Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road ... Or A River

 

Colin Thubron

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

Also on 'Waymarks'

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

Person & Place - The Essence of Good Travel Writing

Parallax - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Owen Lattimore's Desert Road

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Eleanor & Owen Lattimore

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart at Gilgit, 1935.

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

 

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

 

Ella 'Kini' Maillart

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

Owen Lattimore with Chiang Kai-shek

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

 

Owen Lattimore during the McCarthy Era Congressional Investigations

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

 

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

 

~

Mongolia - On The Edge of the Gobi, 1975.

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

 

Mongolia - The City On The Steppes, 1975.

~

 

Owen Lattimore, 1967.

Further Reading

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

Hyperbole Most Florid – Reginald Farrer & William Purdom

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

Retracing the Silk Road

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

Owen Lattimore, on the Desert Road, 1926