At dusk we reached the end of the first stage of our voyage through the romantic backwater lagoons and inlets of the Malabar coast. A crowd of brown boys gathered at the jetty, shouting, “Allerpey!”
We got out and sorted our baggage. Then the brown boys saw visions of baksheesh. Nor were they alone in demanding toll. There was the man who took our tickets, and the man who watched the man who took our tickets to see that he didn’t swindle, and the boy who brought the bullock-cart, and the man who brought the boy who brought the bullock-cart.
“Baksheesh! Rickshaw! Allerpey!” clamored the brown coolies. But alas I Allah didn’t pay. We were the victims who had to produce!
In these out-of-the-way parts of India the nervous traveler is apt to get rattled by the constant demands for baksheesh. But it is the custom of the country. He is a foolish man who tries to pay only for services rendered. It is the undeserving who demand baksheesh and get it too, if the traveler is in search of smiles and peace.
After all, the privilege of visiting this country is worth a lot of the fat coppers of Travancore!
It is a moonless night. Our beds are in the garden by the road, where a breeze is floating through the sentinel palms. The voice of the mosquito is heard in the land and the time of the brain-fever bird has come. But we lie safe inside our mosquito-nets and relax in the tepid air, pondering dreamily on the life about us. A bullfrog croaks for a moment, then lapses into sudden silence. By the garden gate pass silent figures sheeted like the Roman dead. A bat looms by. There comes to us the agonized wail of some beast in pain. Then again a sudden silence, as if a throat had been choked. The powers of evil are abroad. A million tiny lives are born only to die again. By fang and foot the tragedy is played. Then from far away comes to our sleepy ears a sound of worship, the murmur of a multitude, the bugling of conches-the people of Brahma are at prayer.
Allerpey is on the backwater from Quilon to Cochin, a flourishing city so unknown to the outer world that even Murray’s voluminous guide-book doesn’t name it.
At Cochin, the pepper port, we are again in touch with the West, for British Cochin is a big and growing commercial center where cocoanut-fiber, spice, “and all things nice” are exported to an annual value of three and a half millions sterling. There are roughly three towns at Cochin-British Cochin, Jew Town, and Ernakulam. The latter is on the land side of the bay that forms a natural harbor, and is the terminus of the railway. It is a clean and prosperous city, with no historical associations but good accommodation for travelers. British Cochin and Jew Town rank among the quaint places of the world.
Two thousand years ago Chinese pirates taught the Cochinese a peculiar way of fishing. They still prefer it to modern methods. There is a contraption of string and bamboo by the quay-side on which a long pole is hinged, with one end inland and the other over the sea. From the sea end is suspended a kite-like affair. This is the net. The other end of the pole is weighted, for the convenience of the fishermen, who lower the net slowly into the sea and then withdraw it with its freight of fishes. The cords and stones with which these machines are hung, and the curious old creatures who work the levers and stare into the net with googly eyes, are like Heath Robinson’s and Rube Goldberg’s cartoons come to life, and are a strange contrast to the Pierce Leslie factory a hundred yards away. From time immemorial this fishing has continued, and until recently at Cannanore, farther up the coast, half the catch of sharks’ fins and one fish were the perquisites of the rajah’s cat, as a curious form of state tax.
Towards the club we come to St. Francis’s Church, shut and locked after the unfortunate Church of England fashion. It is a gray, unimpressive building both within and without, yet venerable for its associations.
This was the first Christian church in India. Here Vasco da Gama was buried on Christmas Day, 1524.
Those who believe that the caste system, India’s social cancer, will ever be rooted out, should visit Cochin. Here there are as many subdivisions among the Christians as there are among the Hindus, and the lines between them are almost as sharply drawn.
According to tradition, the first Christian converts were made nearly two thousand years ago when the Apostle Thomas came to the Malabar coast. Since then climate and tradition have been at work on Christianity, with the result that to-day there are three divisions of the Roman Catholics using the Latin liturgy, but who do not worship together and who are differentiated by name-”The Three Hundred,” “The Five Hundred,” and “The Seven Hundred.” Then there is another Catholic sect that uses the Church of Rome liturgy in the ancient Syrian language instead of in Latin. There are also the Chaldean Syrians, who obey the “Patriarch of Babylon,” and the Jacobite Syrians, who recognize the leadership of the “Patriarch of Antioch,” and the St. Thomas Syrians, who disregard the rule of both Rome and Antioch and elect their own bishop.
The last-named are the “religious Bolsheviki” of Cochin. They call themselves St. Thomas Syrians on the ground that they are the only Christians in India who adhere to the ritual of the apostolic age. They believe in neither confession, absolution, fasting, invocation of the saints, veneration of relics, masses for the dead, nor baptismal regeneration.
As a result of century after century of dispute these sects have petrified into castes, and to-day intermarriage between castes is as uncommon among them as it is among their Hindu neighbors.
In addition to these seven groups there are others who adhere to various Protestant faiths. But by far the most interesting community we find in Cochin is in Jew Town, a quarter reminding us of the ghettos of Warsaw, Constantinople, or N ew York. But such is the effect of India on invading religions that even the Jews are split up into three separate castes, known as the “Whites,” the “Browns,” and the “Blacks.”
As we drive in our rickshaws toward Jew Town we are confronted by the curse of Cochin. A plague hangs over their city, the plague of death by deformity. One out of every ten of the people we pass suffers from elephantiasis, one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science, for it not only destroys the human frame but first distorts it into a thing of ridicule. The disease causes a swelling of the ankles and knees until the legs are the size of bolsters. It is a common sight to see men walking around in what are apparently brown top-boots, their flesh being thus travestied by this hideous affliction. It is cured in several different ways, one of which is for the victim to have the accumulated fat pared down until his legs are of normal size. But not many can afford the operation, or the necessary trip to the distant metropolis of Madras. The afflicted often live and work to late middle age, but their limbs grow bigger and bigger until they reach the limit of elasticity, and the periodic attacks of fever that accompany elephantiasis grow more frequent until at last the sufferers are relieved of their “too too solid flesh.” Fortunately, English bacteriologists have isolated the microbe-a water-borne germ.
A Brahmin, with the gaudy, diabolic-looking trident of Vishnu on his forehead, who is employed as a clerk by the wealthiest Jew shopkeeper, leads us through a maze of crooked thoroughfares until we find ourselves in a narrow street among a stately silent people dressed in long tunics of rich color, waistcoats buttoned tight around the neck, baggy white trousers, wooden sandals, and skull-caps. It is easy to distinguish them from the other inhabitants of Cochin by the locks that hang down in front of their ears.
The two-storied houses on either side of the street are of a style foreign to India, and the faces looking out at us from the shuttered windows remind us of the Rebeccas and J ezebels of Jerusalem. At the head of the street we come to a synagogue, with its tower and the old Dutch clock that has told off the lazy, listless hours of life in this Indian ghetto since the day when the merchant buccaneers from Amsterdam protected these Jews from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition.
Noone seems to know just when these people settled in southern India. The history of the early days of the colony is shrouded in the mists of obscurity. The Black Jews, who look much like the native Muhammadans except for their locks, stoutly uphold their tradition that they arrived first. According to one of their legends, the Apostle Thomas landed on the coast of Malabar in the year 52 A. D., and they came seventeen years later.
Some writers believe that the Children of Israel have been in touch with this portion of India since the ships of Solomon came here for their “precious cargoes” one thousand years B. c. Sir W. Hunter, a historian of wide repute, tells us that Roman merchant triremes sailing between Myos Hormuz on the Red Sea and the ports of Arabia, Ceylon, and Malabar, found a Jewish colony in southwestern India in the second century A. D.
But the historians and the antiquarians are unable to agree. Some hold that the Black Jews were the first, while others believe that the White Jews preceded them. The former have a tradition that they are descendants of the J udean-Arabians who are still found at Sanaa in the Yemen, and at Aden. The White Jews laugh at this story and declare that the Black Jews are merely the descendants of slaves whom they bought and afterwards converted and liberated.
One of the rabbis of the White Jewish community told us that Nebuchadnezzar, the haughty monarch who carried the Children of Israel off to Babylon in captivity, extended his empire all the way to Cape Comorin, the southernmost ti p of India, and then exiled the tribe of Manasseh to this extreme corner of his realm. He firmly believed that his people were the descendants of this tribe. A few have names like David Castile (David the Castilian), and this has been responsible for the rumor that they may be descendants of the Jews who were driven out of Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.
For centuries these people lived in peace and contentment with their Hindu and Muhammadan neighbors. But with the arrival of the representatives of the first great Christian power to invade the Orient-the Portuguese-their era of persecution began. Great rivalry existed between the Portuguese and the Dutch. The buccaneer dons suspected the Jews of helping their enemies, so they burned their settlements and chased them into the mountains. It was during this time that the records that might have revealed their origin were destroyed. Later on, when the Dutch defeated the Portuguese, the Jews came out of the jungle and with the assistance of their protectors rebuilt their homes and synagogues in Cochin.
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Pan-Asianism is one of the potentially explosive ideas that have contributed to Japan’s drive for expansion. It has become increasingly popular, especially among high military officers, both active and retired. Typical of the spirit of Japanese Pan-Asianism is an article by the publicist Rin Kaito, who, after recalling the religions, arts, and sciences which originated in Asia and repudiating the Occidental assumption of superiority to Orientals, ends on the following note:
For over a century and a half the Asiatics have been pressed down by the Whites and subjected to Western tyranny. But Japan, after defeating Russia, has aroused the sleeping Asiatics to shake off the Western tyranny and torture.
It is significant that Major General Kenji Doihara, who had the reputation of being one of Japan’s most astute military diplomats and experts on the mainland of Asia/ is an avowed believer in Pan-Asianism. “The doctrine of ‘Asia for the Asiatics,’” Doihara wrote in an issue of Dai Asia Shugi, a magazine devoted to expounding Pan-Asian ideas, “is based on the supreme principle that Asia must be safeguarded and maintained by Asiatics.”
In other words, the Occidental should go, from China first of all, then from the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, India, and other parts of Asia which should be “safeguarded and maintained by Asiatics.” Under present conditions “Asia for the Asiatics” in practice would be synonymous with “Japan over Asia.” The Japanese superiority over other Oriental peoples in such factors of national strength as military and naval power, general literacy, industrial development, and military organization is so great that there would be almost no limit to Japanese expectations of supremacy in Asia if the influence of the West were withdrawn.
