THE COMPENSATIONS OF PLUNDER by
Justin M. Jacobs (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
An excellent and informed riposte
to the increasingly prevalent notion that all art objects and ancient artefacts
acquired in colonial and semi-colonial contexts are imperialist 'loot' - i.e.
stolen - due to the relative imbalance in social/financial standing of the
respective parties involved (individuals and nations). The Compensations of Plunder takes a leavening view of the current trends informing both popular
and academic historiographical outlooks and warns against projecting our own
perceptions and values onto historical actors whose worldviews were differently
informed and therefore wholly distinct when compared to our own.
Using the most prominent Western
archaeologists of 'the Silk Road' (Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Paul Pelliot, Roy
Chapman Andrews, Langdon Warner) during the first half of the twentieth century
as his main examples, Justin Jacobs explores the difference in outlook between local
officials at the time (rooted in traditional Confucian scholarly ideals) and
their later (more nationalist-minded) successors who vilified the likes of
archaeologists such as Sir Marc Aurel Stein. In doing so, Jacobs demonstrates
how the concept of value in relation to archaeological artefacts and
ancient manuscripts altered over time as a direct result of such outsiders’
interests in acquiring, preserving and studying such material. Originally the
permissions extended to, and the subsequent transactions with these outsiders
were fully understood and sanctioned by local elites and other indigenous
agents, who perceived they were receiving a worthwhile return in the form of
cultural, social, political, diplomatic as well as *financial* capital
from such interactions and exchanges (hence the ironic title: 'compensations of
plunder'). Indeed, without their active cooperation these Western
archaeologists could not have travelled so widely, or excavated so extensively,
nor removed such large quantities of material from the region. Ironically
again, it was the moulding of the perception of later Chinese elites, a new
younger generation of scholars and officials, who were often trained in the
West, whose perceptions changed and so turned against foreign academics and
'imperialist adventurers' who had previously operated in China and eventually
succeeded in drastically curtailing their activities when they agreed to
undertake such expeditions jointly with Chinese academics, or otherwise managed
to shut them down entirely and ultimately kick them out altogether, even before
the advent of the CCP in 1949.
But that's not to say Jacobs is
wholly uncritical of these foreign outsiders. He takes a broad view of the
activities of each and examines the specifics of how (perhaps primarily due to
their personalities) their methods and approaches differed, leading some to
succeed where others failed, and some to be honoured and held in high esteem by
locals (both elites and subalterns), while others were quite rightly scorned
due to their haughty arrogance and high-handed manners, as well as their
culturally insensitive and/or physically destructive methods whilst operating
'in the field.' In this respect, Jacobs bucks prevailing trends once again by
appearing to be most sympathetic to Stein - who is often perceived and painted
today as the archvillain of the group. Instead, Jacobs endeavours to show how
Stein was the one archaeologist of the group (with Paul Pelliot perhaps coming
a close second) who was most respected and the most sensitive to the mores of
the old order of Confucian scholar-administrators, and how Stein was perhaps
the least destructive, when compared to the likes of the more gung-ho proto-'Indiana Joneses', such as Roy Chapman Andrews and Langdon Warner.
Jacobs provides an excellent and
thorough analysis of a solid and wide-ranging base of primary source material (both
Western and Chinese), although I feel it is a shame that he concentrates almost
exclusively on the bigger names, such as Stein, Hedin and Pelliot. Other
colonial-era adventurers, for example, Kōzui Ōtani and Zuicho Tachibana, to
name just two of the more unusual figures within this wider group, get only a
passing mention relatively early on in the book, but this is perhaps
understandable given the amount of material and the range of themes which
Jacobs is able to explore and elucidate in the very comprehensive manner that
he does. Putting that (perhaps subjective) quibble to one side, it does very
clearly strike me that the book lends itself to potentially broader applications
beyond the limitations of this particular study. Jacobs’ primary focus is, of
course, the archaeological activities undertaken in the regions of Xinjiang and
Gansu; however, there is clearly scope for his ideas to be extended to the art
and antiquities market more widely and other (perhaps more commonplace) art
objects which were acquired privately by individuals or for public museum
collections in the West, particularly during the twilight era of Western colonial expansion and imperialist interaction with other parts of the world.
Essentially, this book is a salient
reminder that history is not a simple case of right versus wrong or black
versus white, but rather it is more like a kind of temporal 'grayscale', a
gradated pattern of change which morphs over time. The Compensations of
Plunder very deftly demonstrates how the sensitive historian should be
prepared to modify their approaches and their final opinions accordingly if
they wish to gain the greatest insights, particularly in terms of understanding
the people who lived before us according to their own terms, rather than
exclusively seeing everything through a blinkered back-projection of our own
current worldview.
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)
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
“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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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