Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860–1939) was an English travel writer, artist, and philanthropist, best known for her illustrated accounts of journeys through China, Central Asia, Korea, and the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kemp studied art, including at the Slade School and in Paris, and that training shaped the distinctive watercolour and pen-and-ink illustrations that accompanied her travel narratives; she illustrated most of her own books rather than relying on photographs alone. She undertook extensive expeditions across the Chinese interior, Manchuria, Korea, Russian and Chinese Turkestan, and Macedonia and the Balkans, often travelling in periods of political instability. Her major works include The Face of China (1909), The Face of Manchuria, Korea and Russian Turkestan (1911), Wanderings in Chinese Turkestan (1914), and Chinese Mettle (1921), along with accounts of the Balkans and Macedonia drawn from her earlier travels. Her writing combined ethnographic and landscape observation with commentary on missionary work, education, and the political upheavals she witnessed, including the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and China's early republican period. Kemp was a committed supporter of women's education in China, contributing to the founding and support of women's colleges there, work that reflected her broader interest in Christian missionary and educational causes in Asia. She is remembered today primarily as a travel writer and illustrator whose books offer a female European perspective on early twentieth-century Asia, valued both for their narrative detail and for the artwork documenting places rarely seen by Western audiences at the time.
3 works on Textopian