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Peking to Paris History
In 1907 five teams of intrepid motorists embarked upon the most gruelling motor challenge at that time – to drive their cars from Peking to Paris. The journey was over eight thousand miles long, crossing two largely roadless continents and lasting eighty days.
Figures alone can not do this journey justice. Indeed it is probably the most heroic adventure in the history of the motor car. Nothing like it had ever been accomplished before and no contests so extraordinary have been held since or indeed can ever be held again. The experts said the thing was impossible, because it had never been done before. Men and cars proved them wrong.
When the challenge was first announced by the popular newspaper Le Matin in Paris, - the proposal was laughed at by most of the experts and the motoring press as both impossible and ridiculous. Nevertheless, on 10th June, 1907, five pioneering motorists answered the call for what was the longest, most brutal auto race to date.
Their route lay across China, Mongolia, Siberia, Russia, Poland, and Germany into France, almost all of it entirely roadless even by 1907 standards. Much of it passing over mountain ranges and trackless deserts was completely unknown. In parts there were rugged tracks made by pack animals but these were often flooded or feet deep in mud: in parts there was nothing but uncharted waste.
The original event bore only a family resemblance to a rally; there were no marshals or fixed route and positions were calculated from telegraphs sent back by competitors from the towns through which they passed. The cars lacked even such basic amenities such as roofs and front brakes - but four of the five crews finally arrived in Paris, having overcome every conceivable hazard of intense cold and blazing heat, of mountain passes and bridgeless rivers, of desert, sand and snow. It is a story to make the most ardent trial enthusiast shudder.
The event won by Prince Borghese in a specially prepared Ital.
The second Peking Paris event took place in 1997 and followed a southerly route from China to Paris, passing through Nepal, Iran and Turkey among other interesting and exotic places and the third 10 years later in 2007.
Though the 2010 event does not follow exactly the same route as used by the intrepid prince and his less well funded and thus even more intrepid opponents it does keep to a similar area as the 1907 event.
