion of the year. This is a great peculiarity of a Ceylon flea - he is a great colonist; and should a house be untenanted for a few months, so sure will it swarm with these "settlers." Even a grass hut built for a night's bivouac in the jungle, without a flea in the neighborhood, will literally swarm with them if deserted for a couple of months. Fleas have a great fancy for settling upon anything white; thus a person with white trowsers will be blackened with them, while a man in darker colors will be comparatively free. I at first supposed that they appeared in larger numbers on the white ground because they were more easily distinguished; but I tried the experiment of putting a sheet of writing-paper and a piece of brown talipot leaf in the midst of fleas; the paper was covered with them, while only two or three were on the talipot.

The bite of the small species of centipede alluded to is not very severe, being about equivalent to a wasp's sting. I have been bitten myself, and I have seen another person suffering from the bite, which was ludicrous enough.

The sufferer was Corporal Phinn, of H.M. Fifteenth Regiment. At that time he was one of Lieutenant de Montenach's servants, and accompanied his master on a hunting-trip to the Horton Plains.

Now Phinn was of course an Irishman; an excellent fellow, a dead hand at tramping a bog and killing a snipe, but (without the slightest intention of impugning his veracity) Phinn's ideality was largely developed. He was never by himself for five minutes in the jungle without having seen something wonderful before his return; this he was sure to relate in a rich brogue with great facetiousness.

However, we had just finished dinner one night, and Phinn had then taken his master's vacant place (there being only one room) to commence his own meal, when up he jumped like a madman, spluttering the food out of his mouth, and shouting and skipping about the room with both hands clutched tightly to the hinder part of his inexpressibles. "Oh, by Jasus! help, sir, help! I've a reptile or some divil up my breeches! Oh! bad luck to him, he's biting me! Oh! oh! it's sure a sarpint that's stinging me! quick, sir, or he'll be the death o' me!"

Phinn was frantic, and upon lowering his inexpressibles we found the centipede about four inches long which had bitten him. A little brandy rubbed on the part soon relieved the pain."

Anthology of over 100 old photos and postcards of the former French Far Eastern colonies of Cambodia, Vietnam, Tonkin, Cochin China, Annam and Laos. Daily life - trade, dancers, Hill tribes including the fierce Mois. Major cities such as Hanoi, Saigon and Phnom Penh, plus historic monuments including Angkor Wat. A digital scrapbook album in PDF format, with optional rolling slideshow functions. Nostalgic, entertaining and educational. 

Among the Tibetans, by Isabella L. Bird

Formats: Acrobat Reader (PDF); Microsoft Reader (LIT)

Isabella Lucy Bird's 1886 account of her journey by horse (and yak!) into the Himalayan kingdoms of Ladakh and Tibet. 
The original text, enhanced in ebook format, with biographical notes, illustrated with period photos and maps of Ladakh and Tibet. A fascinating cross-cultural voyage of exploration. PDF version features mock parchment paper effect.  

"After a bitterly cold night I was awakened at dawn by novel sounds, gruntings, and low, resonant bellowing round my tent, and the grey light revealed several yaks (the Bos grunniens, the Tibetan ox), the pride of the Tibetan highlands. This magnificent animal, though not exceeding an English shorthorn cow in height, looks gigantic, with his thick curved horns, his wild eyes glaring from under a mass of curls, his long thick hair hanging to his fetlocks, and his huge bushy tail. He is usually black or tawny, but the tail is often white, and is the length of his long hair. The nose is fine and has a look of breeding as well as power. He only flourishes at altitudes exceeding 12,000 feet. Even after generations of semi-domestication he is very wild, and can only be managed by being led with a rope attached to a ring in the nostrils. He disdains the plough, but condescends to carry burdens, and numbers of the Ladak and Nubra people get their living by carrying goods for the traders on his broad back over the great passes. His legs are very short, and he has a sensible way of measuring distance with his eyes and planting his feet, which enables him to carry loads where it might be supposed that only a goat could climb. He picks up a living anyhow, in that respect resembling the camel.

