Even direct travel failed to dispel travelers’ romanticized image of the East.

Evidence

During his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land in 1836, American traveler John Lloyd Stephens wrote, One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade away; the gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes melt into nothing; but I still clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert; their temperament and abstinence, their contented poverty and contempt for luxuries, as approaching the true nobility of man’s nature and sustaining the poetry of the “land of the East.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 45

Categorization

• QUESTION: Stephens is powerful evidence that image can outlast direct contact — the ‘fear without an object’ thesis in miniature. Worth chasing more first-contact disconfirmation accounts.
• XREF: connects to: Mass post-1970 travel defused the political stakes of the lost East — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 1380; Travel yields little the traveler did not already possess perceptively — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 661