W a y m a r k s ~: 2021

1 December 2021

Wonders of the World

When I was around the age of eleven or twelve years old, a very kind neighbour gave me a set of old books. Published variously around the 1920s and 1930s, they had beautiful bindings. Their titles mostly related to a range of similar topics: archaeology, the natural world, travel. I recall a few them: A History of Roman Britain; The Countryside Companion; and, A Journey through the Holy Land and the Levant. But there was one book in particular which fascinated me – it was a large and weighty tome with warm, antique red-coloured covers. It had an image of the Buddha embossed upon its spine, and a three-quarter view of the Acropolis similarly embossed on its cover, suggesting the words this book contained might combine the twinned qualities of serenity and wisdom. The pages within promised to reveal the knowledge of past ages and far-away places. The book’s title, written in gilt lettering on the spine, hinted that such gnostic notions might in fact be true. From the comforts of an armchair, when stuck indoors on a rainy day, this book was the perfect companion. A book in which to lose oneself while leafing through its pages, yellowed with slow passing time. It was a book to peruse and explore. And it is a book which I still own and which I still enjoy poring over today. Its title is simply: Wonders of the World.

Filled with an encyclopaedic wealth of articles, illustrated with grainy black and white photographs, and the occasional colour-plate, usually a painting of a beautiful view – Wonders of the World describes itself as: “A popular and authentic account of the marvels of nature and of men as they exist to-day.” There is no list of authors next to its table of contents, although I believe other (later?) editions credit the various contributors, some of whom were the most popular travel writers of their day, writers such as Sir Harry Johnston and Perceval Landon. The book’s ‘Foreword’, however, is appended by the signature of Sir Philip Gibbs, KBE. Although now largely forgotten, Gibbs was a prolific and very popular writer during his time. Perhaps best known for his forthright anti-war stance which he expressed in a number of newspaper correspondence pieces and books, such as The Realities of War, which was published in the USA under the title, Now It Can Be Told (1920). Highly critical of modern trench warfare, his journalistic work aimed to expose the full horrors of the First World War, raising the level of public awareness when official Government censorship was finally lifted, and strongly advocating for greater efforts to be made in mediating international confrontations through means of diplomacy. Something which he believed should be the most essential role of the League of Nations.

There is certainly a range of different voices in evidence, but the written tone of the anonymously authored articles collected in Wonders of the World is uniformly neat and clipped, rather like that of a chirpy narrator accompanying an old British Movietone News bulletin or Pathé newsreel. There is no publication date given in the book, but a written inscription dated 1933 in my copy suggests it was published around the late 1920s, or perhaps very early 1930s. It is a book embodying a certain sort of global outlook, a book born of the age of Western imperialism. A book which marvels at the power and spectacle of nature, and a book which takes pride in the ingenuity of mankind and ‘progress’, as much as it values reflecting on the past. Asking where have we come from, where are we now, and where are we going? – Reflecting the times in which the book was made, it is resonant with the kind of voices I heard from my grandparent’s generation. And, by strange coincidence, the book was published by Odhams, who were based in Watford from 1935, and who later merged with Sun Printers, where my grandfather worked until his retirement.

Perhaps it was only natural then, just as now – when reading Wonders of the World, I often hear its words sounding in my head as if spoken in the voice of the elderly neighbour who gifted it to me. Mr and Mrs C., were an elderly couple who lived across the street. They’d taken me under their wing when I’d got to know them at a Christmas gathering in one of our neighbour’s houses. They very kindly gave me an open invitation to pop round whenever I liked to see them, and so, every once in a while, I’d stroll over to their house and ring the doorbell. Welcoming me inside, I’d often help Mr C. tinkering in his garage, where he taught me how to use a soldering iron and other basic metalworking skills. He gave me some of the first few tools I’d ever owned which we’d refurbished together from the rusty old things which we found buried in his garage, tools that had long lain unused and unloved. He always wore an old RAF beret to protect the thin strands of his neatly brylcreemed hair and a brown coat to protect his immaculately clean shirt and tie from the many greasy black marks it had acquired over time. There was a spare brown coat for me to wear too, similarly redolent with the smell of oil and grease, if a little on the large size.

