Owen Lattimore's Desert Road

 

In early January 2020, I bought myself a copy of Owen Lattimore’s The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929) in the gorgeous treasure house of books which is Isseido Bookstore in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s famous ‘book town’ district. It was a travelogue which I had long been wanting to read, but 2020 had other plans. I left it at our home in Tokyo and then found myself stuck 9,000 miles away, unable to return as I then found myself living under ‘lockdown’ in the UK during the Corona virus pandemic which seemed to stop the world in its tracks. It was well over a year and a half before I was reunited with my copy of Lattimore’s first published work, but it was well worth the wait. Owen Lattimore’s Desert Road is a truly magical book.

 

My copy is the Kodansha reissue of 1995, which contains Lattimore’s own updated Introduction from 1975, plus an additional Introduction written by his son, David Lattimore (Professor of Chinese Studies at Brown University in the USA). In this edition it’s interesting to read how the older Owen Lattimore looks back and reviews a work written while he was a young man. Re-evaluating some of its faults and weaknesses – faults which he deems were due either to his young age and inexperience, and/or due to the tenor of the times in which it was written. He says “there is […] a kind of condescension that makes me wince today, 45 years later when I read some of the pages – a once-fashionable condescension of ‘the white man among the natives.’ I particularly regret some of the patronising remarks about my loyal companion, ‘Moses’, because they belong to the bad old tradition of praising the ‘faithful native servant’ as an indirect way of building up one’s superiority. There are also passages that show that in spite of my love of venturing into the deep interior, I had by no means thrown off the social snobbery and appalling political insensitivity of the Treaty Port foreigner on the coast of China in the 1920s.” (p. xxvi)

 

That said though, Lattimore’s book is far less condescending than some of his contemporaries, such as the plant hunter, Reginald Farrer, for example, whose ‘humorous’ descriptions of the locals he hires in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands repeatedly reduces them to racist caricatures and simplistic clichés. Farrer and Lattimore were both men in their twenties at the time they wrote their travelogues; but, unlike Lattimore who lived a long life, Farrer died young (whilst travelling on one of his journeys), so we’ll never know if like Lattimore he may have grown to regret and revise the opinions of his younger self. Lattimore owns up to his overly “bookish” attempts (as he puts it) to impress his reader, viewing his first published work as “a young man’s effort, sometimes too strained an effort, to show how much he knows, how thoroughly he has mastered his problems, how deeply he has penetrated the lives of people whose nature the reader could never understand without his help.” (p. xxvi) However, his younger self was perhaps more perceptive than his older self gives him credit for. Certainly, he was more honest and open than a great many of his peers in one major respect, as the book’s original Preface attests; where he notes he has consciously attempted to avoid a “tendency, regrettably marked among my own countrymen, to omit all references [to other travellers, such as Nikolay Przhevalsky and Pyotr Kozlov], thus giving the vicious implication that one has been travelling in totally unexplored and unmapped countries.” (p.xxxv)

 

The Desert Road to Turkestan was a book which marked the beginning of a transformation in Lattimore’s life and livelihood. It certainly helped to launch him on a long and distinguished academic career. A career which was the envy of some of his contemporaries, who attempted to severely malign him in the suspiciously paranoid and febrile atmosphere of McCarthy era America during the 1950s. Born in the USA in 1900, Lattimore had grown up in China where his father worked as a businessman in Tianjin. And, like many children born to ‘Treaty Port’ foreigners, he was sent overseas to school, first in Switzerland and then in England. Returning to China, he entered employment in Arnhold & Co.’s import-export company. But unlike other foreigners residing in China at the time, Lattimore actively studied Chinese and Mongolian, a character trait which his family joked was due to the fact that he simply couldn’t “bear not to know what other people are saying.” His job as a commercial agent required him to travel, a role in which his abilities as a polylinguist were a real advantage. It was one such journey, “to expedite a wool shipment,” which led him to the railhead at Hohhot (Kuei-hua), where modern transportation reached its furthest extent and gave way to the older modes transit which had hitherto sustained the commerce between China and Central Asia for centuries, the place where great long caravans of camels set out across the steppes of Mongolia, following the much fabled ‘Silks Roads’ heading west. Lattimore was transfixed. He realised this was a way of life which was teetering on the cusp of great change.

