Beijing to Paris

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Map of the route covered

The Beijing – Paris auto race was a rally for automobiles that was held in 1907 over the nearly 16,000 km distance from Beijing ( China ) to Paris ( France ).

The Beijing – Paris race

The idea for the race came from the Paris newspaper Le Matin , which published a request on January 31, 1907: “What remains to be proven today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and get anywhere can add. Is there anyone who will take an automobile trip from Beijing to Paris this summer? "

40 participants registered for the race, but ultimately only five teams managed to ship their vehicles to Beijing. Although the racing committee then canceled the race, it started anyway. The vehicles left the Chinese capital at 8:00 a.m. on June 10.

There were no rules for the race, the only thing that was certain was that whoever reached Paris first in his car would win a magnum bottle from Mumm - champagne . Without any support from signposts or advance teams, the race led through countries completely unknown to the drivers, in which there were often no roads, let alone reliable maps. In order to be able to supply the drivers with fuel at all, petrol barrels were brought from Beijing on camels to stations that were set up along the route.

The race was held at a time when cars were fairly new, and ran through remote areas of Central Asia , where people were largely unfamiliar with motorized means of transport. The winner of the race was the Italian Prince Scipione Borghese , accompanied by his mechanic and chauffeur Ettore Guizzardi and the reporter Luigi Barzini from Corriere della Sera . Barzini reported continuously from the race, which was made possible by the fact that parts of Borghese's route followed the telegraph lines that already existed in China and Siberia. Borghese's vehicle was an Itala with 7,433 cc and 45 hp. With him the Italians reached Paris on August 10th, expected by journalists, photographers and a large crowd.

Dangers of the road: The Itala of Borghese / Giuzzardi / Barzini collapsed on a bridge

Charles Goddard came second on a Spyker who had no money himself and therefore had to ask others for fuel and borrow his car. He arrived in the French capital on August 30th.

Some of the other cars struggled up ravines, through mud, quicksand, and over bridges not designed for vehicles. The Contal -Dreirad by Auguste Pons stayed in the Gobi Desert stuck and was not recovered, the crew had the good fortune to be found alive by nomads. In 1908 Barzini published the book La metà del mondo vista da un automobile - da Pechino a Parigi in 60 giorni , which was illustrated with his reportage photos.

Attendees

  • Winner: Scipione Borghese / Ettore Guizzardi on Itala
  • Second: Charles Goddard / Jean du Taillis on Spyker
  • Auguste Pons on Contal, not at the finish
  • Georges Cormier on De Dion-Bouton , not at the finish
  • Victor Collignon on De Dion-Bouton, not at the finish
The Itala is pulled in the field

Paris race 1908

A similar race took place in 1908, but this time starting on February 12th in New York City . The route led west across the USA, by ship to Japan and finally, comparable to the Beijing-Paris race, through Siberia via Moscow to Paris. One of the participants was Auguste Pons, who had already taken part in the previous race.

The winner was the American George Schuster. He arrived in Paris on July 30, 1908, 169 days after leaving New York. The distance covered was approximately 21,470 km.

literature

  • Luigi Barzini: Beijing - Paris in the Automobile: A Race through Asia and Europe in Sixty Days, with an introduction by Prince Scipione Borghese , reprint of the original edition from 1908, Monsenstein and Vannerdat , 2007, ISBN 978-3-938568-55-2 ( Paperback edition: Monsenstein and Vannerdat, 2007, ISBN 978-3-938568-56-9 )
  • Danilo Elia: Echt Abgefahren , National Geographic Germany, 2007, ISBN 978-3-89405-834-0 .
  • Peter Höner, Michel Zumbrunn: Beijing – Paris Rally 1907–2007 , Orell Füssli, 2007, ISBN 978-3-280-06103-9 .
  • Mervyn Kaufman: The race to Beat them All (Peking - Paris, 1907); in Automobile Quarterly ISSN  0005-1438 , Volume IV, No. 2 (1965), p. 200 ff

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Schuster, Tom Mahoney: The longest car race in the world - New York-Moscow-Paris (1908) . Stuttgart: Motorbuchverlag, 1997 (reprint from 1968). ISBN 3-613-87162-9 .

Web links

Commons : Peking to Paris  - Collection of images, videos and audio files