He was an evangelical explorer from Doylestown who, in 1908, was likely the first man to travel the 1,500-mile Ming section of China's Great Wall.

Bible in hand, he set out many times from the borough to check on missionary outposts a world away, on one trip covering 100,000 miles in four years, from Samoa to Fiji, up into Japan and Korea, along China's Yangtze River, through the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, west to India and across Africa.

His lectures were the Discovery Channel shows of his day. He enthralled audiences from London to Honolulu with tales of Pygmy tribes in African jungles and reformed cannibals in New Guinea.

He wrote 10 books, made thousands of glass-plate photographs, and was compared in stature to two earlier explorers, Henry Stanley and David Livingstone.

But just as quickly as William Edgar Geil rose to fame, he faded into oblivion after his death in 1925 at age 60.

There he would have remained were it not for a serendipitous turn of events involving a cache of memorabilia in a Bucks County barn and a chance e-mail to China.

Renewed enthusiasm for Geil has produced two tributes: a yearlong exhibit that opened this month at the Doylestown Historical Society, and a three-month display in Beijing last year to mark the centenary of his Great Wall trek.

"He was a classic American eccentric," said Arthur Waldron, a history professor and Great Wall expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "With a touch of genius."

Bought at auction

A bibliophile from Buckingham Township held the keys to the forgotten Geil epic.

In 1959, Walter Gustafson bought the contents of Geil's library at an estate auction after the death of his widow, Constance Emerson Geil. She had been so grief-stricken when he died that she locked away his possessions.

Gustafson stored more than 20 boxes of Geil's papers in his barn, including many of the tin bread boxes the explorer took on expeditions.

For almost 85 years, the material inside was "untouched by any other human hands," said Marilyn Gustafson Arbor, the collector's daughter and curator of the Doylestown exhibit.

Arbor and her siblings donated the collection to the historical society last year.

The gift was met with predictable puzzlement. "Everybody said, 'Who's William Geil?' " recalled Timothy Adamsky, a historian for the society.

Adamsky trolled the Internet for help. He came upon William Lindesay, a British author in Beijing and founder of International Friends of the Great Wall, a nonprofit dedicated to its preservation.

Like Geil, Lindesay had written a book about traveling the Great Wall - which is not one wall but several, with some sections dating to the 5th century B.C.

In an e-mail, Adamsky offered to "share any knowledge . . . that Geil may have hidden in the boxes."

Lindesay was shocked. For a decade, he had searched for Geil's records, reaching out to his original London publisher, to the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, even the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

Everywhere he turned, nothing.