He has an uncertain temper, and is not favourably disposed towards his rider. Indeed, my experience was that just as one was about to mount him he usually made a lunge at one with his horns. Some of my yak steeds shied, plunged, kicked, executed fantastic movements on the ledges of precipices, knocked down their leaders, bellowed defiance, and rushed madly down mountain sides, leaping from boulder to boulder, till they landed me among their fellows. The rush of a herd of bellowing yaks at a wild gallop, waving their huge tails, is a grand sight.

My first yak was fairly quiet, and looked a noble steed, with my Mexican saddle and gay blanket among rather than upon his thick black locks. His back seemed as broad as that of an elephant, and with his slow, sure, resolute step, he was like a mountain in motion. We took five hours for the ascent of the Digar Pass, our loads and some of us on yaks, some walking, and those who suffered most from the ‘pass-poison’ and could not sit on yaks were carried. A number of Tibetans went up with us. It was a new thing for a European lady to travel in Nubra, and they took a friendly interest in my getting through all right. The dreary stretches of the ascent, though at first white with edelweiss, of which the people make their tinder, are surmounted for the most part by steep, short zigzags of broken stone. The heavens were dark with snow-showers, the wind was high and the cold severe, and gasping horses, and men prostrate on their faces unable to move, suggested a considerable amount of suffering; but all safely reached the summit, 17,930 feet, where in a snowstorm the guides huzzaed, praised their gods, and tucked rag streamers into a cairn."

From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan 

by Madame Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky. Atmospheric account of a mystical voyage through India, visiting sacred citied, temples and caves, by the notorious occultist, spiritualist and Theosophy pioneer, Madame HP Blavatsky, from 1892

Price just $2.99 to buy and download.    Formats: Acrobat Reader (PDF)

"India is the land of legends and of mysterious nooks and corners. There is not a ruin, not a monument, not a thicket, that has no story attached to it. Yet, however they may be entangled in the cobweb of popular imagination, which becomes thicker with every generation, it is difficult to point out a single one that is not founded on fact. With patience and, still more, with the help of the learned Brahmans you can always get at the truth, when once you have secured their trust and friendship.

The same road leads to the temple of the Parsee fire-worshippers. At its altar burns an unquenchable fire, which daily consumes hundredweights of sandal wood and aromatic herbs. Lit three hundred years ago, the sacred fire has never been extinguished, notwithstanding many disorders, sectarian discords, and even wars. The Parsees are very proud of this temple of Zaratushta, as they call Zoroaster. Compared with it the Hindu pagodas look like brightly painted Easter eggs. Generally they are consecrated to Hanuman, the monkey-god and the faithful ally of Rama, or to the elephant headed Ganesha, the god of the occult wisdom, or to one of the Devis. You meet with these temples in every street. Before each there is a row of pipals (Ficus religiosa) centuries old, which no temple can dispense with, because these trees are the abode of the elementals and the sinful souls. 

All this is entangled, mixed, and scattered, appearing to one's eyes like a picture in a dream. Thirty centuries have left their traces here."

Classic Japanese Geisha Girls - Vintage Postcard Scrapbook

Burma - Photos and Vintage Postcards

A beautiful collection of images from Myanmar, formerly Burma, compiled as a screen saver for Windows. Over 100 contemporary photos and old post cards of pagodas, people and places - Rangoon, Mandalay, Pagan, Lake Inle, the Irrawaddy River, Buddhist monks, statues and temples. A taste of the exotic Far East, to brighten up your screen.

These erotic Japanese vintage scrolls, accordion book, albums or boxed-set woodcut prints from the 18th, 19th and early 20th century have become much sought after collectors' items. The style and even themes of theses curvacious, bawdy comic-style designs has clearly influenced contemporary Manga graphic culture, as well as European illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley. A selection of the finest risqué prints from famous Shunga artists and schools such as Utagawa, Kunisada, Utamaro, Eisen Tomioka

Oriental Beauties - Vintage Geisha & Tribal Portrait Album