China - Between Revolutions

China is a country which fascinates me. Over the last few years I've been lucky enough to work in China, and have travelled to many parts of the country. It is truly vast, but it is entirely its own world. Much is being made of contemporary China and its current rise in the modern world – politically, economically, militarily. It's fascinating to see how China is changing – and, also, how it isn't. There is a huge difference between the city and the countryside. While certain metropolitan areas are surging ahead there is much in the rural areas which remains unchanged since Mao Zedong's Communist Party took over the country. But, as always in China's history, there is a great disparity between those who have and those who have not.

If you are interested in China's history there are any number of books, films, and websites which will give you chapter and verse on the rise of Chairman Mao, the “Great Helmsman” – whose enormous portrait hangs above the entrance of the Tiananmen, looking out over Tiananmen Square towards his own mausoleum, where he still lies in State to this day. There are also countless books on China’s Imperial past too. One era which it is harder to find books about is the interim period between the revolution which did away with the Manchu Qing Dynasty in 1910/1911 and the Communist "liberation" in 1949, when the Nationalist Government fled into exile on the island of Taiwan, where it remains to this day.

The United Nations continued to recognise the Nationalists as the legitimate Government up until the 1970s, after which many Western countries have maintained their support for Taiwan, but in more muted political and diplomatic terms, quietly supporting Taiwan through trade and cultural initiatives. Whilst cross-strait tensions have eased of late, Beijing would still like to see Taiwan return to the fold one day, as have Hong Kong and Macao. But only time will tell what will become of all these several versions of essentially one China.

The interim period of China’s history in the first half of the twentieth century is a period which has come to take over much of my recent research interests. I am currently researching the life of a British Consular Official who was stationed in China during this turbulent period. He is remarkable because he went against the grain of his time, especially for a man essentially in the diplomatic service of one of the 'great Western powers', by marrying a Tibetan. It was a move, which in part, cost him his career.

I’ve been undertaking this biographical research for the best part of six years now. Amassing all the relevant source material and piecing together various items of information to create a clearer picture has turned into a mammoth undertaking. But it has been and still is immensely interesting and rewarding of itself – not least because I have a family connection to the couple themselves. Their names are Louis Magrath King and Rinchen Lhamo.

Going in search of Louis and Rinchen's personal history has taken me to many different places. I’ve just spent the last two and a half weeks at the National Archives in Kew Gardens. I’ve also spent a lot of time working my way through archive material held at the British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and I’m hoping to look at further archive material in due course at the Royal Geographical Society, and, if needed, at the University of Bristol too. The search has also taken me on a number of journeys, both near and far. I’ve trekked down leafy lanes in Kent, along the bustling thoroughfares of Beijing, Chengdu, and Shanghai, and even up remote mountain paths in western China, where the province of Sichuan borders with Tibet. I’ve also had to familiarise myself with the times in which they lived – not just the complicated and chaotic politics of the feuding Provinces and their various tin-pot warlord Generals, but also the sights, sounds, and smells of their world, to try and imagine what it would have been like to have lived their lives and seen that era as they would have known it back then.

I’ve found a couple of wonderful films on the internet which show, more evocatively than any dusty book or scholarly article, the bygone China which they would have found familiar.

The first is a short documentary made by Sidney D. Gamble (1890 – 1968), who made several journeys in China between 1908 and 1932. This film of a pilgrimage to Miao Feng Shan, some twenty-five miles north-west of Beijing, appears to have been shot between 1924 and 1927. The costume, sedan chairs, and Nationalist Soldiers uniforms are fascinating to me – and whilst China has changed largely beyond all recognition there are some elements here which still echo down to the present day. It’s fascinating to see the Lion Dance – which I’ve seen performed twice, just the same as this, once inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, and once at a small village, called Kam Tin, in the New Territories area of Hong Kong.

The second very short film, from an unmarked reel, appears to be of a metropolitan area – most likely Shanghai or its environs during the 1920s. It shows what life was like for the native Chinese in the foreign concessions.

The third is a newsreel style documentary film about Peking in 1931, with a very sober-style of narration – but which says as much about its time as the pictures it describes. Two continuities between then and now I noted in this film were the split trousers of the small boy eating peanuts – nappies or diapers are a Western child-rearing custom which has never been taken up by China; plus the keeping of song birds as pets and promenading with them in the evenings, which continues to this day too. Happily the custom of female foot-binding has long since ceased, although there are still today a few exceedingly elderly women alive whose feet were bound in infancy. I saw one such woman in the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province in 2007.