I recently discussed the ideals of the Pan-Asian movement with General I wane Matsui, former commander of the Japanese garrison in Formosa and a leading figure in the Dai Asia Kyokai (Great Asia Association) of Japan. Spare in build and alert in bearing, General Matsui, like many other Japanese high officers, gave the impression of keeping himself in an excellent state of physical fitness through rigorous exercise and simple living. He described as one of the ideals of his organization “an Asiatic League of Nations, based on the slogan (Asia for the Asiatics,’” and declared that Pan-Asianism had won followers in China, India, French Indo-China, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. He gave me with approval a pamphlet in the English language entitled Asiatic Asia: What Does It Mean? By Professor Takeyo Nakatani, secretary of the association. The idea of Japanese hegemony in the Pan-Asian order was clearly put forward by Professor Nakatani in the following terms:
To bring order and reconstruction to the present chaotic condition of Asia is a duty that rests mostly on the shoulders of Japan… She has been asked to put to work all her forces, cultural, political, economic, and, if need be, military, in order to bring about unity and wholesale reconstruction in Asia.
The appeal of the Pan-Asian idea outside of Japan does not seem to be very wide or very great. Now and then a roving nationalist revolutionary from India or the Philippines may find shelter in Japan. But there is no evidence that Oriental nationalists, however much they may dislike British, French, or Dutch rule, would care to substitute Japanese. Japan’s aggressive policy toward China has certainly not been calculated to win support for plans of cooperating on a Pan-Asian or any other basis.
But while Pan-Asianism is a negligible force outside of Japan, the propulsive force of the idea in Japan should not be underrated. General Matsui is not the only Japanese military leader who cherishes an almost mystical faith in Japan’s mission as the driving force in an “Asia for the Asiatics” movement. If the Japanese Empire is to expand further, Pan-Asianism, to a certain type of Japanese mind, may become a slogan as inspiring as Kipling’s phrase about the “white man’s burden” was to the believer in the blessings of British imperial rule.
So behind the Japanese sweep toward empire one finds a whole complex of impelling forces. Some of these stem from Japan’s romantic feudal past, with its cult of the sword; others are derived rather from the more prosaic counting house considerations of the present.
The average Japanese does not possess a speculative mind.
But those who try to draw lessons from their country’s history must sometimes regret the two and a half centuries of self-imposed seclusion from which Japan emerged into the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. For while Japan was leading its static, shut-in life under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the rich colonial prizes were being staked out. Japan was handicapped in the race for colonial spoils by her super isolation, much as Germany and Italy were handicapped by the late achievement of national unity.
Two centuries ago, before Russia, Great Britain, France, and other foreign powers had struck firm roots in the Far East, it would have been far simpler and easier for Japan to carve out a vast Asiatic empire than it is at the present time. To-day Japanese pressure evokes counter-pressure. As a direct result of Japan’s drive for expansion, East Asia is arming on a scale which recalls the military establishments of its great mediaeval conquerors, Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.
The more spectacular armament race in Europe should not obscure the fact that the Far East is also arming to the limit of its resources. From Vladivostok, Russia’s main window on the Pacific, to Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, every country, with variations dictated by size, population, and resources, is investing an ever-larger share of its income in troops and ships and airplanes and cannon.
Take a brief imaginary tour of the Far East from north to south. The long Soviet-Manchoukuo frontier, slightly defended a few years ago, now bristles on the Russian side with forts and blockhouses, gas- and bomb-proof hangars for a fleet of several hundred airplanes, cantonments and storehouses for an army that is generally estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 men. Vladivostok, from which Japanese residents are being crowded out by none too gentle methods, is a large garrison town and submarine base.
On the other side of the frontier the Japanese army of occupation in Manchoukuo, while inferior to the Soviet forces in Siberia as regards size and equipment, is much the largest force that Japan has ever maintained on the Asiatic continent in time of peace. And Japan itself is passing through one political and economic crisis after another because of the effort to increase armaments at a pace which affects adversely both the financial stability of the country and the living standards of the people.
China in 1936 was America’s best customer in the field of airplanes and aeronautical equipment. Chinese purchases amounted to $6,872,000, as against $2,293,000 in 1935. And military airplanes represent only one part of China’s preparedness programme, which lays heavy burdens on the country’s chronically straitened finances.
The Commonwealth Government of the Philippines has launched a universal-service army scheme which will train 400,000 men by the time full independence is realized in 1946. The annual military appropriation of 16,000,000 pesos ($8,000,000) is a substantial item in the limited Philippine budget, but is small in relation to the country’s defense needs. It must be increased if the Philippine Army is to possess adequate air and naval auxiliary units.
Siam is spending money abroad for arms so fast that its British financial adviser has felt obliged to sound a gentle note of warning that financial equilibrium is under a strain as a consequence of the large outlay of foreign currency. Military appropriations have increased in the Dutch East Indies and in French Indo-China.
In the Dutch East Indies, where apprehension in regard to Japan’s ultimate acquisitive designs, whether justified or unjustified, is very pronounced, a hundred and fifty fighting planes are held in readiness at the air base near Surabaya. Great Britain has been holding large-scale maneuvers, with units drawn from places as far apart as Hong Kong and Iraq, to test the effectiveness of the great naval and air base at Singapore.
In the Far East, as in Europe, the arms-limitation hopes of what seem in retrospect the peaceful ‘twenties have been thoroughly blighted. At the moment a precarious equilibrium has been attained. Japan’s forward policy on the continent of Asia has provoked so much counter-arming that the Island Empire can scarcely take new aggressive steps without running the risk of provoking serious conflict. Whether this uneasy truce may in time be transformed into something more positively pacific, or whether it will break down altogether, depends in no small degree on how the issue of war and peace will be settled in Europe.
Japan’s sweep toward empire has by no means been purely military and territorial in character. Goods with the “Made in Japan” label have won their victories and made their enemies, just as the Japanese soldiers on the battlefields of Manchuria and Jehol. Japan’s advance to a commanding position on the Asiatic continent may be graphically represented by three arrows, pointing in different directions. The first points north, to Manchoukuo and the troubled frontier with Russia. The second points west, to China, where the destiny of Japan as an imperial power may well be settled. The third points south, to the rich tropical lands where Japan’s activities have thus far been purely commercial in character.
After everyone else had held forth, the general spoke:
“Yes, gentlemen, you have been to strange places.
But have you ever heard of the Black Pagoda?”
We were with Allenby’s army, camped at Deir el Belah on the edge of the Sinai Desert, just south of the old Philistine capital of Gaza. I was putting up for the night at the headquarters of a mounted column and we were sitting in the mess tent after dinner. The inevitable toast “To the King I” had just been drunk in Jewish wine from Richon le Zion, and after the general had passed around a box of Dutch cigars the conversation turned to the topic of far countries.
An Englishman, an Australian, and an Irishman were discussing strange places they had seen. The general was a British officer of the old school, originally of the Bucks Hussars; the Australian, a major in the Imperial Camel Corps; and the Irishman a captain in the Hong Kong-Singapore Battery. They were professional soldiers-had been for most of their natural Iives-e-and always on the move. They talked in the same off-hand intimate way of Basutoland, Malta, Shanghai, Khartoum, and Mandalay as we might speak of Omaha, Denver or Toledo.
“Right-he, sir,” we all said, “and where and what is the Black Pagoda?” Then we hitched our camp-chairs a bit nearer the general’s end of the table and settled ourselves to hear his yarn.
“It was before the war when I was doing my turn in India,” continued our host. “Occasionally we would be given a short leave that was hardly long enough for a voyage to England or even for a decent shoot in Kashmir. One winter, while my regiment was stationed at Mhow, I decided to try ocean bathing-for my liver. Getting a bit crotchety, don’t you know. I had heard a lot about the wonderful surf at Puri on the Bay of Bengal. And there I went. During my sojourn at this sacred Hindu city the local captain of police took me on the most unusual trip I ever made, and India, as you know, is one country where you can go on an unusual journey any day, or any night.
“Borne on the shoulders of muscular coolies, we bounced along on an all-night journey by palanquin. Just at dawn we arrived at our destination, the Black Pagoda, the weirdest and some say the finest of all the temples in India. Many are the strange sights to be found in Asia, but this temple surpasses them all. Why? Well, for the reason that its sides are covered with images, many of them of life size, that depict human beings in the act of committing nearly every sin in the world.
‘Strange, weird things that no man may say, Things Humanity hides away… Cruel things that man may not name, Naked here, without fear or shame’.
“Of course, there are many British officials in India who know of its existence, but few have ever been there -and those who go do not take their wives.”
Then the general gave us such a graphic, detailed description of the Black Pagoda that I returned to my tent there on the plains of Philistia declaring by the whiskers of Samson and Goliath that I would hire me a palanquin and make that midnight journey along the coast of Bengal to the Black Pagoda if my caravel ever touched the shores of mysterious Hindustan.
It was while on a speaking-tour of the world, relating tales of adventures with Allenby and Lawrence, that I caught my first glimpse of India. Here, I realized, was by far the most fascinating of all the countries I had visited. Richard Curle, mining engineer, savant, and friend of Conrad, once wrote a fascinating book entitled “The Shadow Show.” I like that title because it has always seemed to me that life on this planet is indeed a shadow show. And when I saw India I knew that I was witnessing the greatest show of all. I had found Australia and New Zealand fascinating, Africa full of thrills and surprises, and the Far East absorbingly interesting. But India towers as far above them as the Himalayas tower above the Alps. As a spectacle there is nothing like it.
Variety, we are assured, is the spice of life. The country that interests us the most is the one where there is the most variety. At any rate, so it seems to me. And India has variety to the nth degree. It is supremely the land of startling contrast. The southern tip touches the equator. Central India is in the Temperate Zone and is not only a land of mighty rivers and fertile valleys, but also includes vast deserts similar to those of Arabia, Arizona, and the Sahara. Along the northern border of India loom those towering mountain ranges, the Himalayas, loftiest of all the peaks of earth, their summits clad with ice and snow since the dawn of time.
Mark Twain once said that India was the land that all men long to see, and having seen by so much as a glimpse, would not trade that glimpse for all the other sights of the world. He wrote of it as the only land with an irresistible appeal to alien prince and alien peasant alike.
After the World War, when the fiery Clernenceau retired from political life, he announced that there was one country he simply had to see before he died. Romantic India.
The other day in a book about Napoleon I encountered a mention of a dazzling myth, one of those beliefs, half superstitious perhaps, that have fascinated men over the span of the centuries. Napoleon was charmed and tricked by it, and held it in the back of all his dreams. Throughout history, in the higher imaginations of statecraft that same beguiling idea appears again and again. Alexander was motivated by some such intuition. The idea is this: Who holds India holds the world. As a theory of world-politics you can pick it to pieces, but you cannot escape its seductive, glamorous persuasion.
