The Heart of the World: A
Journey to the Last Secret Place by Ian Baker (Penguin, 2004)
This is a good, pacey and engaging
travelogue, which – in the tradition of ‘an American abroad’ – reminded me a
little of Peter Hessler’s River Town.
F.M. "Eric" Bailey & Frank Kingdon Ward
I read The Heart of the World
primarily because I am interested in the lives and travels of Eric Bailey and
Frank Kingdon-Ward (who could almost be this book’s co-author, given how often
he is quoted throughout!). And also because I am interested in how the Tibetan
Buddhist concept of ‘beyul’ (sBas yul) has been co-opted and adapted
into the Western idea of ‘Shangri-La’ – for which this book offers a number of
interesting insights and points to other literary works which it might have
been hard to find or trace otherwise. The journeys made over several years
which Baker recounts are tough trials of stamina, both physical and spiritual,
with obstacles which are both natural, seemingly supernatural, and, of course,
bureaucratic. However, I do agree with the comments (made on GoodReads)
regarding the authorial persona; which, perhaps ironically for someone who
presents himself as an aspiring Buddhist practitioner, comes across at times as
somewhat egocentric. Similarly, while Baker is often at pains to stress that he
is not a privileged white-man of the old explorer mould – this is exactly what
he is at most points in the text, especially when, towards the end of the book,
he and his companions are attempting “to close the gap” on the “last unexplored”
five-mile stretch of the Tsangpo, utilising indigenous labour to enable them to
do so (not that there would be any other option, of course).
There is a clear desire to complete
(or exceed?) the endeavours which Bailey and Kingdon-Ward failed to achieve
themselves; and, in the closing pages of the book, there is an equally palpable
desire to beat a large Chinese expedition to find and measure ‘the last’ major waterfall on the Tsangpo. Although Baker is very evidently self-aware of these
particular flaws, and perhaps understandably circles around them uneasily and
inconclusively. No matter how well informed he is about the region, its spiritual
geography and local traditions, he cannot escape the fact that he is an
outsider. However deeply he manages to enter this remarkable place in all its forms, he always has to reconcile
himself with the fact that he must ultimately leave again at the end of
whichever trip it is he is narrating. Naturally, the reader is drawn to empathise.
But the book does also indulge time-and-again in poetic and spiritual flights
of fancy which skate a little too close to cliché in places (e.g. – to give but
one example, how often it seems that the weather brightening up is attributed
to the possible intervention of divine favour, or a lama happening to appear on
the scene at the moment the sun comes out), which, for me at any rate, raised a
bit of a barrier between reader and author.
That said though, I have read a
particularly mind-numbing Chinese book (in translation; The Yarlung Tsangpo
Great Canyon: The Last Secret World, by Zhang Jimin) about the enormous
Chinese expedition (that features in the closing chapters of Baker’s book), which mangles all its references to Kingdon-Ward, including something as simple
as getting his name right. Baker is by far a much better guide. But both books give rise to complicated and seemingly unresolvable feelings. One can’t help but sympathise with the local
Tibetans’ conflicts of interest in wanting Pemako to remain unviolated by
outsiders, whilst also being acutely aware that they need to make a living in such an ‘out-of-the-way place’
by acting as porters to comparatively affluent external interlopers. No matter
how difficult or sacred the terrain, in the covetous eyes of such outsiders
(Baker as much as the Chinese), the lure to conquer and possess these ‘unknown
realms’ – real or imagined; physical or spiritual – in the end amounts to the
same outcomes.
All too often, it’s simply a matter
of time until others encroach and transform a place into something other than
what it once was to those who have gone before, and even moreso to those who
have always called such places home. Perhaps in this sense, Baker is an
eloquent witness to the completion of a process which was begun long ago by those whom
he has sought to emulate (i.e. – Bailey, Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor). Hence, one can’t
help but feeling both forlorn and perhaps vicariously a little complicit too
(having very much enjoyed the narrative of Baker’s journeys), when closing this book
after reading its concluding chapter. – The truth of ‘Shangri-La,’ perhaps, is both its mutability and its transience; because even here change is the only constant thing.
There is something mellifluously
melancholy in the tone of Colin Thubron’s travel books. He is a wonderful
writer, a genuine poet in prose. Curiously, his writing manages to be both
orientated entirely inward, whilst also being outward-looking at the same time.
It really is quite remarkable. And it is perhaps this paradox which is what
makes his travel books such satisfying reading. As travel writers go, he is
perhaps the travel writer’s paragon – the kind of travel writer whom most
would-be travel writers might aspire to emulate. Oddly shy and unassuming, and
yet open to experiences and interactions. He frequently ends up
chatting to all sorts of ordinary and unusual people, tagging along with them,
sharing a train compartment, or being invited into their homes and their lives;
drifting along, progressing on his way until something or nothing happens. Either
way the outcome is equally mesmerising. He does bathos and pathos with aplomb.