Mr C.’s garage was a veritable Aladdin’s cave of light or model engineering. Precision tools, such as a mini-lathe, which he worked with dexterous hands; enlivened by the sparks struck from fast spinning grinding wheels and the sound of electric motors driving drills, circular saws, and polishing mops. I learnt a lot of the skills from him which I’d later put to good use in making mounts for museum objects. I very fondly remember the fun of afternoons spent pottering away in there with him, working together on some project or other, particularly on a warm, rainy day with the garage doors propped open to keep the place safely aired.

Afterwards, we’d go back indoors, washing the persistent black dirt off our hands and sometimes our faces too! – We’d then sit relaxing in the lounge with Mrs C., looking out over their well-kept garden with its neatly trimmed green lawn and beautiful rose bushes, chatting over a freshly made pot of tea and very generous slices of homemade cake. I loved those long afternoons spent in their company. Sadly I have no photos of Mr and Mrs C., just fond memories and this beautiful old book to remind me of those happy afternoons when I was growing up.

The Buddha at Kamakura, Japan

Leafing through the pages of Wonders of the World when I was younger, I found the twin passions of my future life crystallising there in a longing to know more about the world and its different peoples – its geography, and, in particular, its many varied histories – and the longing to experience both by travelling to such varied and distant places. When I began writing Waymarks, a little over ten years ago, I had a rough idea that I wanted this blog to be a kind of personal recreation of that old compendium with its embossed red covers and its dignified gilt lettering on the spine. In many ways though, the pieces I have written and gathered together here on Waymarks were originally meant to serve as aide memoires to myself (often substitutes for the travel diaries I’d failed either to write or finish writing at the time when I was travelling). But also, I saw them as conversational pieces to share via the open ‘samizdat’ forum of the internet. Posted here in the hope that they might be of interest to others with a similar sense of curiosity and experiences akin to mine. I now realise, however, that these illustrated essays were perhaps also an unconscious means of continuing those afternoon conversations with the old couple who lived across the road.

Temples & Feluccas - Travelling in Egypt

Mr and Mrs C. would often ask me about all the things I’d like to do with my life when I grew up – my dreams of working in museums and travelling the world. In turn, I’d quiz them about all the things they had seen and done, as well as all the places they’d visited and explored when they were younger. Together, we’d discuss the world in wider ways too – ranging through topics such as science, geography, history, current affairs, art and books – in essence encapsulating all the things I’ve continued to do and be interested by ever since; living an inquisitive life of thought and reflection, seeking out my own ‘wonders of the world’, recording and cataloguing my experiences in the photos, short films and essays which I’ve posted here as a kind of electronic scrapbook. In many ways – though far from complete – I’d like to think that Waymarks is my reply to that familiar question which they always used to ask me when I visited them: “What have you been up to lately?” – These are the reminiscences I’d tell them if I were able to sit down once again with Mr and Mrs C. in their living room, overlooking their lovely garden, drinking tea and eating homemade cake, while chatting away the long happy hours of the afternoon together.

Segovia's "El Puente" - Spain

~ Envoi ~

It has been ten years since I began writing Waymarks. Ten years is a long time, but it has passed by very quickly. Ten years is a good innings. Happily, writing this blog has led to some great connections having been made along the way. People have been very generous and unfailingly kind. I’ve tried to keep books as the common thread to all my essays here, which have also roamed through one or more of the other three main tenets upon which the blog was built, namely: history, travel, exhibitions. Examining art, archaeology, anthropology, geography, archives and museums, with the occasional opinion piece, usually erupting in ignominious response to current affairs which have niggled me into noisily clattering my keyboard, thereby “sounding my barbaric yawp.” Apologies for those, especially if they weren’t your chosen cup of tea. On the whole though, I have been very fortunate in that my blog hasn’t attracted much in the way of ire from passing trolls or angry internet warriors with opposing agendas, hurrying by.