Strangest of all the lands of this earth, India is inhabited by peoples who, in outward appearance at any rate, seem to include nearly every race under the sun. They vary in shade from the Untouchables of the south, who are descendants of the black aborigines, to the brown Brahmins, to the Mongolians of the north, and to the Caucasian races that include not only the British rulers but many of the native inhabitants as well.
On top of all this, just to lend more variety and contrast, India is a land of splendor and magnificence far, far surpassing anything to be found in either Europe or America-and at the same time it is also a land of squalor and misery so terrible that the mere memory of it still makes me shudder.
I had thought of India as a country one could see, and be satisfied to come away from, in a month or two. But instead of two months, I stayed for two years. Even then I was not content. I wanted to remain on and on, but unlike Aladdin I had no magic lamp, and one day my chancellor of the exchequer brought me out of my Arabian Nights’ dream with the harsh news that. my wealth in no way resembled either that of the fabled kings of Golconda, or of a present-day Indian maharajah.
To those of us who stop to think about it there is something impressive in the thought that one out of every four people on this spinning planet of ours is a citizen of the British Empire. And when we get that far in our contemplation, it is interesting to keep on for a moment and ponder over the fact that three out of every four people in the British Empire live in India. A thousand years or so from now, when the Muse of History sets down her verdict as to the success of the greatest empire the world has ever known, she will be obliged to measure that success largely by what the British have accomplished among the Oriental peoples of the vast Asiatic peninsula of Hindustan.
I decided to commence my journey at the extreme southernmost tip of the peninsula, right down near the equator. There is no city there, nor had I ever read of any traveler’s visit to that cape. Accompanied by Harry Chase, who had been with me in Arabia, Africa, and Europe during the World War, I sailed down the Red Sea, and then crossed the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean to the island of Ceylon. Here we engaged Singhalese fishermen to ferry us across the strait in their primitive catamarans. Then from Cape Comorin we proposed to set forth on our two or three months’ journey, a journey that lengthened to two years and took us back and forth across India for a total distance of over sixty thousand miles-more than twice the circumference of the earth at the equator-and over a vast country nearly as large as the continent of Europe and inhabited by more people than there are on the continents of Australia, Africa, and North and South America all combined.
Every traveler from the West who visits India should have a guru, a wise man, to lead him about and explain the strange things he sees and hears. Without a guru the European or American who sojourns for a little while in India wanders in a daze and comes away as bewildered as any Alice in Wonderland. But to find your guru when you get to India, ah, that may not be so easy. Ganesha, the Hindu goddess of luck, smiled on me. She may not have given me the ability to see with eyes of understanding, but she did send me a guru. For I was fortunate enough to have a proper teacher who expounded to me many a mystery and perplexity.
In these western parts the custom of learning is to attend the lectures of a professor in a hall. But in India you sit at the feet of an ascetic hermit in a forest, or accompany a wandering yogi as a humble disciple, and your guru expounds to you the secrets of cryptic wisdom. I, metaphorically speaking, sat at the feet of a guru, a yogi. Incongruous as it may seem my guru was neither Hindu, Mussulman, nor Buddhist monk. He was not even an oriental, at any rate not by place of birth or ancestry. He was an Englishman, and a professional soldier.
“Y.B.” was the nickname by which he was known throughout the Indian Army. And most of his fellow officers thought him a bit mad. “Y.B.” would take off his uniform, don the picturesque costume of an Afridi, and wander about like a modern Harun-al-Rashid. Then too, he seemed to be genuinely fond of the Oriental peoples around him and seemed to understand them. Also he was an enthusiastic student of the languages and philosophies of the East. All of which somewhat baffled his beef-eating fellow Britons.
Major Francis Yeats-Brown was the younger son of an English diplomat. Against his will-he wanted to be a poet-he was sent to Sandhurst and trained for the army. The Orient called to him and he became a Bengal Lancer, although every turn of his mind was toward scholarship, literature, and philosophy. But he soldiered well and capably, a slashing cavalry officer in the incessant wars along the Indo-Afghan frontier. When the World War came he transferred to the cavalry of the clouds and became an aviator with the British Army in Mesopotamia. During the advance on Bagdad, not long before the fall of Kut-al-Amara, he flew over the Turkish lines on a hazardous mission to cut the enemy telegraph wires. He did so, but was captured, marched across the North Arabian Desert and after months of captivity made his escape, in the plotting of which he had recourse to a desperate expedient. He took up the smoking of opium to gain the confidence of an opium addicted Turkish commandant.
But affairs military were usually subordinate to “Y.B.” In India he had plunged deeply into the study of the occult lore of the Hindus, Vedantism, yoga, and gained a knowledge of these mysterious subjects as few save native Indians can hope to do. It was this that caused his brother officers to raise their eyebrows and the finger of astonishment. They all seemed to love “Y.B.”, considered him a crack polo player, a gallant soldier, a charming companion, and, as I have said, a bit mad.
Although his charm and drollery are not to be resisted, he is indeed one of the most eccentric fellows alive. And it is his very eccentricity that has resulted in his knowing India as few others do. This is amply demonstrated by a book of his recently published under the title of “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.” It is perhaps the most extraordinary book ever written about India by a westerner. In it he tells of the strange life he lived and something of the strange lessons he learned in the fabulous land of Hindustan.
Any insight that I may have into the ways and ideas of the mysterious land of India I owe to that sapient, whimsical guru, “Y.B.” I found him equally at home along the Coromandel Coast, near the equator, in the mountains of Waziristan, and in the holy cities of the Gangetic Plain. He had delved into the lives of the people and into the hidden knowledge and discipline of yoga. He was the only western yogi I have ever known.
For months we traveled together, and as scenes of fantasy and mystery unfolded before us he expounded the wise, enlightening, and witty ideas of a British yogi. So whatever of truth and wisdom you find in these pages should be credited to “Y.B.”, the Bengal Lancer who became a yogi.
Let us begin with an examination of the Chinese mental make-up which produced this philosophy of living: great realism, inadequate idealism, a high sense of humor, and a high poetic sensitivity to life and nature.
Mankind seems to be divided into idealists and realists, and idealism and realism are the two great forces molding human progress. The clay of humanity is made soft and pliable by the water of idealism, but the stuff that holds it together is after all the clay itself, or we might all evaporate into Ariels. The forces of idealism and realism tug at each other in all human activities, personal, social and national, and real progress is made possible by the proper mixture of these two ingredients, so that the clay is kept in the ideal pliable, plastic condition, half moist and half dry, not hardened and unmanageable, nor dissolving into mud. The soundest nations, like the English, have realism and idealism mixed in proper proportions, like the clay which neither hardens and so gets past the stage for the artist’s molding, nor is so wishy-washy that it cannot retain its form. Some countries are thrown into perpetual revolutions because into their clay has been injected some liquid of foreign ideals which is not yet properly assimilated, and the clay is therefore not able to keep its shape.
A vague, uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals. If there were too many of these visionary idealists in any society or people, revolutions would be the order of the day. Human society would be like an idealistic couple forever getting tired of one place and changing their residence regularly once every three months, for the simple reason that no one place is ideal and the place where one is not seems always better because one is not there. Very fortunately, man is also gifted with a sense of humor, whose function, as I conceive it, is to exercise criticism of man’s dreams, and bring them in touch with the world of reality. It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams. That is a great gift, and the Chinese have plenty of it.
The sense of humor, which I shall discuss at more length in a later chapter, seems to be very closely related to the sense of reality, or realism. If the joker is often cruel in disillusioning the idealist, he nevertheless performs a very important function right there by not letting the idealist bump his head against the stone wall of reality and receive a ruder shock. He also gently eases the tension of the hot-headed enthusiast and makes him live longer. By preparing him for disillusion, there is probably less pain in the final impact, for a humorist is always like a man charged with the duty of breaking a sad news gently to a dying patient. Sometimes the gentle warning from a humorist saves the dying patient’s life. If idealism and disillusion must necessarily go together in this world, we must say that life is cruel, rather than the joker who reminds us of life’s cruelty.
I have often thought of formulas by which the mechanism of human progress and historical change can be expressed. They seem to be as follows:
Reality - Dreams = Animal Being
Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
So then, wisdom, or the highest type of thinking, consists in toning down our dreams or idealism with a good sense of humor, supported by reality itself.
As pure ventures in pseudo-scientific formulations, we may proceed to analyze national characters in the following manner. I say “pseudo-scientific” because I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs or human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom. I do not mean that these things are not being done: they are.
That is why we get so much pseudo-science today. When a psychologist can measure a man’s I.Q. or P.Q.,~ it is a pretty poor world, and specialists have risen to usurp humanized scholarship. But if we recognize that these formulas are no more than handy, graphic ways of expressing certain opinions, and so long as we don’t drag in the sacred name of science to help advertise our goods, no harm is done. The following are my formulas for the characters of certain nations, entirely personal and completely incapable of proof or verification. Anyone is free to dispute them and change them or add his own, if he does not claim that he can prove his private opinions by a mass of statistical facts and figures. Let “R” stand for a sense of reality (or realism), “D” for dreams (or idealism), “H” for a sense of humor, and-adding one important ingredient-”S” for sensitivity.” And further let “4″ stand for “abnormally high,” “3″ stand for “high,” “2″ for “fair,” and “I” for “low,” and we have the following pseudo-chemical formulas for the following national characters. Human beings and communities behave then differently according to their different compositions, as sulphates and sulphides or carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide behave differently from one another. For me, the interesting thing always is to watch how human communities or nations behave differently under identical conditions. As we cannot invent words like “humoride” and “humorate” after the fashion of chemistry, we may put it thus: “3 grains of Realism, 2 grains of Dreams, 2 grains of Humor and I grain of Sensitivity make an Englishman.” a R3D2H2S = The English R2D3H3Sa = The French R3D3H2S2 = The Americans R3D4H1S2 = The Germans
- 1. I am not objecting to the limited utility of intelligence tests, but to their claims to mathematical accuracy or constant dependability as measures of human personality.
- In the sense of the French word sensibilite.
Some might with good reason suggest the including of an “L” standing for logic or the rational faculty, as an important element in shaping human progress. This “L” will then often function or weigh against sensitivity, a direct perception of things. Such a formula might be attempted. For me personally, the role of the rational faculty it a human affairs is rather low.