Guam - Jungle Trekking

In the summer of 2009 I was living in Japan and went on a short break to the island of Guam. Guam is part of the Mariana Islands of Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean. Nowadays it is a territory of the United States, but is thought to have been first settled by people migrating from south-eastern Indonesia around 2000 BC. The island still has several sites of prehistoric remains from the early ancestors of the native Chamorro population. The Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480-1521), was the first European to visit Guam. The island later came under Spanish colonial rule, and they administered the island until it was ceded to the U.S. in 1898. Guam, as an island of strategic importance, was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War and today it is still characterised by a large U.S. Military presence. It’s also famous as one of the islands on which lone Japanese soldiers held out long after the war ended in 1945. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi was one of the last of these surviving 'hold outs', who rather than surrendering had remained for years alone in the jungle. Remarkably he didn’t surrender until he was finally captured in 1972.

What follows is an account of a day’s jungle trekking I undertook to the San Carlos falls in the interior of the island.

“July, 19^th 2009 … Our trek began on a highland ridge where we found lots of wild orchids growing. Our trail went on through tight arches of sword grass. We saw a waterfall in the distance amidst grasslands. Wending further on we came to a tree standing alone on a ridge that was gently whistling in the slight breeze. From here we descended down to a band of lush green which just suddenly seemed to appear before us. This was where the jungle began and immediately upon entering the dense greenery we found ourselves clambering down a steep slope clinging to a rope as we went. This was where the trek really began proper, as from here on it was increasingly tough going. The climate markedly changed too, from the cool temperate highland to the hot and humid verdant enclosure of the jungle.

We reached the first waterfall at its top and looked down to the pool below. It was a beautiful view of a tropical jungle scene. We climbed down ropes to the side of the falls to get to the pool where we swam and stood beneath the falling water. Here fish swam up around our toes and we could see freshwater shrimp scuttling over the rocks below the surface.

From here onwards we trekked down the river, walking in the river-stream itself, until we came to the point where our river joined another, we then trekked far up this other river, eventually back to the grasslands again, taking the whole day to do so.

Our second waterfall wasn’t so tall or so picturesque, but rather the falls, the overhang, and the pool were wider. The pool was also much deeper, which meant we were able to jump from the overhang into the water below. Everyone in our party made the jump. It was certainly a blind leap of faith for me, as without my specs on I couldn’t really see where I was going until I actually got there! Swimming in natural freshwater pools is a wonderful, enchanting experience. The water of the first waterfall was cool in temperature and so a welcome relief from the jungle heat; the second waterfall though, being wider and more exposed to the sun, was wonderfully warm, like a natural bath. Our jumping into the pool far below put me in mind of Alex Garland’s novel ‘The Beach’. We stopped here for lunch.

After lunch we continued upriver, over seriously slippery rocks – all of us, including our guide, each took several slips along the way; one of my slips resulted in a purple toe and a sprained wrist which made going on all the more arduous (I later realised that I’d actually broken my toe!).

At one point along the river a large black monitor lizard with tiny yellow dots all over its body fell into the river between me and our guide, who was next up ahead. Our guide gently clapped his hands to encourage the lizard to swim down the narrow stream in our direction. The lizard reached to within a few feet in front of me before it saw the others coming up behind me. It doubled back and then slowly climbed out of the stream, and up the steep bank back into the jungle. The lizard must have been around 1.5 metres long from nose to tail. It was one of the most astounding things I have ever seen or experienced.

In several places the river made for very deep wading. Further up we came to a bend which was a tall, curving cliff in which the layers of a former molten lava flow could be seen. We stopped here a while to cool off in the stream. The heat certainly made things hard going.

The next big falls was our last. Here there was a shallow pool, but to one side was a very deep sink-hole. Here too one of our companions found a large pair of mating toads/frogs. After this we then continued by climbing up the sheer vertical face of the waterfall (like climbing a ladder!) and then, at the top and a little further on, we climbed a second vertical side out of the river and back up into the grasslands. The trail here lead up what looked like a steep dried up river ‘wadi’ on the Planet Mars because the earth was so richly red and dusty. We finally emerged back onto the grassland plain with its sword grass and orchids from which we’d started, now having seen the San Carlos falls.”

Also on 'Waymarks'

M.I.A. - Second World War Japanese "Hold Outs"