Nineteenth-century Victorian travellers in Northeast Asia were consistently captivated by the Ainu people indigenous to the Okhotsk region. In an age characterized by popular adventure fiction in which the trope of discovering a ‘lost white tribe’ figured prominently, it was perhaps not surprising that the Ainu, who were ethnically distinct from the neighbouring Japanese, would be described as ‘white,’ ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Aryan’ in a large body of travel writing and scientific texts. Why, then, did two of the longest English-language accounts of the Ainu published during this period show no interest in Ainu ‘whiteness’ and virtually none in questions of racial classification? Published the same year (1893) by two very different men, British-American humanitarian doctor Benjamin Douglas Howard and Italian-British provocateur and artist Henry Savage Landor, these books repeat hackneyed tropes of primitiveness, but remain surprisingly uninterested in explicit questions of race. This is particularly striking in that Landor later included a ‘lost white tribe’ episode in an account of his travels in the Philippines (1904). This article uses these works to reflect on the social constructedness of racial categorizations even in contexts far removed from their authors’ home society.