A Visit to Teotihuacan, Mexico

It takes a lot of time and effort to put together each blog post. In that sense, ten years is in fact quite a milestone. It has been heartening, though, to receive personal messages from people grateful for some of the information I’ve shared here. And, similarly, it has been disheartening to see some of the personal research which I’ve shared reused in other contexts without any credit. Most depressing of all though has been to see certain ‘travel bloggers’ repost my content whole on their own blogs – presumably appropriating my original writing in order to capitalise on the revenue generated by hosting adverts; something which I very deliberately chose not to do when starting out, and also one of the reasons why I chose to use the Blogger platform rather than the more popular Wordpress one, specifically because it could be ad free. However, it is immensely difficult to combat this and to get my appropriated content removed from these blog thieves. On this platform you can’t speak to anyone on the administrative ‘support’ side directly. You can only report each stolen blog post individually via an on-line form, and when you have over 200 posts pirated that’s an exhausting prospect, and if you do attempt it – which I did – it soon thinks you are a “bot” spamming the system. Life’s too short.

The NW Coast by Rail - USA to Canada

Consequently, after ten years, it is perhaps time to turn my attention to other things – not least, at long last, to the completion of my PhD thesis, the deadline for which is now drawing frighteningly close. I have other writing projects, both academic and non-academic, which I want to work on as well, such as collecting and re-editing some of the essays originally written for Waymarks into a proper book (though maybe not such a lavish one as ‘Wonders of the World’). So while I am drawing a line here and signing off for now, I’m looking at this as a hiatus rather than a farewell. Waymarks may resume at some point, either here or perhaps on some other web forum (but this site will continue to be actively monitored and regularly maintained by me personally). If you have been a regular reader or if you have only popped by occasionally, many thanks for doing so – I’m very glad you have, and I hope you found Waymarks of interest.

Tim Chamberlain

Exploring Mughal Delhi

‘Waymarks’ – 2011-2021 – A blog about:

HISTORY | TRAVEL | MUSEUMS | BOOKS

And everything in-between

1904 - Tibet's Marriage with Modernity

Nama Amida Butsu

15 November 2021

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

1 November 2021

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

Taktshang Monastery, Bhutan

The Himalaya looms large in so many aspects of contemplation – the highest point on our planet, set in the midst of the Eurasian continent, the source of many of the world’s greatest rivers – the Himalaya is perhaps as much a feeling as it is a geographical feature; an epistemic phenomenon as much as an epochal phase of geological time. It’s both a barrier and a bridge. Both bleak and barren, as well as vertiginously verdant, and, of course, full of cultural complexity and diversity. The Himalaya is a heartland. Its fascination is as multifarious as the shifting shades of sunlight passing across the white faces of its eternally snow-clad peaks.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

I’m not sure when I first became aware of the Himalaya, nor what the original source of its saturation into my consciousness was, but it was an interest which seems to have seeped deep inside my soul. I’m certainly not the first person to have succumbed to its allure, nor will I be the last. The indomitable permanence of this mountain range seems to have echoed within me, reverberating as far back as I can recall. Like the Himalaya itself, my interest in it – geographically, physically, culturally, environmentally – has always seemed to have been there. I suppose I must have first seen and heard about it on television programmes and in Hollywood films, such as The Man Who Would Be King (1975), starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. I certainly read about it in adventure stories – I remember being struck by one which I found in a children’s anthology about the first ascent of Annapurna, though I’ve long since forgotten who it was written by. And, of course, I clearly remember being taught about the Himalaya in terms of the geological processes of its formation in geography lessons at school. Indeed, I liked nothing more than drawing sectional diagrams illustrating how the Himalaya arose from the processes of continental drift, plate tectonics, subduction zones, etc. Attempting to imagine how innumerable strata of hard solid rock could bend, buckle and crease under pressures which exert merely millimetres of slow movement over immense tracks of time – millions of years in the making – shaping and sculpting itself through the corrosion and erosion of the elements into a magnificence and beauty that is simply awe inspiring. Fossilised sea shells found at the top of Mount Everest. My jaw agape and my mind agog at the unfathomable immensity and longevity of it all.