A Pseudo-Scientific Formula
R2D4H1S1 = The Russians
R2DgH1S1 = The Japanese
R4D1HgS3 = The Chinese
I do not know the Italians, the Spanish, the Hindus and others well enough even to essay a formula on the subject, realizing that the above are shaky enough as they are, and in any case are enough to bring down a storm of criticism upon my head. Probably these formulas are more provocative than authoritative. I promise to modify them gradually for my own use as new facts are brought to my knowledge, or new impressions are formed. That is all they are worth today-a record of the progress of my knowledge and the gaps of my ignorance.
Some observations may be necessary. It is easy to see that I regard the Chinese as most closely allied to the French in their sense of humor and sensitivity, as is quite evident from the way the French write their books and eat their food, while the more volatile character of the French comes from their greater idealism, which takes the form of love of abstract ideas (recall the manifestoes of their literary, artistic and political movements). “R4″ for Chinese realism makes the Chinese the most realistic people; “D1″ accounts for something of a drag in the changes in their pattern or ideal of life. The high figures for Chinese humor and sensitivity, as well as for their realism, are perhaps due to my too close association and the vividness of my impressions. For Chinese sensitivity, little justification is needed; the whole story of Chinese prose, poetry and painting proclaims it… The Japanese and Germans are very much alike in their comparative lack of humor (such is the general impression of people), yet it is really impossible to give a “zero” for anyone characteristic in anyone nation, not even for idealism in the Chinese people. It is all a question of degree; such statements as a complete lack of this or that quality are not based on an intimate knowledge of the peoples. For this reason, I give the Japanese and the Germans “H,,” instead of “H;,” and I intuitively feel that I am right. But I do believe that the Japanese and the Germans suffer politically at present, and have suffered in the past, for lacking a better sense of humor. How a Prussian Geheimrat loves to be called a Geheimrat, and how he loves his buttons and metal pins! A certain belief in “logical necessity” (often “holy” or “sacred”), a tendency to fly too straight at a goal instead of circling around it, often carries one too far. It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action. By “D3″ for the Japanese I am referring to their fanatic loyalty to their emperor and to the state, made possible by a low mixture of humor. For idealism must stand for different things in different countries, as the so-called sense of humor really comprises a very wide variety of things…
There is an interesting tug between idealism and realism in America, both given high figures, and that produces the energy characteristic of the Americans. What American idealism is, I had better leave it to the Americans to find out; but they are always enthusiastic about something or other. A great deal of this idealism is noble, in the sense that the Americans are easily appealed to by noble ideals or noble words; but some of it is mere gullibility. The American sense of humor again means a different thing from the Continental sense of humor, but really I think that, such as it is (the love of fun and an innate, broad common sense), it is the greatest asset of the American nation. In the coming years of critical change, they will have great need of that broad common sense referred to by James Bryce, which I hope will tide them over these critical times. I give American sensitivity a low figure because of my impression that they can stand so many things. There is no use quarreling about this, because we will be quarreling about words …. The English seem to be on the whole the soundest race: contrast their “R3D2″ with the French “R2D3.” I am all for “R3D2.” It bespeaks stability. The ideal formula for me would seem to be R3D2H3S2, for too much idealism or too much sensitivity is not a good thing, either. And if I give “S1″ for English sensitivity, and if that is too low, who is to blame for it except the English themselves? How can I tell whether the English ever feel anything-joy, happiness, anger, satisfaction-when they are determined to look so glum on all occasions?
We might apply the same formula to writers and poets. To take a few well-known types:
Shakespeare’<> R4D4HaS4
Heine = RaDaH4Sa
Shelley = R1D4H1S4
Poe = RaD4H1S4
Li Po = R1DaH2S4
Tu Fu = R3DaH2S4
Su Tungp’o = RaD2H4Sa
These are no more than a few impromptu suggestions. But it is clear that all poets have a high sensitivity, or they wouldn’t be poets at all. Poe, I feel, is a very sound genius, in spite of his weird, imaginative gift. Doesn’t he love “ratiocination”?
So my formula for the Chinese national mind is:
R4D1HsSs
There we start with an “Sa,” standing for high sensitivity, which guarantees a proper artistic approach to life and answers for the Chinese affirmation that this earthly life is beautiful and the consequent intense love of this life. But it signifies more than that; actually it stands for the artistic approach even to philosophy. It accounts for the fact that the Chinese philosopher’s view of life is essentially the poet’s view of life, and that, in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West. It will become amply clear from what follows that this high sensitivity to the pleasures and pains and flux and change of the colors of life is the very basis that makes a light philosophy possible. Man’s sense of the tragedy of life comes from his sensitive perception of the tragedy of a departing spring, and a delicate tenderness toward life comes from a tenderness toward the withered blossoms that bloomed yesterday. First the sadness and sense of defeat, then the awakening and the laughter of the old rogue-philosopher.
I have hesitated a long time between giving Shakespeare “S.• and “S3″. Finally his “Sonnets” decided it. No school teacher has experienced greater fear and trembling in grading a pupil than I in trying to grade Shakespeare.
On the other hand, we have “R4″ standing for intense realism, which means an attitude of accepting life as it is and of regarding a bird in the hand as better than two in the bush. This realism, therefore, both reinforces and supplements the artist’s affirmation that this life is transiently beautiful, and it all but saves the artist and poet from escaping from life altogether. The Dreamer says “Life is but a dream,” and the Realist replies, “Quite correct. A..”1d let us live this dream as beautifully as we can.” But the realism of one awakened is the poet’s realism and not that of the business man, and the laughter of the old rogue is no longer the laughter of the young go-getter singing his way to success with his head up and his chin out, but that of an old man running his finger through his flowing beard, and speaking in a soothingly low voice. Such a dreamer loves peace, for no one can fight hard for a dream. He will be more intent to live reasonably and well with his fellow dreamers. Thus is the high tension of life lowered.
But the chief function of this sense of realism is the elimination of all non-essentials in the philosophy of life, holding life down by the neck, as it were, for fear that the wings of imagination may carry it away to an imaginary and possibly beautiful, but unreal, world. And after all, the wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials, in reducing the problems of philosophy to just a few-the enjoyment of the home (the relationship between man and woman and child), of living, of Nature and of culture-and in showing all the other irrelevant scientific disciplines and futile chases after knowledge to the door. The problems of life for the Chinese philosopher then become amazingly few and simple. It means also an impatience with metaphysics and with the pursuit of knowledge that does not lead to any practical bearing on life itself. And it also means that every human activity, whether the acquiring of knowledge or the acquiring of things, has to be submitted immediately to the test of life itself and of its subserviency to the end of living. Again, and here is a significant result, the end of living is not some metaphysical entity-but just living itself.
Gifted with this realism, and with a profound distrust of logic and of the intellect itself, philosophy for the Chinese becomes a matter of direct and intimate feeling of life itself, and refuses to be encased in any system. For there is a robust sense of reality, a sheer animal sense, a spirit of reasonableness which crushes reason itself and makes the rise of any hard and fast philosophic system impossible. There are the three religions of China, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, all magnificent systems in themselves, and yet robust common sense dilutes them all and reduces them all into the common problem of the pursuit of a happy human life. The mature Chinese is always a person who refuses to think too hard or to believe in any single idea or faith or school of philosophy whole-heartedly. When a friend of Confucius told him that he always thought three times before he acted, Confucius wittily replied, “To think twice is quite enough.” A follower of a school of philosophy is but a student of philosophy, but a man is a student, or perhaps a master, of life.
The final product of this culture and philosophy is this: in China, as compared with the West, man lives a life closer to nature and closer to childhood, a life in which the instincts and the emotions are given free play and emphasized against the life of the intellect, with a strange combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of profound wisdom and foolish gaiety, of high sophistication and childish naivete. I would say, therefore, that this philosophy is characterized by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonableness in living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant and the vagabond.
Professor Teijiro Uyeda, one of Japan’s leading economists and a specialist on the population question, is convinced that Japan, like other countries which have gone through the process of industrialization and urbanization, will experience a gradual tapering off of the present sharp rate of increase in the number of its inhabitants. He points out that the birth rate has shown a tendency to decline (from 36.2 in 1920 to 31.6 in 1935) and foresees that in time this downward curve will be more significant than the simultaneous decline in the death rate. However, Professor Uyeda anticipates that for some time there will be no diminution in the annual number of young Japanese who come of working age, since a large child population has already been born. So the pressure of a rapidly growing population seems bound to influence Japan’s development for the next two decades at least.
The extremely strong position of the fighting services in the Japanese constitutional scheme of things has also unmistakably promoted the vigorous forward move on the Asiatic continent. Soldiers are sometimes willing to take risks of international antagonism from which diplomats might shrink. And the army has exerted a powerful influence on the shaping of foreign policy during the last six years.
Japanese army and navy officers have never taken kindly to the idea that the Diet should control the activities of their services. Japan perhaps came nearest to civilian control over the fighting services in 1930 when Premier Hamaguchi, an unusually forceful personality for a Japanese civilian, pushed through the ratification of the London Naval Treaty (This was concluded as a supplement to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.) against the recommendations of some high naval officers.
But this proved a Pyrrhic victory. Hamaguchi was shot by an enthusiastic nationalist and died of his wound. The agitation against the London Treaty hardened navy sentiment against any new ratio agreement which would bind Japan to maintain a position of inferiority to America and Great Britain in naval strength. There were echoes of the London Naval Treaty and of the supposed “usurpation of the imperial prerogative” by a civilian Premier in every nationalist terrorist enterprise of succeeding years, including the spectacular rebellion of February 26, 1936.
The army also reacted sensitively to the conclusion of the London Naval Treaty. The War Minister, General Jiro Minami, openly encouraged army officers to take part in political activity when he said, in the course of an address before divisional commanders of the army, in August 1931:
“Some people hastily advocate limitation of armaments, and engage in propaganda unfavorable to the nation and the army, while others take advantage of the present psychology of the people with a view to reducing the army for domestic reasons. I hope you will cooperate with the War Ministry authorities in correcting such mistakes.”
If one looks back to the files of the Japanese press on the eve of the Mukden affair, he finds no lack of indication that the army was anticipating some striking developments in Manchuria. So Assai, a leading Tokyo newspaper, on September 9, 1 931, quoted Colonel (later General) Ken Ji Doihara, a very active officer in the Japanese forces stationed in Manchuria, as stating that “there was no telling what might happen in Manchuria.” The Tokyo press of September 15 reported an important conference in which War Minister Minami and several other high military officials participated. According to the press it was decided to seek satisfaction by force for the murder of Captain Nakamura, a Japanese officer who had been killed while on a trip in the interior of China, if diplomacy failed to obtain the same result by peaceful means.
