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This introduction outlines the background and contexts of this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from the Borders and Crossings 2019 conference held at the University of Leicester on 4-6 July 2019. The introduction details the history of this long-running conference series, and its previous role as a source of travel writing studies publications. As the conference organisers, the authors explain the rationales which guided their development of the 2019 conference, in particular an emphasis on bringing critical and creative approaches into the same space, and encouraging presenters and attendees from a wide range of backgrounds. The introduction briefly considers the likely significance for travel writing practice and scholarshipas well as for the Borders and Crossings series itselfof the COVID-19 pandemic, and provides a brief summary of the selection of articles, based on papers originally presented at the conference, included in this issue.

The “upas tree” is one of the most enduring European myths about Southeast Asia. Accounts of a tree so toxic that it renders the surrounding atmosphere deadly can first be identified in fourteenth-century journey narratives covering what is now Indonesia. But while most other such apocrypha vanished from later European accounts of the region, the upas myth remained prominent and in fact became progressively more elaborate and fantastical, culminating in a notorious hoax: the 1783 account of J. N. Foersch. This article examines the history of the development of the upas myth, and considers the divergent responses to Foersch’s hoax amongst scientists and colonial administrators on the one hand, and poets, playwrights, and artists on the other. In this it reveals a significant tension within the emerging “Orientalist” discourse about Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century.

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