February 23, 2004
Who Is Owen Lattimore?
Best travel writer of the twentieth century
At Wu-t'ung Wo-tze we had camped on bare soil cleared by another caravan, pitching our tent over the still-glowing coals of their fire. This caravan could be only a day ahead of us, and must, we knew, be the one which had started from San-t'ang Hu five days before us. Plenty of signs gave the reason of their slow progress; we were now rarely out of sight of camels cast either by them or the caravans just in advance of them. Many of these camels were still living, and by the way they were plated with frozen snow on one side it was plain to see that the earlier caravans had been impeded more by blizzards than by snowfall.
Even when a camel is too numbed and weak to stand, his incredible vitality may keep him living for five or six days, and that under the torture of successive blizzards. They do not get even the cruel mercy of death from the wolves, for, though a wolf will pull down a standing camel, he is daunted by the unnatural sight ofa living camel that lies still and waits. Hungry wolves will wait for days until the camel rolls over on his side in the spasm of death.
Some of the castaways we saw, however, had not so much as stretched out on their sides, but had died huddled with their legs under them and their necks turned back in a posture of agony, showing how they had tried to shield their heads from the wind, frozen as they lay. Those that still lived would turn their heads, their bodies being powerless, to watch our approach; then turn to the front to follow us with their gaze.
I could not shoot them; there was too much at stake, for if I had shot and the weather, say, had turned against us, it would have been attributed to the uneasy ghosts of camels dead by unfitting violence, and blamed on me, and there would have been panic. But I remember the sentry chain of death across the Black Gobi, and thought this worse.
In 1926, Owen Lattimore, and his wife Eleanor, began an unfathomably perilous trip through China, Mongolia, and Central Asia which would be the beginning of a career heralded as one of the twentieth century's most amazing scholar-adventurers, and ultimately, the world's preeminent Sinologist and Mongolist.
Son David Lattimore tried to put their journey in perspective:
- My mother's part of the journey made her the first woman to have documented a trip overland from Beijing to India via the Karakoram. In particular, her traversal as a lone woman of the Steppe of the Great Horde in Kazakhstan in mid-winter by horse-drawn sled, at temperatures below those of the North Pole, and in the most unsettled of political and social circumstance, not knowing whether her husband was dead or alive, was remarkable in the highest degree.
But my father's journey by caravan from Hohhot to Turkestan was remarkable too. Chinese and Mongol caravans had traveled this Desert or Winding Road for several years, and had carried a few White Russian refugees, but the route itself was undocumented, although a very few explorers had crossed it at right angles. The first, eastern stretch of the route was an ancient caravan path from Hohhot, the "Blue City," in medieval Tenduc, to Khara-khoto, the ruined "Black City," in medieval Tanggut, on the Edsin Gol. Further west the Winding Road, which crossed the Black Gobi, the most desolate part of Mongolia (including stretches of four and and of three waterless stages) was a route of extreme hardship for the caravans, especially in winter, adopted by them only as a desperate recourse because of the closure of the Great Mongolian Road by the Communist-ruled Mongolian Republic, through whose territory it passed
Owen Lattimore's genius was captured in the three written volumes that came from this trip, his 'The Desert Road to Turkestan (Kodansha Globe)', 'High Tartary', and his wife's book, 'Turkestan Reunion.' No other travel literature, from any age, so viscerally captures the essence and experience of an unknown land as Lattimore's does. His writing is a demonstration of the very best travel record, and it's worth studying to understand why.
The mechanics of his success
"Four months spent on the most desert of all caravan routes through Mongolia," by camel, on the way from Peking to India provides an obvious scaffolding for the journal. Everything worth writing about can be linked to the Jao Lu, Winding Road, Lattimore followed.
On the scaffolding he (mechanically) hung daily telemetry.
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27 October 1926
- Days out from Kuei-hua: 69
- No. of stage: 59
- Ascend shallow valley, filled with scrub; cross easy divide, descend slowly to more barren coutnry. Mongols camped at distance. Halt by Hsien-ch'ih Ching (Salt Pool Well). Water vile.
- Distance of stage 11 miles.
- Total in miles from Kuei-hua: 1036
- General direction: NW
28 October 1926
- Days out from Kuei-hua: 70
- No. of stage: 60
- In and out over horseshoe hils; no wells until at 7 hours reach Ming Shui (Clear Water). Ascend easy valley beyond, camp among hills, with view of much larger hills to W. Near this camp, group of small obo to mark cross of routes. One comes from Outer Mongolia, one from Hsu Chou and Kan Chou; one goes to S side of end of Qarliq Tagh, to reach Ch 'ing Ch 'eng and Hami; finally there is the main caravan road. From stage 56 (House of the False Lama) to Ming Shui previously unexplored.