It would be oversimplification to suggest that the army “staged” the seizure of Manchuria simply as a means of restoring its shaken prestige at home and driving liberalism and pacifism into the background. Other considerations were involved: the many unsettled economic disputes with the Chinese authorities; the disposition of Chang Hsuehliang, ruler of Manchuria, to establish closer relations with the nationalist regime in China; the desire to push back the reviving Russian influence in the Far East. But that the army took full advantage of the strengthened position which it acquired as a result of the outbreak of hostilities in Manchuria is unmistakable. As a Japanese scholar writes:
The actual authority for directing the nation’s foreign policy was gradually shifting from Kasumigaseki (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to Miyakezaka (the Ministry of War) by the middle of August, 1931, and this tendency toward dual diplomacy became more pronounced during the first phase of the League procedure in September. Towards the beginning of October, however, even this last vestige of dual diplomacy appeared to be waning, with the Miyakezaka in firm control of the government, directing the nation’s policy toward the League as well as the Manchurian developments.
The requirement that the posts of War and Navy Minister may be held only by a general and an admiral in active service makes it possible for either the army or the navy to frustrate the formation of any cabinet of which they disapprove. So strong is the corporate spirit in the higher ranks of the army and navy that no officer would accept an appointment in a cabinet against the advice of his colleagues.
Japan’s sweep toward empire cannot be explained merely in terms of population pressure, desire for economic selfsufficiency, and the strong predominance of military and naval leaders in the councils of the empire. There are psychological elements in the Japanese character, in the Japanese cast of thought that fit in readily with a programme of aggrandizement and expansion. Intense patriotism, red-hot nationalism, is deeply implanted in the Japanese masses. The divine origin that is attributed to the Emperor imparts an element of religious sanction to the most exalted conceptions of Japan’s destiny. Take, for example, the grandiose conception of Japan’s national mission (nothing less than world pacification), as set forth in Professor Chikao Fujisawa’s book, Japanese and Oriental Political Philosophy:
The [Japanese] Emperor as the Sage-King would think it his sacred duty to love and protect not only the people of this land, but also those alien peoples who are suffering from misgovernment and privations. It must be recalled that the Sage-King is answerable in person for the pacification of the entire Under-Heaven, which is the ancient name for the whole world: consequently his moral and political influence ought to make itself strongly felt through the length and breadth of the earth. Should any unlawful elements dare to obstruct in one way or another the noble activities of the Sage-King, he would be permitted to appeal to force; but this may be justified only when he acts strictly on behalf of Heaven… This firm belief in our holy state mission moved Japan to assist Mr. Henry Pu Yi to found the new state of Manchoukuo, which will faithfully follow the way of the SageKing… Nippon’s national flag is an ensign of “red heart,” or fiery sincerity. It alludes to the heavenly mission of Japan to tranquillize the whole world.
The ease with which “the will of heaven” may be invoked to justify Japan’s military and naval aspirations is reflected in the following excerpt from a pamphlet which was issued in the summer of 1935 by the Japanese Navy Ministry:
In view of Japan’s geographical position the powers should leave the maintenance of peace in the Orient in the hands of Japan, which is now powerful enough to perform this duty. If the other powers fail to recognize the mission of Japan they may well be said to disobey the will of Heaven.
A train journey or a cross-country walking trip gives abundant visual evidence that the rural districts of Japan are crowded to the saturation point. Every available inch of land is cultivated; the carefully terraced, irrigated rice fields on the steep hillsides are a monument of patient toil and ingenuity. Between 1920 and 1930, when the whole population increased by about eight and a half millions, the number of persons employed in agriculture slightly declined.
Three possible peaceful remedies for Japan’s population problem are birth control, emigration, and industrialization. Birth control is frowned on by the authorities and runs counter to the strong impulse among the Japanese and other Oriental peoples to conceive many male children in order to ensure the continuity of the family line. Its practice is spreading among the more Westernized and sophisticated Japanese of the larger towns, but it is not yet appreciably slowing up the number of births. The middle-class family with five or six children is far more frequently found in Japan than in America or Great Britain.
There is still room for settlers in the northern parts of the Island Empire, in Hokkaido and in Southern Sakhalin. But the absorption capacity of both these regions, so far as I could learn during a recent visit, is definitely limited. Hokkaido has reached its present population of about 3,000,000 over a period of sixty years. There is a twenty-year plan for the development of Hokkaido which calls for the doubling of this figure by 1956.
But experienced residents of Hokkaido, both Japanese and foreigners, expressed doubt whether this plan could be realized. The best land is already settled; Japanese coming from warmer parts of the empire find the climate of Hokkaido too cold and foggy; the percentage of assisted colonists who fail to stick out the rigors of pioneering in this northern island is already fairly high. The prospects in Sakhalin are still less promising. The Japanese part of this island now reckons about 336,000 inhabitants. It is questionable whether room can be found for more than 200,000 new settlers - a mere drop in the stream of population increase.
Manchoukuo is the uncertain element in Japanese emigration policy. The army dreams of solving two problems, relieving agrarian congestion in Japan and building up a solid human wall against the Russian threat, by settling millions of sturdy Japanese peasants in the northern provinces of Manchoukuo, where there is a considerable amount of untenanted land. But so far this is only a dream. Only a handful of Japanese agriculturists have settled in Manchoukuo, although there has been an influx of merchants, traders, artisans, employees, and other urban dwellers into the new state. It remains to be seen whether such unfavorable factors as a severely cold climate, chronic banditism, the lower living standards of the native Manchurian peasants with whom the Japanese settlers must compete, can be overcome or sufficiently alleviated to make possible a large-scale emigration movement.
The only other foreign country to which Japanese emigrants have been going or could go in any considerable number is Brazil. About 128,000 Japanese have settled there, the record figure of migration for any single year being 12,000. But a large immigration of Japanese settlers, like an inflow of Japanese goods, is apt to provoke restrictive measures. Japanese emigration to Brazil has now been placed on a quota basis, which seems likely to reduce it to small dimensions.
So emigration, like birth control, seems likely to make only a minor contribution to the solution of Japan’s population problem. There remains industrialization; and here Japan has made remarkable strides during the last few years, as will be shown in detail in later chapters.
There are two considerations, however, which prevent industrialization from serving as a panacea, smoothly and automatically absorbing the steady increment of the working population. In the first place, machines have been replacing men and women very perceptibly in the larger and better equipped Japanese factories. More output with fewer workers has been especially characteristic of the textile industry, which gives more employment than any other form of factory production.
Moreover, Japan’s striking progress in export trade has encountered more and more barriers in the form of tariffs, quotas, and self-limitation agreements, concluded by Japanese businessmen as a means of forestalling these restrictions. Industry, trade, and the traditional family system have thus far absorbed, after a fashion, Japan’s annual contingent of new mouths to be fed. Japan is a nation of shopkeepers; a stroll through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, or any Japanese provincial town reveals an amazing number of people who depend for their living on the proceeds of some very small store. The family system is Japan’s substitute for the dole; it is taken for granted that the successful and prosperous members of a family will look after their less capable or less fortunate relatives.
But the sense of strain and tension is never absent. With its unusual combination of an Oriental birth rate and an Occidental death rate, Japan sees itself confronted with the alternative of expanding or exploding. So there is a direct line of connection between the numerous slant-eyed children whom one finds in every Tokyo side street, playing battledore and shuttlecock, or flying kites, or playing soldiers with sticks for guns and swords, and the patrols of real Japanese soldiers who are hunting down guerrilla “bandits” in Manchoukuo or parading along the Bund of Shanghai. Japan sees in empire a possible way out of its population impasse.
I have discussed at some length Japan’s pressure of population, not only because, along with the closely related problem of poverty in essential raw materials, it is a main driving force in the sweep toward expansion, but also because it affects very intimately many other phases of Japanese life. Many peculiar features of industry and agriculture are attributable in large measure to the fact that there are more people in Japan than the country can comfortably support. Population pressure is a dynamic and explosive force internally as well as externally. It feeds the ferment of dissatisfaction that occasionally finds expression in spectacular plots and assassinations.
There are several views of mankind, the traditional Christian theological view, the Greek pagan view, and the Chinese TaoistConfucianist view. (I do not include the Buddhist view because it is too sad.) Deeper down in their allegorical sense, these views after all do not differ so much from one another, especially when the modern man with better biological and anthropological knowledge gives them a broader interpretation. But these differences in their original forms exist.
The traditional, orthodox Christian view was that man was created perfect, innocent, foolish and happy, living naked in the Garden of Eden. Then came knowledge and wisdom and the Fall of Man, to which the sufferings of man are due, notably (I) work by the sweat of one’s brow for man, and (2) the pangs of labor for women. In contrast with man’s original innocence and perfection, a new element was introduced to explain his present imperfection, and that is of course the Devil, working chiefly through the body, while his higher nature works through the soul. When the “soul” was invented in the history of Christian theology I am not aware, but this “soul” became a something rather than a function, an entity rather than a condition, and it sharply separated man from the animals, which have no souls worth saving. Here the logic halts, for the origin of the Devil had to be explained, and when the medieval theologians proceeded with their usual scholastic logic to deal with the problem, they got into a quandary. They could not have very well admitted that the Devil, who was NotGod, came from God himself, nor could they quite agree that in the original universe, the Devil, a Not-God, was co-eternal with God. So in desperation they agreed that the Devil must have been a fallen angel, which rather begs the question of the origin of evil (for there still must have been another Devil to tempt this fallen angel), and which is therefore unsatisfactory, but they had to leave it at that. Nevertheless from all this followed the curious dichotomy of the spirit and the flesh, a mythical conception which is still quite prevalent and powerful today in affecting our philosophy of life and happiness.’
Then came the Redemption, still borrowing from the current conception of the sacrificial lamb, which went still farther back to the idea of a God Who desired the smell of roast meat and could not forgive for nothing. From this Redemption, at one stroke a means was found by which all sins could be forgiven, and a way was found for perfection again. The most curious aspect of Christian thought is the idea of perfection. As this happened during the decay of the ancient worlds, a tendency grew up to emphasize the afterlife, and the question of salvation supplanted the question of happiness or simple living itself. The notion was how to get away from this world alive, a world which was apparently sinking into corruption and chaos and doomed. Hence the overwhelming importance attached to immortality. This represents a contradiction of the original Genesis story that God did not want man to live forever. The Genesis story of the reason why Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden was not that they had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, as is popularly conceived, but the fear lest they should disobey a second time and eat of the Tree of Life and live forever:
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
It is a happy fact that with the progress of modern thought, the Devil is the first to be thrown overboard. I believe that of a hundred liberal Christians today who still believe in God in some form or other, not more than five believe in a real Devil, except in a figurative sense. Also the belief in a real Hell is disappearing before the belief in a real Heaven.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be somewhere in the center of the garden, but the Tree of Life was near the eastern entrance, where for all we know, cherubims are still stationed to guard the approach by men.