There are moments of drama too,
usually rendered with beautiful understatement, such as when the police turn up
and haul him off for questioning, as they frequently seem to do. This is
usually because Colin is drawn to the parts of the world which aren’t exactly
used to receiving visiting tourists, at least not those of a lone hapless,
wandering Englishman-type, such as he appears to be. Naturally they suspect he must be up
to no good; some sort of criminal or clandestine activity, possibly spying? – But
Colin is wonderfully ‘old school’, as some might say. He tends to eschew modern
technology, and he rarely travels with a camera. Only his spidery and illegible
handwriting in his notebooks inadvertently lends him a taint of suspicion, but
as soon as he begins to translate his scribbled notes for his interrogator, the
police quickly come to realise Thubron is indeed a wandering poet, waxing
lyrical about landscapes they find mundane but which he sees as sublime.
I came to Colin Thubron’s travel
books quite late, and I really can’t understand how or why I had not come
across him before. It was an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4, back in early
2007, when he was promoting his then recently published book, Shadow of the
Silk Road. I was entranced by his evocative descriptions of travelling
through landscapes and reflecting upon the history of places which had long
held a deep and abiding fascination for me. And it was later on, in the summer
of that same year, when I was travelling through China, that I began reading Shadow
of the Silk Road for myself. I realised it was kind of oddly serendipitous
to begin reading the book there in Xi’an, where the book itself begins; but,
unlike Colin, the journey which I was about to undertake would lead in the
opposite direction, heading east, overland to Beijing. I had gone there to
escort a cohort of terracotta warriors across China and onwards to London for a
landmark exhibition at the British Museum, entitled ‘The First Emperor.’
Whereas the Shadow of the Silk Road recounts Thubron’s 7000-mile journey
heading west, travelling from China through Central Asia and Afghanistan to the
Islamic countries of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean. A route along
which he is haunted by the persona of another traveller, talking to him across
the vast Steppe-like expanse of time in the bygone centuries-old voice of a Sogdian
camel driver travelling with one of the old merchant caravans which used to
cross the deserts and the high plateaus of the network of routes which once criss-crossed
that region, now collectively and somewhat Romantically known as ‘the Silk
Road.’
Thubron has often spoken of the
solitary traveller as being two people travelling in tandem. There is
the person who is actually doing the travelling – clocking the miles, suffering
the pains and anxieties, marvelling at the wonders both large and small which
befall him along the way; but then there is also the person, the travel writer
side of himself, who (in a sense) sits upon his shoulder throughout the journey
– noting all the things which will make ‘good copy’ for a travel book, and
often consoling him with that fact when he finds himself in situations of
adversity, such as when he gets questioned by suspicious police officers. The
greatest fear for a travel writer, he has said, is that nothing will happen at
all.
In reading Thubron’s books the
reader experiences the world with him. He has such a wonderfully deft way with
words and emotions that while his books are deeply personal documents, they
also seem somehow oddly divested from him as their author. When he published To
A Mountain in Tibet in 2011, I heard him joke (again on the radio) that
people had sometimes complained that he didn’t put more of himself into his
books, but that with this one, they might now wish he’d done the opposite,
because To A Mountain in Tibet is a deeply personal book. It is a book
about a journey he made on foot, a pilgrimage of sorts, making the kora
around Mount Kailash – a sacred mountain which is central to the cosmology of
several major religions, but at its core it is also a book which deals with the
universally felt subject of grief. People often speak of life as being a journey
or of time being seen as a road, and travelling – escaping the everyday of our
own worlds and all that is familiar to us by going somewhere far away and
utterly different in terms of society, culture, language, religion – this kind of travelling can be a
way of reflecting upon ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and how we
fit into the wider aspect of a globalised world. Travel is thereby seen as a
way of breaking down boundaries, crossing borders and bridging divides which
might otherwise have remained unseen or worse, wilfully overlooked. In that
sense travel is not about seeking escape, but rather of seeking to find
something extra. Redefining the self and our home in sympathy as well as in
contrast to that which we might simply assume to be ‘other’ is what the real goal
of most travellers tends to be. I read To A Mountain in Tibet at a time
of similar although slightly different emotional upheaval in my life, and so
the book certainly spoke to me on more than one level, as it was perhaps
intended to do. It was a reminder to me that both travel and the closely allied
activities of reading and writing can be a balm to the soul.
Thubron’s latest book, The Amur
River: Between Russia and China (2021) is equally sublime. It is certainly
one of Thubron’s best travel books, in my opinion. In this book he travels the length
of the Amur from its source in Mongolia to the coast, opposite the northern
part of Sakhalin Island, where the river emerges between the Sea of Japan and
the Okhotsk Sea. It’s an enormous watercourse, undammed and largely unknown in
comparison to its more famous cousins, such as the Amazon, the Danube, or the
Nile. Along the way he alternates between the river’s northern and southern
shores, between Russia and China. The Amur forms a boundary which both divides
and connects these two geographically huge nations, each vastly different in
culture and outlook, which meet along one section of its banks. The huge
disparities in terms of populations and local economies makes the locals on
either side of the river uneasy neighbours. As with all of Thubron’s travel
books, he seeks out insights into the histories and cultures, both national and
local, of the people whom he meets along the way. He relates the snippets of
themselves and their lives as they reveal their personal stories to him. He is
particularly interested in the original indigenous customs, seeking out the
traces of shamans and their animistic beliefs which seem to linger, often
half-forgotten, having almost been entirely obliterated by centuries of
incomers hailing from the larger surrounding polities and their overwhelming tides
of political and religious ideologies, seeking to modernise, revolutionise or capitalise
upon an uncompromising land and an unruly watercourse which ultimately always
seems to defeat them.
One gets the sense from reading Thubron that the further
he travels along the Amur the more remote it becomes, even from itself. It
feels like a place oddly forgotten and removed from the wider world, even
though the myriad worlds of its own which it forms along its course all seem
somehow larger than life as it is lived in other parts of our modern and
globally interconnected world. Reflecting upon this, he quotes one of my
favourite writers: “In a poignant passage of Andrei Makine’s ‘Once Upon the
River Love’, his protagonist speculates that you could spend your life on the
remote Amur and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, or
understand the sensual topography of another human body. ‘Love, too, did not
easily take root in this austere county …’ (p.261-262)
I’ve often wondered about the Amur.
Firstly, having come across it in other books I’ve read, particularly about nineteenth-century
Russian explorers such as Nikolay Przhevalsky, who explored the Ussuri region,
and Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who led the expansion of the Russian Empire to
the shores of the Sea of Japan. And secondly, from having glimpsed parts of it
or its tributaries when flying across Siberia en route to and from Japan,
looking down upon such a vast and expansive frozen landscape with real
fascination. Hence, I was very keen to read Thubron’s account of his following
this long-flowing riverine thread through a land I’ve only ever glimpsed and
imagined from afar. A river so long it has many different names, among which it
is: the Onon in Mongolia, the Heilong Jiang in China, and the Amur in Russia.
Thubron’s
journey along the river’s course was not an easy one. In Mongolia he begins his journey
on horseback, but not long after he sets out his horse stumbles in the boggy
ground and falls upon him which results in a couple of cracked ribs and a
broken ankle – and yet Thubron, who is in his eighties, stoically soldiers on,
mentally kidding himself that his ankle is merely sprained. The thought of
curtailing his trip and returning home to properly convalesce is a far more
painful prospect than carrying on. Thubron is a true traveller to his core. And
thankfully – as he always does – Thubron shapes a journey around himself which
is inimitably his own. Mastering just enough of the languages of the people he travels
among before setting out – in this case Russian and Mandarin – in order to
converse with them unmediated. He says he takes a year to research and prepare
before embarking, and then about a year afterwards to write his journey up.
Consequently, his travel books are undoubtedly on a par with, and in some cases
more than equal to those who have similarly found fame in defining the genre,
writer-travellers such as: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred
Thesiger, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gavin Young, Paul
Theroux, Dervla Murphy, et al.
I’m not at all surprised that
Thubron is drawn to the fictional works of Andrei Makine. He and Makine clearly
share a common ground in their fascination for the sublime, for Russian
melancholy, and for deeply profound meditations upon the slow passing of time
and memory, deftly rendered with the lightest and most masterfully-understated
touches of true sympathy. For me Colin Thubron’s writings represent the
pinnacle of what I am seeking in a good travel book: a deeply lyrical and
contemplative exploration of both place and people, a deft mixing of history, anthropology,
landscape, and atmosphere, illuminated through individual insight. The best
travel books in my opinion, like a river, wend a slow and unhurried way through
our shared world, showing us places far beyond our own doorstep – places which
we might never see or experience for ourselves; but done so through carefully
considered words, words through which we might see and live vicariously. Travel
writing is undoubtedly a craft of its own kind, offering the reader an escape
through someone else’s eyes – wherein words can shape mellifluous memories which
often remain with us long after we’ve finished our first reading of such books.
The Amur River is certainly one to treasure.
Somewhere over Russia, near the Sea of Japan - 2004
~
“In the mist of early morning
the far shore next day is only a sepia hairline, as though the horizon had
rusted away at its edges. The river is formidable now. For over 2,500 miles it
has gathered its tributaries from a basin almost the size of Mexico, until its
brown flood pours northward through a channel that sometimes reaches three
miles across. As our boat shudders upriver in the lightening day, the eastern
shore ascends in mountain walls of pine, spruce and birch, where wisps of cloud
dangle, as if from steaming jungle. Even as we speed beneath them, Sergei and Alexander
go on smoking, cupping the cigarettes in their hands against the headwind,
while our beer bottles dwindle alongside a bag of frozen smelts with cartoon
faces.” – Colin Thubron, The Amur River (p.247-248)
Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road - The South Bank Show, 1992
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)
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