 

“It was a strange thing to walk in those markets, feeling the pulses of the life led through inenarrable yesterdays by the farthest-going caravans, and knowing the shadow of tomorrow would distort all their type and character. When the camel man has done up his bundle, he shambles away out of the city as if he were expecting to stroll home within half an hour; but he plods on until he finds the camp where the caravan waits behind the hills with its camels at pasture, until its complement of loads be filled; when camp is broken, he plods away again until he fetches up in Central Asia; for the men of his calling, by leaving their houses and pitching tents, depart with no more ado from the civilization of telegraphs and newspapers, bayonets and martial law, into a secret and distant land of which they only know the doors.” (p.27)

 

Eleanor & Owen Lattimore

Oddly enough this journey was actually Lattimore’s honeymoon, yet he travelled alone with the caravan men across Mongolia. His wife, Eleanor Holgate Lattimore, likewise travelled alone – departing from Manchuria, heading to ‘Chinese Turkestan’ (Xinjiang) through Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. Rendezvousing in Xinjiang the newly-weds travelled onwards together, through the Karakorum mountains to India via Ladakh, even though the internecine rivalries between Chinese warlords which around this time in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 frequently flared up in chaotic bouts of fighting meant this would likely be a hazardous undertaking. Eleanor later published her own travelogue, Turkestan Reunion (1934), which travels in tandem to Owen’s Desert Road, based on her letters written during the journey. The couple returned to China once more after a brief stay in America, travelling through Manchuria. Owen wrote about this journey in his second travelogue, High Tartary (1930). Returning to Mongolia in the 1930s, Lattimore continued to observe and reflect upon the influence of Chinese settlers on the traditional way of life of the nomadic pastoralists whom the Chinese were increasingly displacing. 

 

 

Although he had sat and passed the entrance exam for Oxford, Lattimore never went to university because he was unsuccessful in attaining the scholarship which he would have needed to support himself during his studies. This missed opportunity, however, certainly never held him back. Indeed, soon after it was published, The Desert Road to Turkestan was duly noted for its scholarly merits. As his son, David, recounts: “In America, the Social Sciences Research Council, imaginatively judging the book equivalent to a Ph.D., awarded my father a year of ‘postdoctoral’ study in anthropology at Harvard University. More grants followed for further travel and study in China and Inner Asia, one from the Harvard-Yenching Institute and two successive ones from the Guggenheim Foundation.” It was perhaps an astute rather than ‘imaginative’ award, because anyone reading The Desert Road surely can’t help but take notice and admire the deft and very subtle way in which Lattimore manages to interweave highly perceptive strands of several allied subject areas – combining geography with history and anthropology, and these in turn with etymology and language, as well as relevant nods to contemporary politics – all within the first-hand narration of a singular and unusual journey. The Desert Road very ably records what was certainly an arduous journey made at a unique point in time. It’s this combination of elements, along with Lattimore’s quietly understated talent as a writer, which today makes this book a genuine classic.

 

 

When I began reading it, I expected Lattimore to be erudite and interesting. I’d already dipped into his most famous scholarly work, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940). But what I’d not really expected was for him to be such affable company while travelling on The Desert Road. There are several points where his humour shines through marvellously. To give just two examples, remarkably both from the same chapter of the book: – the first is his recounting of his conversation with a doctor friend prior to setting out, in which Owen is seeking advice on maintaining a healthy diet while travelling with the camel caravan, and what preparations he should make ahead of his journey:

 

“Now my stomach is a prideful organ that has always urged me to let it try anything once, and has usually liked it. Nevertheless, when I returned to Peking, I took that same stomach to a friend of mine who was a doctor with Mongolian experience and asked him what I should put into it. The doctor thought of a lot of things. He drew up a wonderful list in which the proportions of the proteins and the carbohydrates and the what-nots were superbly balanced. Then he checked it by the dietary of the American Navy (for he was versed in many things besides Mongolia), saw that it was good, and made some additions. Afterward I checked it with a check book and made some subtractions. Finally we arrived at a ‘modus edendi.’ Of the original theory on which the regimen was based I seem to remember only that the American Navy can keep afloat (if pushed, as the saying goes) on baked beans and what are Americonautically called “canned” tomatoes.

               Although a layman, I take a really intelligent interest in my gastric juices. Therefore, when the doctor had squared his idea of what I should buy with my idea of what I should pay, and announced that the calories, at any rate, would be no disgrace to the American Navy, I made bold to ask him how I stood on vitamins, the A and the B, or both, or either. I told him roundly that tinned vegetables were deficient in vitamins. Nor could he deny it. We pondered the vitamins with silent gloom and a whiskey-soda. At last the doctor said: ‘Well, anyway, America was largely civilized by the canned tomato.’ To which I answered … but no matter. The American Navy has been getting very large of late.” (p. 164)

 

Lattimore's dog, Suji (eating from a dead camel carcass?)