All in all, there is still a belief in total depravity, that enjoyment of this life is sin and wickedness, that to be uncomfortable is to be virtuous, and that on the whole man cannot save himself except by a greater power outside. The doctrine of sin is still the basic assumption of Christianity as generally practiced today, and Christian missionaries trying to make converts generally start out by impressing upon the party to be converted a consciousness of sin and of the wickedness of human nature (which is, of course, the sine qua non for the need of the ready-made remedy which the missionary has up his sleeve). All in all, you can’t make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner. Some one has said rather cruelly, “Religion in our country has so narrowed down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not any longer dare to show his face in the church.”
The Greek pagan world was a different world by itself and therefore their conception of man was also quite different. What strikes me most is that the Greeks made their gods like men, while the Christians desired to make men like the gods. That Olympian company is certainly a jovial, amorous, loving, lying, quarreling and vow-breaking, petulant lot; hunt-loving, chariot-riding and javelin-throwing like the Greeks themselves-a marrying lot, too, and having unbelievably many illegitimate children. So far as the difference between gods and men is concerned, the gods merely had divine powers of hurling thunderbolts in heaven and raising vegetation on earth, were immortal, and drank nectar instead of wine-the fruits were pretty much the same. One feels one can be intimate with this crowd, can go hunting with a knapsack on one’s back with Apollo or Athene, or stop Mercury on the way and chat with him as with a Western Union messenger boy, and if the conversation gets too interesting, we can imagine Mercury saying, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, but I’ll have to run along and deliver this message at 72nd Street.” The Greek men were not divine, but the Greek gods were human. How different from the perfect Christian God! And so the gods were merely another race of men, a race of giants, gifted with immortality, while men on earth were not. Out of this background came some of the most inexpressibly beautiful stories of Demeter and Proserpina and Orpheus. The belief in the gods was taken for granted, for even Socrates, when he was about to drink hemlock, proposed a libation to the gods to speed him on his journey from this world to the next. This was very much like the attitude of Confucius. It was necessarily so in that period; what attitude toward man and God the Greek spirit would take in the modern world there is unfortunately no chance of knowing. The Greek pagan world was not modern, and the modern Christian world is not Greek. That’s the pity of it.
On the whole, it was accepted by the Greeks that man’s was a mortal lot, subject sometimes to a cruel Fate. That once accepted, man was quite happy as he was, for the Greeks loved this life and this universe, and were interested in understanding the good, the true and the beautiful in life, besides being fully occupied in scientifically understanding the physical world. There was no mythical “Golden Period” in the sense of the Garden of Eden, and no allegory of the Fall of Man; the Hellenes themselves were but human creatures transformed from pebbles picked up and thrown over their shoulders by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, as they were coming down to the plain after the Great Flood. Diseases and cares were explained comically; they came through the uncontrollable desire of a young woman to open and see a box of jewels-Pandora’s Box. The Greek fancy was beautiful. They took human nature largely as it was: the Christians might say they were “resigned” to the mortal lot. But it was so beautiful to be mortal: there was free room for the exercise of understanding and the free, speculative spirit. Some of the Sophists thought man’s nature good, and some thought man’s nature bad, but there wasn’t the sharp contradiction of Hobbes and Rousseau. Finally, in Plato, man was seen to be a compound of desires, emotions, and thought, and ideal human life was the living together in harmony of these three parts of his being under the guidance of wisdom or true understanding. Plato thought “ideas” were immortal, but individual souls were either base or noble, according as they loved justice, learning, temperance and beauty or not. The soul also acquired an independent and immortal existence in Socrates; as we are told in “Phaedo,” “When the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body, and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death?” Evidently the belief in immortality of the human soul is something which the Christian, Greek, Taoist and Confucianist views have in common. Of course this is nothing to be jumped at by modern believers in the immortality of the soul. Socrates’ belief in immortality would probably mean nothing to a modern man, because many of his premises in support of it, like re-incarnation, cannot be accepted by the modern man.
The Chinese view of man also arrived at the idea that man is the Lord of the Creation (”Spirit of the Ten Thousand Things”), and in the Confucianist view, man ranks as the equal of heaven and earth in the “Trio of Geniuses.” The background was animistic: everything was alive or inhabited by a spirit-mountains, rivers, and everything that reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits themselves; each of the great mountains and each river was ruled by a spirit who practically owned it; each kind of flower had a fairy in heaven attending to its seasons and its welfare, and there was a Queen of All Flowers whose birthday came on the twelfth day of the second moon; every willow tree pine tree, cypress, fox or turtle that reached a grand old age, say over a few hundred years, acquired by that very fact immortality and became a “genius.”
With this animistic background, it is natural that man is also considered a manifestation of the spirit. This spirit, like all life in the entire universe, is produced by the union of the male, active, positive or yang principle, and the female, passive, negative or yin principle-which is really no more than a lucky, shrewd guess at positive and negative electricity. When this spirit becomes incarnated in a human body, it is called p’o; when unattached to a body and floating about as spirit it is called hwen. (A man of forceful personality or “spirits” is spoken of as having a lot of p’oli, or p’oenergy.) After death, this hwen continues to wander about. Normally it does not bother people, but if no one buries and offers sacrifices to the deceased, the spirit becomes a “wandering ghost,” for which reason an All Souls’ Day is set apart on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon for a general sacrifice to those drowned in water or dead and unburied in a strange land. Also, if the deceased was murdered or died suffering a wrong, the sense of injustice in the ghost compels it to hang about and cause trouble until the wrong is avenged and the spirit is satisfied. Then all trouble is stopped.
While living, man, who is spirit taking shape in a body, necessarily has certain passions, desires, and a flow of “vital energy,” or in more easily understood English, just “nervous energy.” In and for themselves, these are neither good nor bad, but just something given and inseparable from the characteristically human life. All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony. That is the Confucianist view, which believes that by living in harmony with this human nature given us, we can become the equals of heaven and earth, as quoted at the end of Chapter VI. The Buddhists, however, regard the mortal desires of the flesh essentially as the medieval Christians did-they are a nuisance to be done away with. Men and women who are too intelligent, or inclined to think too much, sometimes accept this view and become monks and nuns; but on the whole, Confucian good sense forbids it. Then also, with a Taoistic touch, beautiful and talented girls suffering a harsh fate are regarded as “fallen fairies,” punished for having mortal thoughts or some neglect of duty in heaven and sent down to this earth to live through a predestined fate of mortal sufferings.
Man’s intellect is considered as a flow of energy. Literally this intellect is “spirit of a genius” (chingshen), the word “genius” being essentially taken in the sense in which we speak of fox genii, rock genii and pine genii. The nearest English equivalent is, as I have suggested, “vitality” or “nervous energy,” which ebbs and flows at different times of the day and of the person’s life. Every man born into this world starts out with certain passions and desires and this vital energy, which run their course in different cycles through childhood, youth, maturity, old age and death. Confucius said, “When young, beware of fighting; when strong, beware of sex; and when old, beware of possession,” which simply means that a boy loves fighting, a young man loves women, and an old man loves money.
Faced with this compound of physical, mental and moral assets, the Chinese takes an attitude toward man himself, as toward all other problems, which may be summed up in the phrase: “Let us be reasonable.” This is an attitude of expecting neither too much nor too little. Man is, as it were, sandwiched between heaven and earth, between idealism and realism, between lofty thoughts and the baser passions. Being so sandwiched is the very essence of humanity; it is human to have thirst for knowledge and thirst for water, to love a good idea and a good dish of pork with bamboo shoots, and to admire a beautiful saying and a beautiful woman. This being the case, our world is necessarily an imperfect world. Of course there is a chance of taking human society in hand and making it better, but the Chinese do not expect either perfect peace or perfect happiness. There is a story illustrating this point of view. There was a man who was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of Re-incarnation, “If you want me to return to the earth as a human being, I will go only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?” asked the King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a cabinet minister and father of a future ‘Literary Wrangler’ (the scholar who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have ten thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and fruits of every kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years old.” And the King of Re-incarnation replied, “If there was such a lot on earth, I would go and be re-incarnated myself, and not give it to you!”
The reasonable attitude is, since we’ve got this human nature, let’s start with it. Besides, there is no escaping from it anyway. Passions and instincts are originally good or originally bad, but there is not much use talking about them, is there? On the other hand, there is the danger of our being enslaved by them. Just stay in the middle of the road. This reasonable attitude creates such a forgiving kind of philosophy that, at least to a cultured, broadminded scholar who lives according to the spirit of reasonableness, any human error or misbehavior whatsoever, legal or moral or political, which can be labeled as “common human nature” (more literally, “man’s normal passions”), is excusable. The Chinese go so far as to assume that Heaven or God Himself is quite a reasonable being, that if you live reasonably, according to your best lights, you have nothing to fear, that peace of conscience is the greatest of all gifts, and that a man with a clear conscience need not be afraid even of ghosts. With a reasonable God supervising the affairs of reasonable and some unreasonable beings, everything is quite all right in this world. Tyrants die; traitors commit suicide; the grasping fellow is seen selling his property; the sons of a powerful and rich collector of curios (about whom tales are told of grasping greed or extortion by power) are seen selling out the collection on which their father spent so much thought and trouble, and these same curios are now being dispersed among other families; murderers are found out and dead and wronged women are avenged. Sometimes, but quite seldom, an oppressed person cries out, “Heaven has no eyes!” (Justice is blind.) Eventually, both in Taoism and in Confucianism, the conclusion and highest goal of this philosophy is complete understanding of and harmony with nature, resulting in what I may call “reasonable naturalism,” if we must have a term for classification. A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, “Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?”
There is a terrible philosophy in this saying, “Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others.” Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need be ashamed. The whole pattern of Chinese life is organized according to this one idea.
