Anton Dolenc

Anton Dolenc (Lož 1871–Split 1920), who rose to the rank of captain of a warship in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, was one of those sailors who wanted to visit as many places in the world as possible. As a cadet at the Naval Academy in Rijeka, he travelled around the world on the Austro-Hungarian corvette Saida between 1890 and 1892. His travelogues from this trip were published in the literary magazine Ljubljanski zvon. Later, he travelled to America on the private light two-masted ship Taormina, and in 1909–1910 he visited East Asia on the Austro-Hungarian light cruiser Leopard. Like other station ships based in East Asia, the Leopard sailed between Chinese and Japanese ports. It sailed up the Yangtze River to the port of Hankou. However, Anton Dolenc wanted to visit other places in the interior of China, so before the ship began the return voyage home, he disembarked at the port of Qingdao. From there he travelled by train to Tianjin, and then to Beijing and Mukden (today Shenyang). He continued his journey by train via Moscow to Vienna.

Anton brought back several objects from his trip to East Asia, but the limitations on what he could carry by train meant that most of them were small, such as the handles of the short Japanese kozuka knives, postcards, snuff bottles and mandarin hat buttons. Today, these items are kept at the Maritime Museum in Piran and the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana. Anton Dolenc had no children. He was very close to his siblings and their families, with whom he corresponded frequently.