- Distance of stage 20 miles.
- Total in miles from Kuei-hua 1056
- General direction: W
One day's entry is not interesting in itself. However, it serves as a cue point for the entire record, a common reference for any arbitrary location along the route. It provides semi-quantitative telemetry that can later be used to study the trip, for instance converting mileages into an estimation of difficulty of terrain, or cross-referencing to locations in others' diaries.
The log isn't only a strict telemetry of formatted data sentences. It includes lots of microscopic details of no obvious, immediate application to anything else. Only when studied afterwards, or viewed in totality with all the other microscopic bits of information dust, do patterns, themes, and discoveries emerge.
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There is one of my "folk-etymologies," however, which is rather interesting. On pages 5 and 6, describing a man whom the caravan men called the "Bastard of Barkol," I translated "Erh-hun-tze" as a Chinese word for "bastard." That was certainly what it meant to the caravan men, but I am now sure that "Erh-hun-tze" is the Chinese pronunciation of "Erke'un," plural "Erk'ut," the medieval Mongol name for Nestorian Christians. It survives as a clan name here and there in Mongolia, and is at the basis of the palcename of Irkutsk, in Siberia. Most interesting of all, Father Antoine Mostaert, the great Belgian Mongolist, discoverd among the Ordos Mongols a small community of surviving "crypto-Nestorians." One may recall that Marco Polo, in his account of the Nestorians of the same general region in his time, got the notion (just like the Chinese caravan men) that they were a mixed race, or bastards. How close I came, in my young ignorance, to stumblign on a discovery of real importance! The discover and, if possible, the straightening up of early mistakes is one of the pleasures of old age."
His record could have easily been just "A Linguist to Turkestan" or "A Geologist Along the Winding Road." But Lattimore's observations were multi-spectral, producing a rich record of the people, geography, history, and biology he encountered along the trail.
The selection function for what he wrote seems to be simply, "what interesting things did I encounter today?"
One day it might be running into a cell of Turkish opium smugglers:
- Besides the opium they had on their saddles, the five Salars led two pack ponies, so that they must have been convoying several thousand dollars' worth of a drug that can be sold anywhere, is light to carry and easy to conceal. They looked like fighting men; a look worth having in their way of life. Opium runners have to be both reckless and resolute. Most of them are men of betters "bones," as the Chinese say, than common bandits. They travel in smaller parties and run more risk, since one of their handy consignments would make a pretty haul for the bandits themselves. When carrying opium, therefore, the are always anxious to avoid trouble; but if they are going back to Kan-su empty-handed they are notoriously ready for the minor kinds of devilment. On the way down from Kan-su they usually turn into Mongolia from Nin-hsia, to avoid the Ko-lao Huei or Elder Brethren bandits who are cocks of the walks in the Ordos and Yellow River regions. They are splendidly mounted and travel hard and fast along the unfrequented trails of Alashan, keeping as far as possible to the cover of desert hills and sand dunes. They get forage for their ponies, paying more according to their own mood than the market price, from the Chinese traders who sell grain to the Mongols.
Another day it's describing the "the [rock] imprint of the face of a saint called Borhungwulu":
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I was told later than somewhere in this region -- probably in the main Lang Shan, south of our pasage -- there is a group fo three holy peaks. One the central peak is a rock bearing the imprint of that face of a saint called "Borghunwulu.[1]" I say imprint rather than carving because this appears to be connected with the very ancient legend of a saint sitting in meditation before a rock and impressing his image on it."
[1] I spell the name as nearly as possible as I heard it, from my Chen-fan Wa-wa. There is a curious resemablenace between this name and the name of the peak given by Kozloff as Burkhan-Buddha, in the southeastern Altai, at about 46N 96E. The Chen-fan Wa-wa spoke a soft, slurred southern Alashan dialect of Mongol. In some border distrct the Mongol pronunciation seems to be softened until words pronounced almost as teh Chinese pronounce them -- as, for instance, hala for khara.
The route is used as a framework, but not a crutch. Lattimore wrote the book with warm, often funny, readable prose, not as 120 different atomic fact bins for each day of the journey.
In retelling how he came to adapt the identical diet as the camel pullers he walked with, he described his earlier preperations back in Peking.