Chomolungma, also known as Mount Everest

Later on, when studying anthropology at university, I remember reading about The Political Systems of Highland Burma (1977) in Edmund R. Leach’s book, first seeding a fascination with the human cultural aspects of the Himalayan region, an interest which has been extended more recently by James C, Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009). These two books look at the smaller communities who have largely lived beyond the reach, if not necessarily completely beyond the notional bounds of state control – both a concept and a geographical region now referred to as ‘Zomia’ (a term originally coined by Willem van Schendel, derived from the common Tibeto-Burman root linguistic term for ‘highlander’), something which has been much contested and debated within academic circles in recent years.

The geography of the Himalaya has clearly shaped the societal forms as well as the histories of the various polities which have settled there and the cultural distinctions which have evolved to unite or divide them. The topography, the climate, and the extremes of altitude that some of these places attain, for the peoples who live there, have certainly moulded and defined who they are and how they see themselves, as well as how they have interacted with various interlopers, traders and invaders, who have strayed acquisitively into their remote territories over the centuries.

The library shelves devoted to the Himalaya abound with a wealth of travelogues written over the last hundred years or so by individuals who have sought to explore the region for all variety of reasons – personal, political, economic, and scientific – all equally fascinated by the terrain and the peoples: they recount the challenges of climate and altitude encountered in scaling the highest peaks, simply “because they are there”; intrigued and enchanted by the religion, the customs, and the kaleidoscope of cultures found in the valleys folded between the Himalayan massif. Books by travellers such as Sarat Chandra Das’s A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1902), Ekai Kawaguchi’s Three Years in Tibet (1909), Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1952), and the many travelogues of the botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward (to name only a handful). Many of whom have been compendiously chronicled by writers with interests entirely akin to my own, historians such as Charles Allen and Peter Hopkirk. More often than not, though, the people who write about this region do so because they have been there and because they have fallen under the spell of this magical place.

There is also a rich historiography mapping various geopolitical perspectives of the region over the last fifty or sixty years which is worth surveying in greater depth too. Owen Lattimore’s Inner Asian Frontiers remains an influential work, having lit the way when it was first published in 1940. Alistair Lamb’s several highly notable works, along with Dorothy Woodman’s Himalayan Frontiers (1969), and Alex McKay’s Tibet and the British Raj (1997), seek to triangulate the rivalries between British-India, Russia, and China, laying down the more recent historical background to current geopolitical disputes, problems rooted in the colonial era which remain as areas of on-going contestation, particularly along the borders between China and India, today. A topic which Bérénice Guyot-Réchard’s more recent Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962 (2016) re-examines – a book which, having heard Bérénice talking on this subject, sits high up on my current wish list of books ‘to read.’

In many ways, in human terms, the Himalaya can be viewed as a node or a nexus point, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seen as both a natural physical as well as a social and political boundary, it is a place where civilisations and empires met. But, like all boundaries and borders, despite its seemingly vast dimensions, the Himalaya was and still remains a fluid and permeable place – simultaneously constrained by its physical aspects, it channels human movement whilst conveniently shielding the accessibility it provides, making it a hard terrain to police and control. It’s often a case of geography and climate thwarting the arbitrary ‘red lines’ drawn on maps; an immovable, mountainous barrier which confounds attempts to define human jurisdictions; a place where both notional and actual delimitations – of necessity – have ebbed and flowed with the seasons, naturally moving with the earthly elements rather than in accordance with official edicts.

