Customer Reviews

The Desert Road to Turkestan (Kodansha Globe)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an account of a journey across the Gobi Desert by camel in the early part of the 20th century at a time when central government control was fragmentary at best--a time of warlords, bandits, and the rapid decline of a great number of traditional practices in China. The author, a fluent Chinese speaker, sometime journalist, and wool trader for a company in Tianjin, hired camels to join one of the last of the trading caravans travelling between Xinjiang an what is now Inner Mongolia. From observations of the manners and customs of the caravans, through details of language, to descriptions of the various hazards of the journey, Lattimore (an American who was later persecuted in the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 60s for his knowledge of China) is both perceptive and witty, and his book is infused with a sympathy for the people and their soon-to-vanish way of life.

This charming, amusing, and intelligent book is one of the best travel books on China ever written, several leagues above most modern accounts, and is likely to remain in print for a long time to come.

I finished reading Owen Lattimore's The Desert Road to Turkestan yesterday, and rarely have I been so completely, thoroughly and delightedly sandbagged by a book. I spent all day in bed absorbed in Lattimore's travels with a Chinese camel caravan through Western China and the Gobi desert in 1926-7. This definitely qualifies as a first-rate example of the "Are You Out of Your Mind!" travel book genre. It's even better than The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. On top of that, Lattimore was one of the 20th centuries finest Asian Scholars. Buy, Read, Enjoy!

Owen Lattimore, the successively famous Chinese and Mongolian scholar and much debated presumptive "comunist agent" of the McCartney period, wrote this book in 1927 after his incredible caravan voyage along the then unmapped "Winding Road" in Inner Mongolia of 1926. The reason for this ethnological feat was the Author's convinction that caravan days were going to disappear with the progress beeing made in China by railways and roads and as he puts it: "I wanted to feel the strange and actual life of the past which we usually accept without thought as the dead background of our present". The choice of the Winding Road instead of the more common and mapped Silk Road routes was determined by the then dangerous traveling conditions due to war going on in China. Lattimore's intention must be kept in mind while reading this exquisite work. Many of the apparent drawbacks of the book such as the excessive detail in the use of foreign toponyms, the frequent digressions into prices of wares, habits of people, legends and stories related to places are in reality a treasure of knwoledge that has been preserved for ever. However, the "winding" of Lattimore's prose and thoughts does not hinder the enjoyability of this adventure, because the Desert Road is an adventure book of the best tradition. The adventure of a smart and curious and brave young man that is completely engrossed in his dream but at the same times does not recoil from living and learning from the men he travels with. The characters such as Moses, the Villainous Camel Puller and Wa-wa, the Eldest Son of the House of Chou are etched with great care and deep understanding and even if there are no "strong episodes", the interactions among them is interesting to follow and works like the backbone of the story. But the real magic of the book is the description of the days, the atmospheres and the landscapes, the animals (camels and others), the physical excertion and the the inconveniences and the moments of joy and peace.The Black Gobi is looming in the back of the whole story with its camel skeletons and buried water wells. The book also offers many photographs shot by the Author that illustrate significant episodes and people.
I think this book is an indispensable read in the approach to Inner Mongolia and its traditions and represents at the same time a specialistic and a non-specilistic historical document that will not be forgotten like many other travel books of those times.

P.S. If one is curious on the House of the False Lama (see the more recent George Crane's Beyond the House of the False Lama) in the DRTT you can find many answers.
The introduction by the Author's son David Lattimore helps to contextualize the book and gives many useful information for cross-references.

This book is probably is as interesting as being Owen Lattimore's first book as for its content. It basically represents the starting point of Lattimore's career as a traveler/scholar. At the time (1926), he was a twenty-something "native son" of the Euro-American expat community of China's "treaty ports": born in the US but raised in China son of a China-based American professor, a fluent Chinese speaker, and a successful young employee of some kind of wool trading business. But one day, on a business trip to Baotou (the railhead in Inner Mongolia) he made a momentous decision: to hire a few camels and a "camel man" to manage them, and to make his way along the China-Mongolia's border to Central Asia.

And so he did, a few months later, despite the fighting warlords and the predatory tax collectors of the desert. Unlike the "famous explorer" preceding him, he did not have a staff of servants and a caravan of his own; rather, he, with his old family servant and his hired camel man joined one of many caravans plying the road between the Eastern China and Xinjiang along the "Winding Road" of the Gobi, avoiding the customs extortions of both the newly independent Outer Mongolia and the warlord governments of various Chinese provinces. Having to move along with trade caravans, Lattimore regretted his inability to make detours to various sites of interest away from the main route; but, on the other hand, spending 5 months walking and living along with the people and camels of the Gobi allowed him an unparalleled opportunity to learn about their way of life and their view of the world. Did you know that the camel pullers were able to supplement their income by spinning yarn and then knitting or crocheting socks or scarves while walking along their camels, the animals readily supplying any wool they needed? Or that Gansu migrants to a small oasis in Xinjiang, not having professional Taoist priests, would be able to carry out necessary rituals in the community's Taoist shrine using their own joint efforts? Minor details - what one did with oatmeal to make it more edible, or how much one would have to pay for a sheep - may be boring for some readers, but put together they give a realistic feeling of what it was like to live in that time and place.

The world of the people of the desert was a cruel world, and Lattimore's era was far from "political correctness" of any kind. But he was able to understand the common humanity of all of us, and to share his insights with his readers.

If you're traveling to Western China (anything West of and including Qinghai and Gansu), this is one of 2 must-read books. "Desert Road to Turkestan" shares this honor with an even slightly better book, "News from Tartary" by Peter Fleming. Both are excellent accounts of the cultural trail from deep China into the wilderness of the West. Both are also outstanding travelogues that stand on their own as fantastic travel writing. (Many reviewers consider Fleming's book--and this is always a strange sentence to see in writing--as one of the best travel books ever written; after reading it and traveling in the region it's hard to completely disagree.) The insights of Lattimore's book--he later became one of the United States' greatest scholars on China in the 20th century--stand the test of time and are surprisingly balanced for a book written decades ago. Lattimore also memorializes and describes the tail end of the last great non-mechanized caravans across China, which have passed into history.

I only read about 100 pages, and I'm not sure how I even got that far. It's not that the book is poorly written, for lack of a better phrase, nor is it that Lattimore's trip was boring. Maybe it was, can't really put my finger on it.

But Lattimore's account of the trip is just excruciating to read! For starters, Lattimore jumps around from one topic to another in the same chapter, and many times goes off on these tangents, all without any seemingly good reason.

For a book about an explorer's account of a trip, Sven Hedin's MY LIFE AS AN EXPLORER is much more well written and will keep you much more suspense.

I got to page three on three occasions and it's now collecting dust. Owen Lattimore may have been a explorer and a beacon for sensible China research during the US witch hunt days, but this isn't gripping travel writing. Maybe it's the fact that he uses old fashioned transliteration of Chinese names, I don't know, but I just couldn't get into it.

I'll definitely try again, another time. First hand accounts from explorers heading off into the wild blue yonder are normally hard to put down. If ony Lattimore could write like Great Game guru Peter Hopkirk. What a shame.