My other example rather reminds me of a very memorable passage in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, coincidentally not so long after Lattimore’s Desert Road – in which Orwell meditates on the probable evolution and hence eventual dilution of the efficacy of the F word as a particularly versatile and pungently pugnacious swear word. Lattimore ponders the vernacular in a similar vein, observing:

 

“It is a pity that even in this age of experiment a treatise on swearing would have to be privately printed, because language that is robustly and originally foul is almost always achieved by startling combinations of words that look so disgusting. It is a still greater pity that the disguised use of swearing in print should have led to all kinds of sham. I do not mean so much things in the style of ‘d---!’ or ‘The captain swore a frightful oath. ‘Confound you!’ he said turning on his heel.’ I mean serious and active falsity in our literature, which was revealed to me while pondering an attempt to Bowdlerize the strong talk of the Kuei-hua camel men without emasculating it. What I cannot away with is the spurious ornament and gingerbread ‘picturesqueness’ of our versions of Persian, Egyptian, Arabic, Hindu, and Oriental cursing generally. In that hour of mental exertion it was forced on my understanding that the ruck of those rococo expressions must be not only related in kind but identical in word with many of the raw formulae of the caravan men. They have, I can only suppose, very little of that artful sophistication they have assumed in English. What is ko-p’ao! jih ta tsu-tsu! (a favourite address to a camel) but ‘O base-born son of a shameless ancestry!’ Yet literally (and, except for the comparatively little-known dialect of the northwest, I have selected an Easy Example for Beginners) it is ‘Bastard! – his ancestors!’

               It is at that word in blank that we stick. ‘Defile’ is in some measure a version; but it is not a full rendering, not a flat-footed, absolute translation.” (pp. 153-154)

 

I can’t help wondering what Lattimore would have made of them had he lived long enough to read the works of Irvine Welsh … ?

 

Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart at Gilgit, 1935.

The Desert Road to Turkestan had a significant influence on subsequent travellers to the region, perhaps most notably on Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, for whom the book was both an inspiration and a guide. Fleming and Maillart, both very young but experienced solo travellers, combined forces to make a journey through Xinjiang around ten to fifteen years after Lattimore made his journey through Mongolia. They were journalists, each respectively working for British and French newspapers at the time, who each subsequently wrote their own travelogues of their shared journey. It’s fascinating to read Fleming’s News from Tartary (1936) alongside Maillart’s Forbidden Journey (1937), simply to see how a single journey can differ so greatly in simple terms of personal perspective. Each disavowed any intentions to claim that they were ‘serious explorers’, claiming that their journey was an entirely ad hoc one which succeeded simply through luck and good fortune rather than by means of meticulous planning and preparation. Nonetheless, their journey was commended by more experienced veterans of the Desert Road, notably Sir Eric Teichman, who chronicled his own journey in a book titled, Journey to Turkistan (1937), and, of course, by Owen Lattimore himself.

 

Fleming’s book is nonchalantly laid back in tone, never seeming to take the journey seriously; an affected attitude which some have taken to be a cover for the fact that he was really making the journey in order to gather intelligence for the British Secret Service (his brother, Ian Fleming, was famously the writer and creator of James Bond, 007). Maillart’s book, in contrast, is much more reflective and romantic in tone; clearly the vast open spaces she travelled through, as well as the places and people she encountered, touched her heart deeply; and indeed, she continued to travel in Central Asia for many years thereafter. She subsequently made another famous shared journey, this time travelling through Afghanistan, travelling in company with fellow Swiss writer and photographer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom Maillart calls ‘Christina’ in her book, The Cruel Way (1947). Lattimore certainly thought very highly of Maillart, both as a traveller and a writer.

 

Ella 'Kini' Maillart

Given Lattimore’s unusual entré into academia, it is perhaps not so surprising to discover that his scholarly career was equally unusual. His academic life was suitably adventurous, and in many ways it remained as independently motivated as his first journey with Mongolia’s caravan men. It brought him into the orbit of some of the era’s most prominent and powerful statesmen. He met Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai in the 1930s, before they came to power in China. And he was appointed by American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Second World War to act as a foreign adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, who was then the President of the Republic of China. And though Lattimore’s politcial analysis differed little in substance from that of other official US China watchers at the time, his access to such individuals and some of his alleged political sympathies with the left enabled a shadow of doubt to be cast over his underlying aims and intentions. 

Owen Lattimore with Chiang Kai-shek

As such, he was suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies and accused of being the top Soviet spy operating covertly in the United States by Senators Joseph McCarthy and Pat McCarran. A lengthy Congressional Investigation meticulously picked through everything he wrote himself and commissioned from other writers and academics whilst he was working for the Institute of Pacific Relations as the editor of its journal, Pacific Affairs. No conclusive proof, however, was found at the time or since to prove the allegations; and despite the support of friends and colleagues during the tortuous course of the various hearings, Lattimore’s name and career in the US never really recovered from what he described in a book of the same title, as an Ordeal by Slander (1950). Consequently, in 1963 he moved to the UK where he took up an appointment to found a new Department of Chinese Studies (now East Asian Studies) at Leeds University, where he also established a programme of Mongolian Studies, a subject he remained devoted to even in the years after he retired. He spent much of the remainder of his life in Europe and Mongolia rather than the USA, although he died and was buried there in 1989.

 

Owen Lattimore during the McCarthy Era Congressional Investigations

During his lifetime he received due recognition and many academic honours, and his scholarly work still resonates with students and specialists across many disciplines today because he retains that far-reaching, transcendental sense of perception which seems an essential prerequisite in making truly original connections. Lattimore’s work has since been built upon, continued and diversified in more recent years by many notable scholars, such as James Millward, Peter Perdue, and Alfred J. Rieber, to name only a few. And as Peter Perdue has observed, “Modern historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have revised many of Lattimore’s arguments, but they still rely on his insights. All of the themes addressed by Lattimore continue to inspire world historians today.”

 

Indeed, despite his own self-referential criticisms of his younger authorial self in The Desert Road to Turkestan, I think there is still much to be learned from his first book – not least in terms of his mindset and his methodology, but also from his authorial manner; it is his patience and his curiosity allied together in the way in which he conducts himself and couches his observations which establish him as a master of his chosen métier. Setting his pace in time with that of the caravan plodding along the Desert Road, he walks with steady, well-paced assurance, with an open eye which remains trained to the horizon at all times. In many ways, reflecting on his background in relation to his remarkable life, beginning from relatively humble, if unusual, circumstances, and his highly accomplished career which managed to endure such extremes of adversity, I think it’s a fair claim to make, that Lattimore’s writings show that true scholars are both born and self-made.

 

~

Mongolia - On The Edge of the Gobi, 1975.

In 1975 Owen Lattimore advised and narrated two documentary films about Mongolia made for Granada Television’s “Disappearing World” series. These two films, plus a two-hour long interview with Lattimore by anthropologists, Caroline Humphrey and Alan Macfarlane in 1983, help to give a clear view of Lattimore as a person. His speaking voice was no less beautifully clear and measured than his written voice, it is a real joy to be able to hear him speak in what remain as a series of fascinating films and conversations. I have collated a ‘playlist’ of these documentaries and interviews on YouTube, which you can access here.

 

Mongolia - The City On The Steppes, 1975.

~

 

Owen Lattimore, 1967.

Further Reading

 

Charles Forsdick, ‘Peter Fleming & Ella Maillart in China: Travel Writing as Stereoscopic and Polygraphic Form,’ in Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2009), pp. 293-303

Caroline Humphrey & David Sneath, The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999)

Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016)

James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2005)

Peter C. Perdue, ‘Owen Lattimore:World Historian’, in Oxford Handbooks Online: Scholarly Research Reviews, 2018.

Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

William T. Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 66, No. 3 (August, 2007), pp. 759-786

 

 

 

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

Hyperbole Most Florid – Reginald Farrer & William Purdom

Salween: Black River of Tibet – Ronald Kaulback & John Hanbury-Tracy

Retracing the Silk Road

“It seemed to me a little hard that I should have had only this one chance of seeing one of the remotest places of the earth [Etsina / Kara Khoto], and, passing almost within hail, yet pass it sight unseen. It made me wonder how much more I might have seen and learned, had I been a Competent Traveler, with all the assistance of lavish funds and the cordial regard of legations. As it was, the fortune I followed was no more than the fortune of travel in company with the trading caravans – the haphazard life among men whose very going forth and coming in is a survival from forgotten ages, and is as regardless of outer things; men sometimes closed-lipped and sometimes free-spoken, whose fragmentary legends of immemorial tradition are like dim lights flickering down long corridors of ignorance.” (pp. 193-194)

Owen Lattimore, on the Desert Road, 1926