There is a school of thought, persuasively represented in England by Sir Norman Angell, among others, which contends that the national ownership of raw materials is unimportant and that the alleged grievances of the so-called (’have-not” powers are largely, if not entirely, spurious. Members of this school of economic thinking declare that the expense of conquering and administering colonies is out of all proportion to the trade, investment, and migration benefits which accrue from colonial imperialism. Since producers of essential raw materials are only too eager to find buyers, there is nothing, according to this line of argument, to prevent a nation which is poor in raw materials from buying what it needs in the cheapest market and building up its industries on imported raw materials.
There is indubitable weight in these arguments. The horse of poverty in raw materials has been ridden too hard. Yet it is significant that it is usually economists and publicists who are citizens of states which are richest in colonies who are most eager to demonstrate the unimportance of colonial possessions. Spokesmen for the “have-not” peoples have often been guilty of exaggeration in their claims. But in a world of rampant economic nationalism and protectionism the proletarian nation is at a disadvantage compared with its well-to-do brother.
Two concrete illustrations will help to show how Japan is handicapped in the economic race with countries which, like Great Britain and France, possess large colonial empires, or which, like America and the Soviet Union, are notably rich in internal resources.
Japan needs rubber. The natives of Malaya need cheap textiles. But the process of normal exchange is upset when the British Government, quite naturally concerned by the plight of the Lancashire textile industry, imposes a quota which sharply reduces Japanese sales of textiles in Malaya.
The remarkable growth of the paper and rayon industries is making heavy inroads on Japan’s reserves of timber. A time may come in the not very distant future when timber imports from Eastern Siberia will be desired. But the Soviet Union, with its tightly closed economic system and its state monopoly of foreign trade, will quite possibly refuse to sell this timber to Japan, if it wishes to payoff some political grudges, or may refuse to accept the exports which Japan can offer in exchange.
Of course it is theoretically possible for Japan to pay for Malayan rubber, or Siberian timber, or any other commodity which it may need, out of the receipts of its sales in other markets. But with trade restrictions established and multiplying all over the world, it is not easy to convince the Japanese that physical possession of essential raw materials is a matter of indifference. There is a strong temptation to cast the samurai sword into the mercantile scales that seem unfairly weighted against Japan.
The restless Japanese feeling of a need for expansion, for outlets, is intensified by the necessity of providing work and food for the half million people of working age who come on the labor market every year. Among the larger countries of the world Japan is second only to the Soviet Union in the rate of growth of its population. Between 1930 and 1935 the number of inhabitants of Japan proper (Japan proper consists of the four islands, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, with a number of smaller islands scattered along their coasts. The Japanese Empire also includes Formosa, Korea, and Southern Sakhalin. The population of the empire is approximately 97,000,000.) increased from 64,450,005 to 69,254,148. Births exceeded deaths in 1935 by more than 1,000,000.
With an area slightly less than that of California, Japan proper must support about twelve times the population of California. Japan’s problem is made more difficult by the mountainous character of the country. Only 15.6 per cent of the area of Japan proper is rated as arable land. While the density of population in relation to total area is greater in Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, density in relation to arable land works out much less favorably to Japan, as the percentage of cultivated area is 43.7 in Germany, 40.2 in Belgium, 24.2 in Great Britain, and 27.8 in the Netherlands.
Japan may be regarded, along with Germany and Italy, as one of the three major dissatisfied “have-not” powers of the world. It was in Italian Fascist intellectual circles that the idea first found expression that there could just as logically be a “class struggle” between rich and poor nations as between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” in a single nation. German National Socialist leaders have displayed an increasing tendency to attribute their country’s economic difficulties largely to the lack of colonial sources of essential raw materials. Japan sees itself confronted with a similar problem, despite the acquisition of Manchoukuo. So the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Amau, recently remarked:-
Unfortunately the territories which now feed Japan’s population are too small. Weare advised to practice birth control, but this advice comes too late, since the population of the Japanese Empire is already about 1 00,000,000. Japanese work harder and longer than people in Western countries; their opportunities in life are more restricted. Why? We need more territory and must cultivate more resources if we are to nourish our population.
A succinct statement of Japan’s case as a “have-not” power is to be found in the following excerpt from a widely read Japanese economic textbook, which has been translated into English under the title Nippon: A Charted Survey:-
The territory of Japan represents one half per cent of the world’s total, while her population makes up five per cent of the world’s total. In other words, Japan’s population density is approximately ten times greater than the average population density of the world. Moreover, Japan is for the most part mountainous, favored with comparatively few stretches of open level land. Dearth of sown acreage and overpopulation are two distinct fundamental factors of Japan’s national life. It will be no exaggeration to say that this particular condition of the country underlies all the difficulties which its people find in their way.
The belief that overpopulation (in relation to available natural resources) is the root cause of Japan’s difficulties runs like a red thread through almost all Japanese publications on social and economic subjects. Even liberal and radical professors and publicists who are outspokenly or cautiously critical of the high-handed methods of the country’s military leaders are quick to point out that the world-wide restrictions on Japanese immigrants and Japanese goods greatly accentuate the strains within the Japanese social order and play into the hands of the advocates of violent courses.
There is abundant statistical proof that Japan’s position is that of a proletarian nation. It depends entirely, or almost entirely, on foreign sources for such vitally necessary raw materials as cotton, wool, rubber, and oil, which are the lifeblood of some of its most important industries. There is no mineral of any consequence which Japan possesses in surplus quantities; and there is an absolute lack or a grave deficiency of such valuable industrial ores as iron, lead, zinc, and nickel. Its consistent bad fortune in finding natural resources within its own frontiers is exemplified in the northern island of Sakhalin, which is divided between Japan and the Soviet Union. Diligent prospecting has revealed no oil in the southern Japanese part of the island, while there is an abundant supply of this liquid fuel on the Russian side of the border.
In my early twenties I left the Southwest for New York City. Here I spent nearly four years, working during the day and attending lectures at night at New York University. Among the friends I made was an old exiled professor from India, Lala Laipat Rai, who began tutoring me in Indian history, preparatory to sending me to India as a teacher. Some of his younger countrymen convinced me that India could not advance until it was freed from British rule - as America had been freed - by revolution. All my experiences predisposed me to believe this, and I became a kind of communication center for these men. I kept their correspondence, their codes, and foreign addresses. It was as a result of this work that I was arrested in 1918, held in solitary confinement in the Tombs in New York City, and charged with a violation of our Neutrality Law. Although I had never met a German and believed that I was only helping a subjugated people, I found myself accused of aiding in German espionage.
Years later I learned that Indian exiles in Europe had indeed formed a government-in-exile and taken a loan from the German Government to finance their work. They had shipped arms and ammunition from America to India, but had no more use for the Germans than-the Germans had for them.
Soon after the Armistice I was released from jail and the charges against me were dismissed. I had spent the months of imprisonment studying and writing. Friends had sent me books, paper, and pencils, and for the first time in my life I had been able to study without being burdened with the necessity of earning my own living. My first short stories, Cell Mates, were written during that time.
Coming out of prison, I learned that, months before, my younger brother had passed through New York City en route to France as a soldier. He had tried to see me repeatedly but the prosecuting attorney had turned him away, telling him that I was a traitor. This, combined with news that my other brother had been killed while working as a day laborer, sickened me. The employer in whose service my older brother had been killed paid my father fifty dollars for his life. My younger brother, unable to earn a living, had offered himself to death before he was seventeen. Both had lived like animals without protection or education.
The problems of my own life had developed neurotic tendencies within me, and the fate of my brothers, combined with my imprisonment, deepened them. I came out of prison morose and miserable. I was in my early twenties, at an age when serious-minded middle-class men and women were completing their schooling and embarking on careers. They had homes, protection, and guidance. It was not that I begrudged them these good things; it was merely that I thought the advantages they had should be made universally available.
I was a woman, and women were expected to marry and, if possible, “marry money.” If you were not interested in marriage or money, you were doomed. As I saw it, I could hope to continue only as I was - slaving by day and striving desperately at night for some kind of meager education. And what after that? A shabby hall bedroom for the rest of my days?
I rejected such a life, yet I could envision no other. A World War had just ended and there was a sort of peace. The German Republic had come to life, but was held in pawn by the victors. The Russian Revolution had taken place, but the Russian people were still fighting on more than a dozen fronts against invading armies of World War victors, including one from my own country. The Russian people were learning the most brutal lesson in human history - that only by their own armed might could they have a civilization of their own choosing.
A Communist Party was being formed in New York, but I did not join it. I knew many of its leaders and had read books or articles written by some of them. For years I listened to Communists with sympathy and in later years in China I gave them my active support, but I could never place my mind and life unquestioningly at the disposal of their leaders. I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth.
Because of this I was often attacked from two sides: believers in capitalism called me a Communist, a Red, or an Anarchist; Communists called me an individualist, an idealist, or a bourgeois democrat… One American woman Communist long delighted in dubbing me a “Smedleyite.’
One day as the year 1919 drew to a close, I took my place in a line at the office of a shipping company on the New York waterfront and made application for a job as a stewardess on an old Polish-American freighter bound for Europe. It carried deck and third-class passengers, and another girl and I were hired to care for them. I had no definite destination, no clear aims, no connections with any organization save a weak link with Indian exiles who lived in Europe and published a small newspaper from Berlin. I merely entertained the hope that I could find them, live a short time in Europe, visit the Soviet Union, and, if possible, find work on some ship sailing for India. Whatever might result from this venture, I would at least see something of the earth on which I had been born. But live the life of a cabbage I would not.
The situation then is, this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed aside. Let not the spirit take wings and soar to the abode of the gods and forget the earth. Are we not mortals, condemned to die? The span of life vouchsafed us, threescore and ten, is short enough, if the spirit gets too haughty and wants to live forever, but on the other hand, it is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, “It was a good show,” when the curtain falls.
For we are of the earth, earth-born and earth-bound. There is nothing to be unhappy about the fact that we are, as it were, delivered upon this beautiful earth as its transient guests. Even if it were a dark dungeon, we still would have to make the best of it; it would be ungrateful of us not to do so when we have, instead of a dungeon, such a beautiful earth to live on for a good part of a century. Sometimes we get too ambitious and disdain the humble and yet generous earth. Yet a sentiment for this Mother Earth, a feeling of true affection and attachment, one must have for this temporary abode of our body and spirit, if we are to have a sense of spiritual harmony.
