Win Java, The Garden Of The East Rendered By Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore Disseminated As Paper Copy

Scidmore's account of her travel to Java, I cannot help but compare her work with that of Augusta de Wit's Java: Facts and Fancies.
Both were published around the same time and both illuminated the ins and outs of traveling and to a certain extent, living ins Java in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.

Yet, whereas de Wit'sperhaps due to her Dutch Indies background, she was after all born in Sumatraempathetically captured and described the everyday life of "orang blanda" adopting custom and practices more suited to the tropics than to Europe, Scidmore was unambiguously harsher in tone toward the attitudes of whitemen and women in the Netherlands East Indies.
An exact sentiment she also directed toward other ethnic groups that lived side by side with the

Javanese,

Despite the shortcomings on what I feel is the author's thinlyveiled racial prejudicethis seminal work, after all, is a product of theth centuryScidmore's exquisite writing provides a vignette of a time and life long gone and mostly forgotten.

Eliza Rumaha Scidmore was born October,in Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America and died November,in Geneva, Switzerland.
She was a journalist and a traveller and spent long periods in in Alaska, Japan, China, Java and India, In this book about Java written in, Scidmore, who clearly loved the subject is very enthusiastic about the country and the traditions that have made Java such a unique place.
It still remains a little known country nowadays but by reading Eliza Scidmore, we are transported to the beauty of the tropical gardens, the volcanoes, the magnificent buddhist temple of Borobudur, the impact of the conquest by Islam, its unique culture and so many places that I bet you did not even know they existed.
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