Now my stomach is a prideful organ that has always urged me to let it try anything once, and has usually liked it. Nevertheless, when I returned to Peking, I took that same stomach to a friend of mine who was a doctor with Mongolian experience and asked him what I should put into it. The doctor thought of a lot of things. He drew up a wonderful list in which the proportions of the protieins and the carbohydrates and the what-nots were superbly balanced. Thenhe chreeckd it by the dietary of the American Navy (for he was versed in many thigns besides Mongolia), saw that it was good, and made some additions. Afterward I checked it with a check book and made some subtractions. Finally we arrived ata modus edendi. Of the original theory on which the regimen was based I seem to remember onl that the American Navy can keep afloat (if pushed, as the saying goes) on baked beans and what are Americonautically called "canned" tomatoes.
Considering the privation of the journey, and the state of photographic equipment in 1926, the books are relatively full of photographs. I would have found it interesting how he managed. Alas, he never discusses the subject. The pictures, and their terse captions, must speak for themselves.
Lattimore also provided a limited set of appendices, including an index, two maps, and a table of name translations.
For instance, the city Keui-hua:
- Usage in 'Desert Road to Turkestan': Kuei-hua
- Pinyin Usage: Guihua, Huhehaode
- Other Common Usages: Huhot, Huhehot, Hohhot, Old City
Lattimore's books are fertile for discovery. By including the seemingly trivial details, hooks are left that allow others to make connections and conclusions which add to the world's body of knowledge.
Write travel logs like Lattimore
Sadly, the open lands full of ancient civilizations barely known to the west are gone. You can reach almost any point on the globe in seventy-two hours now. Although there are plenty of adventures to experience, they're smaller, and harder to find.
The good news is that we're so inter-connected by the internet that the small bits of discovery and knowledge we do generate can be leveraged much more effectively than Lattimore managed. The time between discovery, publishing [to the web], and readers responding can be as short as a few hours now. Remember, Lattimore had his adventure in 1926-1927. He didn't publish the book until 1929. Sadly, some of his other travel journals, like Mongol Journey, are simply unavailable today.
So do not despair -- web technology allows us to do more with less!
The blog is the ideal vehicle for travel writing in the twenty first century.
...Its chronological dated entry format is the basic style for all travel writing and provides the straightforward framework from which to hang all your information. The key to recording all the juicy details is to keep the writing overhead as low as possible. You just want to be writing and dumping details of the day. You don't want to be worrying about metadata or formatting or even excessive editing. The blog does all the formatting and metadata for you, and makes it easy to do revisions later, when you're back home. In the field, one minute not spent on administration is one more minute you can record another speck of information that might prove useful some day.
...It's the quickest way to make your knowledge useful to others. With the profusion of internet cafes worldwide, you can be online from practically anywhere, write up your day's entry, or transcribe a week's worth from your bound journal, and have it published to the web in minutes. There is a good chance Googlebot will have read your blog a few hours later, and with the explosion in RSS and other pinging technologies, people interested in you or your subject will have already been alerted to your new posting. You might receive feedback from readers literally hours after you publish.
...It makes supplementing your writing with other resources effortless. Google and RSS syndication make it easy for writers and their audience to find each other. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) add maps to your journal and links to nearby resources. Digital photography tremendously shortens the workflow necessary to publish photos. The beauty of these tools is that they're nearly costless supplements. You merely write prose. Little perl engines do all the (hard) work of supplementing your writing with the extra bits of information, metadata, maps, pings, and links. We can keep writing as the variable cost, and everything else a fixed cost.
How you can make your travel writing more useful
There are three important enhancements you should apply to travel blogs.
Visualization aids for the reader
Blogs need photos to accompany the article. That's not all they need, though. The readers need a sense of location plus a sense of progress along a route. Thus a good travel blog should have a map to accompany it. Mentioning place names, roads, and cardinal directions isn't sufficient now. Ideally you'd have a large map of the whole area plus route, and then each blog article has a small thumbnail of its section of that route.
Hooks for further research
A good trip is full of new experiences for the reader: lots of proper nouns, jargon, and geography. The article should have a robust set of external links for these places and terms. Even better is to allow users to contribute cross-references themselves. Most blogs have comment and trackBack capability, but a useful extension would incorporate some wiki-like functionality for readers to create inline links.
The converse is that your writing should be readily indexed and searchable. This includes GIS hooks like ICBM addresses.
Navigational aids
The travel log should have enough geographical hooks that a reasonably smart, resourceful reader could closely follow your route. Good maps, photos, and descriptions go a long way towards this, but with GPS ubiquity, there is no excuse not to have a nice library of relevant waypoints and trackdata for readers to download and follow.
So why is the software called Lattimore?
My purpose is to provide a toolkit of small utilities that allow people to transform and enhance their own travel experiences into rich, useful tracts, but with minimal work. The title should honor one of the original scholar-hardmen of the 20th century, Owen Lattimore.