Harmukh Mountain, India

The Himalaya isn’t a landscape shaped by people; however hard they might strive to impose such conformities. Rather it’s a place which ultimately people mould themselves to fit into – at least, those who live there most successfully seem to have learnt how to do so – but this hasn’t yet stopped the wider human world of bureaucratically-minded nation states located along its peripheries from trying. Perhaps it is simply a case of an unstoppable (yet all too mortal) force meeting an immovable (and comparatively immortal) object, but carrying on regardless, unbowed by the futility of its own actions and endeavours in such an unforgiving and ultimately unyielding terrain. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it captivates me. It is a vast region of both great heights and unfathomable depths. A place of great confluences and contradictions.

Gorkha Postage Stamp, 1907

The Himalaya is a region where people contend with enormous challenges. It’s a place where we can witness how geological extremes have shaped the landscape and the environment, and, in turn, where we can see how the extremes of landscape and climate have shaped human beings. In a similar manner to the way in which I am fascinated by island lives bounded by the oceans, so too I am intrigued by the ways in which mountains mould the lives of those who choose to live (and/or travel) amongst them, either by following or bisecting the parallel contour lines of their topographies.

As yet, I have only touched the outermost fringes of the Himalaya myself, when in 2010 I travelled up into the foothills of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Sichuan. But it was a tantalising first taste which has left me wanting to return to range even further into the more majestic heights of Tibet itself, as well as to the closely allied altitudes of neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal. On that first trip I took Michael Palin’s Himalaya (2004) as my amiable textual travelling companion, having already watched and enjoyed his series of travel programmes which the book chronicles. But, the next time I am able to venture back to this remarkable region, I know I shall be taking a heftier – but no less amenable – tome as my ‘vade mecum’: – Ed Douglas’s Himalaya: A Human History (Vintage, 2021).

This is a wonderful book. From the first page you can tell that it was written as the fruit of a lifetime’s worth of reading about, as well as travelling in, the region it describes; hence the ‘human’ element of this history is exactly that, a personal and a personable view. It is written with a lovely fluid elegance; reading its first few chapters it feels like the reader is trekking through the Himalaya with the author as their own personal guide. Ed Douglas has a beautifully well-honed style of writing which effortlessly imparts information unobtrusively alongside his own anecdotes of travel through the region, and vice versa. It’s a subtle tour de force in the craft of good writing. The kind of book which invites revisiting and sustains re-reading. It combines the best of first-hand travel writing and historical narrative in well balanced measures of each, using the lightest of touches to combine individual immediacy with the broader, big-canvas sweep of time and place – because, after all, to attempt to distil and narrate the history of such a vast region and all its different peoples, a region as old and as diverse as the Himalaya, is no mean feat.

Kathmandu, Nepal - c.1910

Clearly it is a terrain within which Douglas is comfortably at home, roaming and writing as a mountain climber himself, having first travelled to the Himalaya in 1995, he has spent much of his life writing and reflecting upon mountaineering, having edited a number of well-known climbing magazines, as well as the prestigious Alpine Journal – the invaluable archive of which I am continually raiding (it is available on-line here). Douglas’s love of Nepal shines through Himalaya: A Human History, and, in many ways, it is Nepal which acts as a pivot to his telling of the many stories which are rooted in the complex interrelations of the broader Himalayan region, a vast area which extends out as much to the Karakorum and the Kunlun as it does to the borderlands of Central Asia and the foothills of India and China, as well as high up into the heart of the Himalaya itself.

