LONDON — In 1922, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Einstein set out with his wife, Elsa, on a five-and-a-half-month odyssey of discovery of a new world: the Far East and Middle East.

Along the way, he was feted by a Japanese empress and had an audience with the king of Spain. He also kept a travel diary, noting in stark, often racist terms his impressions of the people he encountered on stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, China, Japan, India and Palestine.

The personal writings do not only reveal the musings of a man grappling with a jolt to his view of the world. They also expose “Einstein’s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race,” according to Princeton University Press, which has published the first full English-language edition.

The first volume in a planned series — his writings were previously available in German — is now available under the title “The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein.” It complicates the portrait of a man often described as the most brilliant physicist of the modern era.