In Xanadu

Dalrymple back at Cambridge

Imagine being an undergraduate and deciding that your summer vacation would be more fun if you retraced the route Marco Polo followed in 1271, from Jerusalem to the Chinese Emperor's summer palace at Shang-tu (Coleridge's "Xanadu"), a bit north of Peking (Beijing).  I've traveled a fair bit in my life, but reading about such an adventure at any age leaves me seething with jealousy.

But that's what William Dalrymple did, at the age of 22 while still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, back in 1986.  Traveling by bus, minibus, hitchhiking, walking -- through Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and all across China.  He did the final leg into Beijing in a first class train coach, having been caught traveling once too often into sensitive areas of China forbidden to foreigners.  In 1989, he published his account of the trip, In Xanadu.

Dalrymple tackles his trip with all the impetuosity and fearlessness of extreme youth, accompanied by his two female friends -- the first, Laura, a "fearless traveler" whom he met at a party in England, who was able to accompany him only as far as Lahore; the second, Lou, a former girlfriend, who joined him in Lahore and completed the expedition with him.

The travelers departed from Marco Polo's route at only one point -- Afghanistan in 1986, as now, was patently unsafe for casual travel.  They detoured through southern Iran and the wild and wooly Pakistan province of Baluchistan.  Once they reached Lahore, Pakistan in the 1980s was still safe for travel and enjoyable -- a condition that today we can only envy.  I seriously considered joining a hiking expedition in Gilgit and Hunza, near the Chinese border about the same time that Dalrymple was passing through.  I seriously regret now that I didn't seize the opportunity.

My primary reason for reading the book was to hear of Dalrymple's travels north of the Sino-Pakistani border -- into Xinjiang, with its Uigher population, and its city of Kashgar where I will be spending several days in three weeks.  Dalrymple, like other authors such as Colin Thubron twenty years later, found Kashgar disappointing.  Holed up in the former British consulate, which by 1986 had been been demoted to use as a primitive hostel, he found little about 1986 Kashgar that was romantic:

A gloomy dust haze hangs over the town like a shroud.  The old city walls have been pulled down and only fragments remain.  Large open streets have been punched through the bazaars, with separate lanes for cars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians.  There are no cars yet in Kashgar; there is a five-year waiting list for bicycles, and few of the buses are ever in working order.  ...  {T]he Chinese want to give the impression that Kashgar is looking forward to the next century.  For this reason, the streets are now lined with charmless totalitarian buildings and in the centre of the  principal boulevard stands an outsized statute of Mao, hand raised in benediction towards the empty expanses of People's Park.

Mao no doubt is gone, thirty years later.  And Dalrymple himself soon discovered traditional Uighur life continuing in makeshift bazaars squeezed into the blank spaces between the sterile boulevards imposed by the Han Chinese authorities. 

But I believe it was Thubron who noted the increasing Chinese tendency to eradicate most of the ethnic particularities of Chinese cities, but to save and "sanitize" a sectors of those cities for tourist consumption.  Thus, I may discover that Kashgar offers a Disneyfied area of "Uighurland" for my enjoyment -- in the same way as Samarkand and Tashkent had been tidied up and prettified -- now seemingly almost Californian cities with radically renovated monuments -- when I visited Uzbekistan two years ago. 

Although to Dalrymple, traveling Marco Polo's Silk Road seemed to take forever, he necessarily skims over much of the route.  He and his companion were ill, or they were traveling by night, or they were totally focused on dealing with odd locals and bureaucratic functionaries, or they simply had to move all too quickly through an area that they themselves would loved to have investigated more thoroughly.  Dalrymple is very much a travel writer in the British tradition of Robert Byron (whose reconstruction of  nonsensical dialogues with locals he loves to emulate) and Patrick Leigh Fermor -- a traveler who is also an amateur art history connoisseur.  He spends many pages describing mosques, palaces and other monuments in detail.  He states openly that he is happy to be able to pontificate without fear of contradiction about architecture that professional art historians haven't yet had a chance to dissect authoritatively.  The reader may or may not appreciate his detailed discussions.

More popular with "Lonely Planet" type readers may be his ruminations over the hardships of traveling on the cheap -- of which there were many, and frequent -- and his willingness to ignore "forbidden" areas or activities, and continue blithely onward until nabbed.  And even then his frequent ability to talk his way out of trouble.  Sometimes they were saved just by luck, as when an Iranian police officer was about to arrest Dalrymple and Laura as spies, but then discovered Dalrymple's university library card:

"What is this?" he said.  He looked at the card.  Then he looked up.
"You are at Cambridge?"
"Yes."
"Cambridge University?"
"Cambridge University."
His expression changed.
"Oh.  Agah," he said.  "By the great Ali!  This is the most famous university in the world."
He examined the card.
"Ah, my heart!  Look at this card.  Expiry date June eighty-seven.  Borrowing October eighty-six.  Five vols.  Oh, Agah.  For me these are magic words."
"For me too."
"Agah.  I am your servant."
I sat up.
"Do you mean that?"
"Agah.  You are a scholar.  I am at your service."
He did mean it.

In a foreword to the 2014 edition, Dalrymple cringes a bit at his youth, naiveté, tendency to stereotype others, and Anglocentricity:  "a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can't quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to ..."  Well, sure, but we're all young once, and Dalrymple went on to become a highly respected travel writer and historian.  His 1989 book is informative and amusing and a product of its era -- only thirty years ago, but "a world that has in many ways already disappeared." 

I read the book primarily to learn Dalrymple's observations of Kashgar and of the Uighur people.  I'm a little disappointed at the observations (offered both by Dalrymple, and by Colin Thubron in his more recent Shadow of the Silk Road) of Chinese attempts to weaken Uighur culture and impose Han ideals of tidiness and order on ancient Kashgar.  But every traveler sees the sights before him differently, depending on his own background and interests. 

I look forward to drawing my own conclusions three weeks from now.