Colin Thubron is trumpeted by his publishers as “our greatest travel writer,” meaning perhaps England's, perhaps the English-speaking world's, or perhaps simply the world's. In this new book he travels the vestiges of the Silk Road from Xian in China, via Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iran to Antioch (now Antakya) on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. So -- what kind of writer is he? What are his fears and loathings, his delights and epiphanies?
In a sense, all travel books are similarly constituted - diary extracts form the skeleton, and this is fleshed out with passages of historical summary, plus some general thoughts. Places are described, and people met by chance along the way developed into minor characters. But in any travel book written by a solitary traveler there can be only the one major character.
Thubron is essentially a loner and an aesthete. But he considers joy in new places and experiences essentially a youthful phenomenon, and in several places complains of getting old. In addition the intellectual side of his character is generally skeptical. So what you have are frequent beautifully-crafted phrases about snow, the fading light of evening or the disappearing stars of morning, combined with descriptions where the magic of legendary names - Samarkand, Kashgar - is shown to be at best elusive, together with interviews with rather sad and disappointed people.
The landscapes are rarely experienced as awesome. Instead, there are valleys supporting mulberry trees (for silk cultivation) disfigured by pylons or a crumbling Soviet-era factory. Beauty where he finds it tends to lodge mostly in the sky, or in a view of distant mountains, still snowless in autumn sunlight. The result is a sense of loneliness. He carries a satellite phone, but nobody calls him on it.
The whole Silk Road area comes over as essentially a mixture, and on many levels. Uzbeks go away to work in Korea, and the Chinese are flooding into Xinjiang along the new railway to Kashgar (to the fury of every Uighur he talks to). But then the whole region was always like that, a place where different peoples met, traded and later inter-married. The author himself becomes absorbed with traces of Roman blood in northwestern China, seeking out fair-haired people in several locations. So if Central Asia has always been characterized by its cultural mix, the modern version of this must be accepted too - carrier bags in Uzbekistan made in China or Pakistan with logos proclaiming Estee Lauder or “Have a Nice Day!,” etc.
Thubron proves tough with the police. He carries his US dollars in a mosquito repellent bottle and routinely refuses suggestions that he pay a bribe. At one point he shouts “Who the hell are you?” at someone who may or may not be pretending to be an official, and when he refuses to pay up to customs inspectors on a train, one of whom had said, referring to a colleague, “Give him money,” he gets the reply “It was a joke,” and the pair move off along the corridor.
The Shadow of the Silk Road covers eight months, though the section through northern Afghanistan was postponed and traveled a year later because of fighting. Everywhere there's the fear of SARS, so we can assume the journey was largely made in 2003.
This isn't an eccentric account. Thubron calls in on all the celebrated sites – Xian's terracotta warriors, the famous Buddhist monastery at Labrang (also visited in the 1930s by Peter Fleming and described in News From Tartary) and Dunhuang where, in 1900, the Anglo-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein discovered, along with many other things, the world's oldest printed book, and then made off with it.
In Iran Thubron makes a point of going to the Valley of the Assassins (made famous by Freya Stark in another classic travel book), and devotes a whole chapter to it. He clambers up crevices in the castle-fortress of Maimundiz and nearly comes to grief. His trainers still bear the marks of the experience when he finally arrives in Antioch.
The book's style is reminiscent of Norman Lewis, with the same ironic detachment and love of the telling phrase. It also has something in common with Jan Morris, with her eye for comic detail, and the incongruous aspects of history in general. As for his crafted sentences, this one is representative: “The mist never lifted, but hung as if painted, over a painted desolation.” Does he realize this echoes Coleridge's painted ship upon a painted ocean? Almost certainly.
Thubron allows himself few luxuries. Three dollar hotels with concrete floors and naked light-bulbs alternate with 13-hour rides on decrepit buses, with only the occasional jaunt on a camel or a donkey-cart. He eats biscuits from his backpack for breakfast (while using the old-fashioned phrase “I breakfasted on”), wears trainers and thermal underwear, and is ashamed of the holes in his pullover when he finally arrives at the Mediterranean coast.
Much of his journey is through a post-Soviet world, and Thubron is able to use his Russian on several occasions. This, and what he calls a largely tone-free Mandarin, plus English, gets him through. Of the six countries, he appears to enjoy Afghanistan the most. There are few Soviet-era factories here, and when he arrives at the border with Iran he writes that he didn't want to leave. Only a festival in Iran's eastern outpost of Meshed gets him going again (even though the chronology here is in reality quasi-fictional).
This book makes fine reading and kept me absorbed through two sleepless nights. Whether it's Thubron's masterpiece, as his publishers claim, is another matter. Perhaps someone should ask him - he'll give the now customary author's talks to promote the book, though it's easy to imagine how distasteful these will be to someone who enjoys his own company as much as Thubron does - a characteristic, however, for which his readers should be especially grateful.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist