Dressed in a three-piece suit and tie, Carl Stearns Clancy circumnavigated the globe on a single-gear motorbike

He was impressed by the ‘quiet, respectful, courteous and neat’ Chinese he found in Hong Kong

It was going to be the “longest, most difficult, and most perilous motor­cycle journey ever attempted”. At least, that was the opinion published by The Bicycling World and Motorcycle Review when it hit American news stands in the autumn of 1912.