Tibet, naturally, is the other main anchor point of the book. Tibet’s apparent isolation in effect transmuting through time into a magnet attracting Western adventurers, travelling both individually and in the name of empires, seeking to bridge borders through trade and conquest, making famous names for themselves along the way. From George Bogle and Thomas Manning to Francis Younghusband, by way of various Indian ‘pundits’, as well as a wide scattering of European and American ‘plant hunters’, and a host of tenaciously persistent missionaries, outsiders were forever attempting to follow in the footsteps of local Himalayan porters and the long established postal and trade routes of caravans, hoping to reach the much fabled ‘forbidden city’ of Lhasa – historical seat of the Dalai Lamas. Douglas introduces and discusses these Western interlopers in depth, but he also balances them with an eye to the lesser-known local actors – both those in positions of power as well as those with more lowly and locally-based agency – who both helped and hindered these attempts to open up the Himalaya to the insatiable voracity of an increasingly globalising world.

Climbers ascending Chomolungma, Mount Everest

Likewise, the later chapters of Himalaya: A Human History do not shy away from contemporary issues affecting the region – from the decades of political unrest in Tibet since 1950, to the growing concerns relating to the escalating environmental degradation now being caused by the modern-day mass-tourism overload of trekkers queuing up to reach the summit of Mount Everest; as well as the fractious on-going border disputes which have dogged diplomatic relations between China and India from the colonial era right up to the present day. Douglas peoples this latter part of his narrative with his first-hand interviews with Tibetan prisoners of conscience, individuals who have devoted their lives to fighting for Human Rights at great personal cost, and with the Sherpas of Nepal, who perform a vital yet dangerous role in facilitating wealthy foreign trekkers, as well as those people (such as the journalist, Liz Hawley), who have long resided in and watched both the slow changes and the rapid transformations which have overtaken the region in recent decades. This element of contemporary reportage lends Douglas’s book a sense of journalistic immediacy which most modern history books tend to fall short on in their closing pages.

The Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis 'Slieve Donard')

Nowadays, a lot of academic attention is most frequently directed toward the strategic and geopolitical importance of the Himalaya, but taking a broader scope we see that the influence of the region permeates much deeper into the complex processes of cross-pollination within our shared world. Early on, a significant part of the outside interest in the Himalaya was rooted in botany. Economic botany was an area of scientific interest which burgeoned with Western Imperial expansion from the Eighteenth Century onwards. Botanical Gardens were set up across the British Empire and these institutions were a huge motor in driving the machinery of empire. They sponsored journeys of exploration in which botanists, as well as some very notable missionaries with penchants for plant collecting, sought out new species while studying the effects of climate, altitude, soil chemistry, etc. Collecting and cataloguing ‘herbarium’ (dried plant) specimens, surveying vast regions in order to map plant locations, enabling them to return in different seasons at different stages of growth in order to study the lifecycles of plants, as well as collecting their seeds at the most feracious moment. These seeds were sent back to the botanical gardens as well as commercial plant nurseries, who then capitalised upon them; refining and sending different strains to different parts of the globe which could in turn propagate and capitalise further from producing and selling various crops in greater quantities, or processing derivatives from their fruits, fibres, oils and sap.

Rubber and tea were, of course, perhaps the two most transformative in terms of both local ecologies and global economies, along with the cinchona plant, from which the anti-malarial quinine could be derived. Whole landscapes were biologically re-engineered as a result – both in the Himalaya, in terms of the successful introduction of tea plants from China – most notably in the hills around Darjeeling; and at home, in terms of many of the flowering plants which we now unthinkingly accept as quintessentially English – such as primulas and rhododendrons, which can be found in the gardens of ordinary terrace houses as well as those of grand stately homes across the UK. Taking the Himalayan blue poppy (meconopsis) found in the forbidding terrain of the Tsang-po River region as a motif for all of this activity, Douglas devotes a chapter to the fascinating endeavours of these so-called ‘plant hunters’, who in many ways were perhaps the individuals who most successfully managed to come to know the true essence of the Himalaya in a manner which allied both the human and the natural worlds. One of my favourite books on this topic is E.H.M. Cox’s, Plant Hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (1945).

Douglas’s Himalaya: A Human History is a perfect introduction and an overview of a huge subject area – both geographically and historically – an excellent book for orientating oneself before setting off on more focussed and localised routes of enquiry. In addition to some of the titles which I have mentioned above, some admirable companion tomes to read on a regional trek of the Himalaya would have to include Sam Van Schaik’s excellent, Tibet: A History (2011), and Andrew Duff’s, Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (2015), as well as Charles Allen’s, The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal 1820-43 (2015). Travelogues still continue to be written about the region by contemporary writers too. Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake (1983) is one of my favourites, recounting his journey hitching rides through Xinjiang and Tibet en route home to India when he was a young student. Perhaps the best of late, though, is Colin Thubron’s highly evocative prose, retelling a very personal journey he made, following the pilgrims walking the sacred ‘Kora’ around Mount Kailas in, To A Mountain In Tibet (2011). An excellent forum for keeping up-to-date with contemporary writings upon a diverse array of topics relating to the Himalaya is via the ‘reading lists’ which are regularly collated by the website: High Peaks, Pure Earth (see here). This website is a fantastic resource which has been hugely supportive and very helpful to me in my research over the years.

Mountains are, of course, the most essential and characteristic element of the Himalaya. And mountains seem to hold a special sort of fascination, a fascination which has written itself its own special chapter in the history of exploration (as well as several chapters of Douglas’s book). The Himalaya has often been described as “the third pole.” In terms of mountaineering, the region is home to some of the world’s most legendary and much fabled peaks. Climbing mountains whether for sport or science, either individually or as a part of an expedition team, is an immensely challenging activity which requires careful planning, reconnaissance, training and organisation. It provides an elemental test of skills and wills, testing limits both physical and psychological. I’m not a mountain climber myself, but ultimately, it seems to me that the desire (or perhaps the need) to climb mountains is a siren call to the soul. It’s not always the achievement of reaching the summit which is the most important goal. But still, the lure of scaling mountain peaks, scarps, ledges and ridges is perhaps found in the fact that they are otherwise inaccessible places which inspire a unique sense of fascination and wonder quite unlike that of other remote points on the globe.

Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Chomolungma, Mount Everest - 29 May 1953

While researching for my PhD, leafing through the Foreign Office files at the National Archives in Kew, I have often found myself inadvertently distracted into perusing the many notes and letters relating to the British expeditions to Mount Everest (Chomolungma) in the 1920s; forever fascinated by the speculation as to whether or not George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared perhaps having reached the summit, or perhaps having fallen just short of it. There are many books both by and about mountaineers from Mallory and Irvine’s day to the present, one of the most recent – which I have duly added to my ‘to read’ list – is Mick Conefrey’s, The Last Great Mountain: The First Ascent of Kangchenjunga (2020).

Nicholas Roerich - Nan Shan, Tibetan Frontier, 1936

My fascination for this region is a fascination which is shared by many and one which is unlikely to fade from prominence any time soon. Like a shimmering glimpse of Shangri-La – in many ways, though it might well be an all too predictable cliché to say it: the Himalaya is like a vast and limitless library – a geographical and historical labyrinth – both real and actual, as well as a labyrinth which has been transmuted into texts and maps, photographs and films. It is a place which once entered, enters the soul and never leaves. A region of both the earth and the mind, a region which we will never exhaust through exploration or idle dreaming.

Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine & George Mallory, 1924

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Read my reviews of Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya, by Lachlan Fleetwood (Cambridge University Press, 2022) in The Alpine Journal, Vol. 126 (2022)

And of The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape, by Peter Bishop (The Athlone Press, 1989) on GoodReads

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A Playlist of Ed Douglas's Interviews with Various Climbers

Read an extract from Himalaya: A Human History, by Ed Douglas

Ed Douglas's own Top 10 Books about the Himalaya

Ed Douglas talks to Sherpa Ang Tsering, member of the 1924 British Everest expedition

In Search of Shangri-La in a Lost Himalayan Kingdom, by Ed Douglas

Himalaya: The Human Story - The Compass: BBC World Service