Ella Maillart (1903-1997), a Swiss writer, journalist, photographer and traveller, was born in Geneva, Switzerland. A youth of skiing, hockey, reading adventure books, and sailing the Mediterranean with Hermine de Saussure (‘Miette’) led to Maillart helming for Switzerland in the 1924 Olympics. After various jobs, including teaching English in Wales, she moved to Belin in 1929 where she met Russian refugees. This inspired a trip to Russia and the Caucuses in 1930, providing material for her first book ‘Among Russian Youth’ (1932).
In 1934-35, the newspaper Le Petit Parisien, which specializes in reports from far-flung places, sends Ella to China to investigate Japanese-occupied Manchuria. There her path crosses that of Peter Fleming, a brilliant journalist for The Times, whom she had met in London in 1934. In Peking, she meets Father Teilhard de Chardin. She intends to find out about forbidden Chinese Turkestan: nobody knows what has been happening in this region for the past four years. She decides to go and see, and from there to gain India by Sin-kiang and the Karakoram. The explorer Sven Hedin advises her to go through northern Tibet and the Tsaidam. The route is so difficult there that the Chinese government did not think of prohibiting it. This was the itinerary she would take with Peter Fleming. In February 1935, they leave Peking for the interior of China, with permits as far as the Koko Nor region. From there, in order to avoid military controls and the authority of provincial governors, they will set out into the "great unknown”. After crossing the Tsaidam highlands, of extreme poverty and a violent climate, they will enter Sin-kiang and join, by the Silk Road, the Pamir.
Seven months after leaving Peking they arrive in Srinagar, Kashmir, at the end of an amazing raid through one of the most secret regions of the globe. Upon seeing her again on her return to Paris, Paul Morand wrote: “The one I mean is a woman in sheepskin boots, gloved with mittens, her complexion baked by the altitude and the desert wind, who explores inaccessible regions with Chinese, Tibetans, Russians, and Englishmen, whose socks she mends, whose wounds she dresses, and with whom she sleeps in complete innocence under the stars… And this woman is Ella Maillart.” This experience is narrated in ‘Forbidden Journey’ (1937).
Ella continued to travel for the Petit Parisien until 1939: Turkey and India, through Iran and Afghanistan, by truck and bus, collecting, along the way, notes for articles on the progress made in these countries. She gave lectures in several European countries.
Ella Maillart spends the years of the Second World War in India, living with difficulty on her royalties. Returning to Europe at the end of the war, Ella Maillart settled in the Val d'Anniviers in Chandolin, while pursuing her travels around the world. The last decades of her life were marked by her concern for the many ecological issues and the future of this planet that she so deeply admired. Ella Maillart died in Chandolin on March 27, 1997.
More information:
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