Customer Reviews

Frontiers of Heaven: A Journey to the End of China

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

 

 

This book should be more popular! Stewart has the spirit of the intrepid traveler and the writing skills of a poet. I loved his descriptions of his travels along the Silk Road as well as his dry English wit. He is like Paul Theroux, another of my favorite travel writers, without the acidity and cynicism Theroux often exudes. Let's face it, how many of us are actually going to visit the remote places Stewart writes about? Reading about his encounters in Kashgar or Xinjiang is surely as satisfying and without all the hassles and unpleasantries of the real thing.

I picked this up after reading Stewart's excellent book on Mongolia. Originally published in England a decade ago, this account of traveling through China won the prestigious Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award. Starting on the coast, he traveled westward by bus, boat and train to a point south of the Great Wall where the Silk Road emerged from the desert to enter the Celestial Kingdom. To a certain extent, his Westward-Ho! venture retraces the steps of the legendary 7th-century monk Hsuan-tsang, who left the safe confines of mother China on a solo mission to gather sacred Buddhist texts from India and bring them back so that the Chinese Buddhists could be assured that they remained on the true path. However, Stewart doesn't shackle his narrative this particular hook; at times he's examining the state of modern China, other times the psychology of traveling alone, and sometimes the notion among Chinese that the world beyond the Great Wall is a barbarian one.

From Shanghai onward, he finds that the notion of traveling West is curious to many Chinese. In a nation where wealth is heavily concentrated on the coast, the hinterlands are still regarded as a place of exile, and he's continually having to explain why he's headed that way. In highly readable prose studded with wit and observation, he wends his merry way, drawing assistance from a network of contacts, and even manages to have a brief fling with a woman in Xian. (This is notable, as it is the first outright admission of such a thing I've come across in mainstream travelogues.) The overwhelming image he sketches of modern China is one of rapid change and an embrace of the adage "to become rich is glorious." As one of his contacts explains the apparent dissolution of communist principles, "Human nature was a far more formidable opponent than international capital." One of the most interesting aspects of this is his discovery that in parts of China housing shortages are such that approximately 10,000,000 people live in converted caves!

The latter third of the book takes him to Xinjiang province, where he witnesses the depressing transformations there (the government is engaged in a dramatic effort to resettle the region with ethnic Han in order to culturally pacify the area). From there he leaves China, onward to Tibet, an encounter with Kyrgyz tribesmen, and ultimately over the passes on dubious Pakistani buses. It's not the most cohesive journey, but the account is well-written and packs a great deal into its relatively few pages.

Author: Stanley Stewart
Title: Frontiers of Heaven
Time: 1994
Destination: China, Pakistan
Length: a few weeks
Type: overland
Rating: 5/10
Looking for the weird?

[Please note: I have been reading a German translation.]

The story: Travel writer SS starts in Shanghai - and travels overland through China, all the way to Xinjiang and into Pakistan. He writes about what he sees along the ancient Silk Roads, talks to locals, checks out historical relics - and he even has a short-lived love affair.

I liked that last part best. Sometimes I wonder: why don't more travel writers dare to write about this part of the adventure? Is it not important?

Anyway, I found SS's style of writing pretty enjoyable. Standing in a long tradition of Anglosaxon travel writers, he can be very funny. But it does him good not to rely on humor as much as Peter Fleming and Nigel Barley do. In other words: he sounds a bit more serious, which is a good thing.

So why is this one only a 5/10 then?

Well, you can argue with me on this one, but I found some of SS's stories a bit... weird. I don't know about his level of Chinese, or his knowledge of Chinese culture, but many of the things he writes seem a bit too juicy" for my taste - as if SS had been searching for oddities instead of embracing the ordinary.

The guy on the train who brags about how he basically purchased" a woman from her father without any intents of marrying her.
The chief judge in Wuwei who is wears his shirt tied up above his exposed belly and hauls around the bloody head of a cow on his bicycle (while being on the way to a court case).
The discussion with a sailor about Tang poetry (in English?)...
Things like these were a bit weird for me to read. I think maybe China is really not as strange and peculiar as many people would like to have it be?

Don't get me wrong: this is not a bad book at all, and especially the part about the love affair is enjoyable to read.

But I have a bad feeling about those stories.

5/10.

The last of SS's books I hadn't read yet. This travelogue on China's western frontier had already been published in 1995 going on to win the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1996. (This award is apparently defunct sinche it hasn't been attributed from 2004!). Written twelve years ago, the book probably is not superupdated like republished modern travel books should be, but it does have its good points. What SS is justly famous for is his wit and humanity, that only sometimes lapses into cynism and a downright superiority complex. In this work tolerance and adaptation are the main characteristics of our traveler. The narrative structure is knowledge of places through human encounters, so the book is a collection of short profiles and stories linked together by the description of travel and bits and pieces of cultural preparation due to the author's reading and information gathering. The intinerary goes from Shangai to Rawalpindi, crossing China. Stanley starts from the Yangze by boat to Chongquing, then goes by train to Xi'an were he has a love story with a pretty Chinese girl and dwells on the importance of horses to the Chinese culture. Xi'an is the departure place for the Chinese western frontier, once by horse and now by train. With many inconveniences and with downright disconforts the train runs through Langzhou on the Yellow River, and from here Stanley detours to Xiahe on the borders of the Tibetan grasslands to give us some outlook on recent Tibetan history and the conflict with China. From Langzhou to Wuwei, now definitely on the Silk Road (the way of Xuan Zang), with many difficulties with train tickets (he has to propose to the station ticket office official to wrench a ticket to Xinjiang), through the Gansu corridor he manages to reach the Great Wall. Follows Dunhunag and famous Mogao caves and the story of Stein's discovery of the old Buddhist manuscripts. The issue of the Turkic Moslems and Xinjiang ("New Dominion") is examined in depth taking into account the problems of the ethnic minorities and the Han immigration. Follows Turfan and Ili, taking time to wander in the Kazak steppes, and successively Kuqa and the Great Game location Kashgar, that eventhough not as fascinating as we immagine it still survies in its multiethnic variety and maybe some of its cloack and dagger atmosphere. From Kashgar to Pakistan, along the Karakorum Highway by bus, through Hunza, to Gilgit and Taxila (Ashoka's capital with memories of the Hellenistic period) Stanley reaches Rawalpindi, were his first encounters with English speaking people open up his heart.
The book is short and reads fast and the sketches of the people Stewart meets are really hilarious at times. If one likes the style, the desire to be taken along is guaranteed. A book to enjoy!

This is a nice travel book. I hesitated to buy this book, but his travels on the boundary of China fascinated me. I followed his land journey from Shanghai to Pakistan. The area he traveled in is Chinese Central Asia, and is inhabitated by Chinese and other nationalities. Until recently, this was a restricted area of China. Stewart makes it comes to life in his colorful and descriptive language. Along the way, you can also feel the sarcasm in his view of subjects. The biggest laugh came when Stewart was attempting to buy a train ticket out of a small town. After several days of being told he could not buy one, he finally asked the ticket seller to marry him, since he planned to settle in the town. A ticket magically appeared. That was an innovative way to solve a problem.

I have been to China, but not the areas where Stewart wandered. His book gives me great interest in the places he described. A nice read.