Year

1936

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Mentioned People (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1936	Fleming, Peter. News from Tartary : a journey from Peking to Kashmir [ID D3374]. Foreword : There is not much to say about this book by way of introduction. It describes and undeservedly successful attempt to travel overland from Peking in China to Kashmir in India. The journey took seven months and covered about 355 miles. Anyone familiar, even vicriousley, with the regions which we traversed will recognize the inadequacy of my description of them. For much of the time we were in country very little known – country where even the collated wisdom represented by our maps was sometimes at ault and seldom comprehensive ; and although at almost no point on our route could we have regareded ourselves as pioneers, there was hardly a stretch of it which did not offer great opportunieis to specialists – opportunities to amplify, confirm, or contradict the findings of their rare and distinguished predecessors. We did not avail ourselves of these opportunities ; we were no specialists. The world's stock of knowledge – geographical, ethnological, meteorological, what you will – gained nothing from our journey. Nor did we mean that it should. Much as we should have liked to justify our existence by bringing back material which would have set the hive of learned men buzzing with confusion or complacency, we were not qualified to do so. We measured no skulls, we took no readings ; we would not have known how. We travelled for two reasons only. One is implicit in the title of this book. We wanted (it was part of our job, even if it had not been part of our natures) to find out what was happening in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkistan. It was eight years since a traveller had crossed this remote and turbulent province and reached India across country from Peking. In the interim a civil war had flared up and had (at least we hoped that it had) burnt itself out. There were dark rumours that a Foreign Power was making this area, the size of France, its own. Nobody could get in. Nobody could get out. In 1935 Sinkiang, if you substitute political for physical difficulties, shared with the peak of Everest the blue riband of inaccessibility. The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify. The earth, which one danced and spun before us as alluringly as a celluloid ball on top of a fountain in a rifle-range, is now a dull and vulnerable target ; nor do we get, for hitting it in the right place, the manicure set or the packet of Edinburgh rock which formerly rewarded good marksmanship. All along the line we have been forestalled, and forestalled by better men than we. Only the born tourist – happy, goggling ruminant – can follow in their tracks with the conviction that he is not wasting his time. But Sinkiang was, in 1935, a special case ; and the seemingly impossible journey through it could, at a pinch, qualify as political if not as geographical exploration. To the outside world the situation in the Province was as dark as Darkest Africa in the days when that Victorian superlative was current. So, although we brought back only News from Tartary when we might have brought back Knowledge, we at least had some excuse for going there ; our selfishness was in part disguised, our amateurishness in part condoned. Our selfishness was of course the operative factor. I have said that we travelled for two reasons only, and I have tried to explain one of them. The second, which was far more cogent than the first, was because we wanted to travel – because we believed, in the light of previous experience, that we should enjoy it. It turned out that we were right. We enjoyed it very much indeed. There is only one other thing. You will find in this book, if you stay the course, a good many statements which – had they not reference to a part of Asia which is almost as remote from the headlines as it is from the sea – would be classed as 'revelations'. The majority of these show the Government of the Soviet Union in what will probably seem to most a discreditable light. All these statements are based on what is, at is flimsiest, good second-hand evidence – i.e. the evidence of reliable people who thave themselves witnessed the events of tendencies recorded. I should perhaps add that these statements are made objectively. I know nothing, and care less, about political theory ; knavery, oppression and ineptitude, as perpetrated by government, interest me only in their concrete manifestations, in their impact on mankind : not in their nebulous doctrinal origins. I have travelled fairly widely in 'Communist' Russia (where they supplied me with the inverted commas) : and I have seen a good deal of Japanese Imperialism on the Asiatic mainland. I like the Russians and the Japanese enormously ; and I have been equally rude to both. I say this because I know that to read a propagandist, a man with vested intellectual interests, is as dull as dining with a vegetarian. I have never admired, and very seldom liked, anything that I have written ; and I can only hope that this book will commend itself more to you than it does to me. But it is at least honest in intention. I really have done my best – and it was difficult, because we led such a queer, remote, specialized kind of life – to describe the journey without even involuntary falsification, to tell what it felt like at the time, to give a true picture of a monotonous, unheroic, but strange existence. On paper it was a spectacular journey, but I have tried to reduce it to its true dimensions. The difficulties were potentially enormous, but in the event they never amounted to very much. We were never ill, never in immediate danger, and never seriously short of food. We had, by the only standards worth applying, and easy time of it. Of the people who helped us, some are thanked in the pages that follow. But there were others, and I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to Erik Norin for invaluable assistance in Peking ; to Nancy and Harold Caccia, under whose hospitable roof in the Legation my preparations, such as they were, were made ; to Owen and Eleanor Lattimore, for inspiration, advice, and a tin of saddle-soap which we never used ; to Sir Eric Teichman, for the loan of the.44 ; to John and Tony Keswick, who got the rook rifle for me ; and to Geoffrey Dawson, who gave me the run of Asia. Finally, I should like to thank Kini Maillart. It is customary for the members of an expedition to pay each other elaborate compliments in print, though they may have done the opposite in the field ; but ours was more of an escapade than an expedition, and in this as in other respects I have not too closely followed precedent. Explicit praise of her courage, her endurance, her good-humour and her discretion would – were it adequate – strike at the opening of this prosaic and informal narrative a note at once too conventional and too flamboyant. Here and there in the text I have paid tributes to her which could not be whithheld ; but for the most part I have left you to form your own opinions of a girl who travelled for many hundreds of miles through country were no white woman has ever been before. I can hardly doubt that you will find her, as I did, a gallant traveller and a good companion.	Person: Fleming, Peter

Cited by (2)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2003-	Claus, Matthias Claus, Matthias. Reisen und Abenteuer : Reiseberichte über China und Tibet, von den Anfängen der Geschichte bis zum Jahr 2000. : http://www.das-klassische-china.de.	Web / Cla
2		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB