Research



My current academic research focuses upon Western travellers in Asia during the late 19th / early 20th centuries, particularly in the China-Tibet borderlands.

For more information on my PhD studies see:  




Plus a list of my publications (with PDFs or web-links to those which have been published) can be found here:



W a y m a r k s  ~


Listed below are some examples of blog posts which focus on my research and related areas of interest, as well as some of my travel writing, book reviews, and reflections on museums, exhibitions and documentaries, plus miscellaneous historical and literary excursions:


On China: 

The First British Embassy to China, 1793-1794 - Part I

British Artistic Impressions of Qing Dynasty China - Part II

Boxer Rebels & British Diplomats - Peking 1900

China - Between Revolutions

China & The Great War 

May 4th - Star Wars & China 

Red Fort at Tamsui
































Literary Excursions:

























“The history and culture of Everest is far wider and more complex than the stories we tell most often would have us believe. We have allowed the mountain to calcify into a single image when, as the subtitle of the book suggests, it actually offers ‘many worlds’ to the informed observer.

This dynamic quality of the mountain finds perhaps its best articulation in an unlikely chapter. In ‘Far-away frontiers and spiritual sanctuaries: occidental escapism in the high Himalaya’ , Tim Chamberlain offers us not an analysis of Everest, but of western conceptions of the Himalaya, and particularly of Tibet. In concluding, he notes ‘… we must always remember that what we are seeing is only half the picture, and that picture was always a mutable one.’

Chamberlain also quotes Rinchen Lhamo, the Tibetan wife of British Consul and author Louis Magrath King, who said of western depictions of Tibet: ‘It is so much easier to say what is expected than what is true, but contrary to established views.’ By taking the harder path and planting its flag outside of established narratives, this book offers readers much more than the half picture of Everest to which we have become accustomed.”   

~  Adam Butterworth, The Alpine Journal, 2025.



Other Academic Activity: 

I have contributed to the Engaging Race Project (2020-2022), led by Dr Amy Matthewson, SOAS, University of London. I am also a part of the Other Everests Research Network (2021-2024), led by Dr Jonathan Westaway (University of Central Lancashire) & Dr Paul Gilchrist (University of Brighton). 

Some wry self-reflections upon my academic roots: Bullsh*t Anthropology and "People Call The Romans, They Go The House?"

I also write a (non-academic) blog about modern haiku: Shinobazu Pond 俳句






"Life is too short, and science too vast, to permit even the greatest genius a total experience of humanity. Some people will always specialize in the present, as others do in the Stone Age or Egyptology. We simply ask both to bear in mind that historical research will tolerate no autarchy. Isolated, each will understand only by halves, even within their own field of study; for the only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history." 

~ Marc Bloch, "The Historian's Craft" (c.1941).


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