We have to have, therefore, a kind of animal skepticism as well as animal faith, taking this earthly life largely as it is. And we have to retain the wholeness of nature that we see in Thoreau who felt himself kin to the sod and partook largely of its dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring, who in his cheapest moments was apt to think that it was not his business to be “seeking the spirit,” but as much the spirit’s business to seek him, and whose happiness, as he described it, was a good deal like that of the woodchucks. The earth, after all is real, as the heaven is unreal: how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body. It is high time that some among us made the straight admission that we are animals, an admission which is inevitable since the establishment of the basic truth of the Darwinian Theory and the great progress of biology, especially bio-chemistry. It was very unfortunate that our teachers and philosophers belonged to the so-called intellectual class, with a characteristic professional pride of intellect. The men of the spirit were as proud of the spirit as the shoemaker is proud of leather. Sometimes even the spirit was not sufficiently remote and abstract and they had to use the words, “essence” or “soul” or “idea,” writing them with capital letters to frighten us. The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine into a spirit, and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of essence, forgetting that even alcoholic drinks must have a “body”-mixed with plain water-if they are to be palatable at all. And we poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence of spirit. This over-emphasis on the spirit was fatal. It made us war with our natural instincts, and my chief criticism is that it made a whole and rounded view of human nature impossible. It proceeded also from an inadequate knowledge of biology and psychology, and of the place of the senses, emotions and, above all, instincts in our life. Man is made of flesh and spirit both, and it should be philosophy’s business to see that the mind and body live harmoniously together, that there be reconciliation between the two.
Soon after my arrival in Japan I had an interesting talk with a professor in one of the leading Tokyo universities.
He remarked that, as the people of North China are of the same racial stock as the majority of the inhabitants of Manchoukuo, it would only be natural if, in time, these two territories should come under the same sovereignty.
Then, he suggested, would come the turn of vast, sparsely populated Outer Mongolia. Finally, the Japanese Empire might be rounded out by the addition of the maritime provinces of Siberia. After outlining this substantial programme of national aggrandizement, the professor, with a very amiable smile, concluded:
“Some people say I am an imperialist. But I think I am only a sane liberal.”
The professor, of course, was a private individual, with no official responsibilities. But similar expansionist voices are not infrequently raised in the Japanese newspaper and periodical press. So Mr. Chonosuke Yada, director of the Japan-Siam Society, offered the following suggestions in regard to Japanese southward expansion in the course of a recent lecture:
The world situation is constantly changing. It is highly questionable how long the Netherlands can retain her territories in the East Indies, which are more than sixty times as large as her homeland, and continue to exploit them to her advantage. It is also uncertain how long India will remain a British possession. When we take account of these facts we are convinced that Japan must make her way southward. She must make her way southward immediately, for there is no time to be lost.
Other suggestions for a peaceful enlargement of Japan’s possessions were the intimation by Foreign Minister Hirota, in the spring of 1935, that Japan would be glad to consider purchasing the Soviet northern part of the island of Sakhalin and the more recent proposal in the Japanese Diet that Japan should lease the huge, undeveloped Dutch portion of the island of New Guinea. The Soviet reaction to Hirota’s suggestion was freezingly negative, and it is doubtful whether the Dutch Government would ever, except under duress, open up any part of its East Indian possessions to large-scale Japanese colonization and economic development. The fear is too great that any such concession would be only the prelude to the bringing of the whole rich East Indian archipelago under the Rising Sun flag.
Behind Japan’s urge to expansion are a number of impelling forces. There is the explosive pressure of rapidly increasing population in a land that is already overcrowded. There is the feeling of being unfairly treated in the world distribution of territory and raw materials. There is the exceptionally strong position of the fighting services vis-à-vis the civil authorities. There is the high-flown sense of nationalism, which for many Japanese has all the force of religious conviction. There is the mystical idea of Japan’s Pan-Asian mission, very popular with retired army officers and nationalist theoreticians, which envisage Japan as the leader of an Asia from which “white imperialism” has been banished. Finally, there is the great difficulty, not to say impossibility, of turning back from the imperial road on which the country has started, no matter how great may be the difficulties and obstacles which may be encountered.
This last consideration may be clarified through an illustration. If Japan had not seized Manchuria, the Soviet Union might not have considered it necessary to send a powerful army, with a large complement of tanks and airplanes, to the Far East and to create a flotilla of submarines in Far Eastern waters. But now that the Soviet troops and airplanes and tanks and submarines are there, the Japanese military leaders feel that it is an elementary requirement of national security to scale up their own military and air forces to meet the threat. This is only one of several instances in which the costs of imperialism grow because of the opposition and counter-pressure which it excites.
If one may paraphrase a famous saying of Karl Marx; “a spectre is haunting East Asia: the spectre of Japan.” From icy Komsomolsk, eastern terminus of Russia’s new strategic railway in Eastern Siberia, to humidly tropical Singapore, where Great Britain has built up a Far Eastern Gibraltar in the shape of a powerful naval and air base, on what was formerly a jungle swamp, Japan is the primary object of political, military, and naval apprehensions and calculations.
Japan’s drive for expansion on the Asiatic mainland began when a mysterious bomb exploded on the line of the South Manchuria Railway outside of Mukden on the night of September 18, 1931. The bomb did very little damage, but its reverberations were heard around the world. For, using this incident as a pretext, the Japanese Army, flouting the feeble remonstrance’s of civilian officials at home and the equally impotent protests of the League of Nations, carried out a complete occupation of Manchuria. This brought under Japan’s effective control an area more than three times as great as that of Japan proper and thrust forward the military frontier to the Soviet boundary on the Amur River.
Since that time incidents of forward movement have alternated with periods of relative calm. But the drive shows no signs of coming to a definite end, even though it may slacken in momentum from time to time in response to a stiffening of actual or potential obstacles. It would be a bold observer who would venture to predict how the Japanese Empire may appear on a map published in 1945 or 1950.
Every recent year has had its milestone on Japan’s road to empire. In 1933 it was the slicing off of Jehol, with its old Chinese imperial palaces, its coal, and its strategic mountain passes, from the main body of China and its incorporation in Manchoukuo. In 1934 there was the Amau Statement, with its warning that Japan was assuming a veto power in regard to foreign “political” loans to China.
The year 1935 witnessed the elimination of the last vestige of the traditional Russian influence in North Manchuria through the transfer by purchase of the Soviet share of ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchoukuo. It was also marked by a series of maneuvers, on the part of the Japanese military authorities in China, calculated to undermine the authority of the central government at Nanking over the seventy-five million inhabitants of the five provinces of North China. The culmination of these maneuvers was the setting up, with very obvious Japanese military connivance and sympathy, of a puppet regime headed by Yin Ju-keng in the eastern districts of North China.
Early in 1936 irregular forces, emerging from Manchoukuo drove out the Chinese troops and militia and established a pro-Japanese regime in the large, sparsely populated province of Chahar, which is believed to be rich in undeveloped iron resources. Mr. Koki Hirota, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, put forward three points as essential prerequisites of Sino-Japanese understanding. These points were cooperation between China and Japan in suppressing Communism; recognition of Manchoukuo by China, and the cessation by China of all unfriendly actions in relation to Japan and of the policy of “playing off a third power against Japan.” The first and third of these points were capable of elastic interpretation; they might be stretched to the point of asserting for Japan the right to supervise China’s foreign relations and to send Japanese troops into any part of China where Communist forces might be operating.
Two other important events in the establishment of an informal Japanese hegemony in North China were the substantial increase of the Japanese garrison in the Peiping Tientsin area and the inflow of smuggled goods, largely of Japanese origin, as a result of the paralysis of the authority of the Chinese customs inspectors and the free hand which was given to Japanese and Korean smugglers.
The further forward step which was so clearly foreshadowed by the previous process of wedge like penetration of North China occurred in the summer of 1937. A nocturnal clash between Japanese and Chinese troops at Lukowkiao, near Peiping, was followed by several other conflicts, in which each side accused the other of being the aggressor. The Japanese Government rushed in additional troops; and on July 28 and 29 large-scale military operations, accompanied by an extensive use of air bombing, drove the ill-equipped local Chinese troops from Peiping and Tientsin. While the situation is still fluid at the moment of writing, all the omens seem to point to the setting up in the Peiping-Tientsin area of a regime that will be thoroughly compliant with Japanese demands.
Quite in line with the policy of expansion on land was the denunciation by the Japanese Government of the Washington Naval Treaty and the refusal to conclude any new naval agreement except on a basis of parity with the United States and Great Britain. The 5-5-3 ratio which had been considered adequate for Japan’s security in 1922 was regarded as no longer satisfactory by the growing Empire of 1936.
Anyone who has been attending the press conferences at the Tokyo Ministry of Foreign Affairs and who has been in contact with representative Japanese officials and publicists could not fail to notice the intense unwillingness to assume any restraining obligations regarding future Japanese actions, especially in China. Japan has withdrawn from the League of Nations, and the Japanese press makes no secret of its belief that the Nine-Power Treaty concluded at Washington, which stipulates “respect for the sovereignty, the independence and the territorial and administrative integrity of China,” and provides for communication between the nine powers with major interests in the Pacific in the event of any situation which may involve the application of this treaty, is a dead letter.
Questioned on one occasion as to the Japanese attitude in the event that the Nine-Power Treaty should be invoked in connection with some disputed point between Japan and China, Mr. Eiji Amau, the well-known spokesman of the Japanese Foreign Office, significantly replied: “The world is moving and the treaties are standing still.” He added that China, anyway, had never carried out its obligations under that treaty.
Japan’s advance in Asia has been one of the major developments of the present decade. It has greatly affected not only the international relations but also the internal politics and economics of what can no longer be called with strict accuracy the Island Empire.
Japan’s foreign and domestic policies have been inseparably connected since the occupation of Manchuria, and no account of one would be complete or even intelligible without constant reference to the other. This consideration has helped to shape the scheme of the present book. While the first half deals with Japan’s adventures abroad and with their present and probable future consequences, the concluding chapters endeavor to give an outline sketch of Japan at home, and especially of those tendencies which have been most marked during the last few years.
My purpose has been to write neither an indictment nor a vindication of Japan’s expansionism, but to set forth as objectively as possible the main events and causes of the forward drive in Asia, the obstacles which it has encountered, and the favorable and unfavorable auguries for Japan’s imperial career in the future.
At the moment of writing (September 1), the ultimate scope of the Japanese military action in North China which began in July 1937 is still uncertain. So far as it has gone, however, this action, which brought to a violent close a period of deadlock: and uncertainty in the Peiping- Tientsin area, confirms the thesis of this book: that Japan, ever since the occupation of Manchuria in 1931, has experienced an overmastering urge to expansion on the Asiatic mainland. There have been setbacks and periods of lull; but the process has never stopped or been stabilized. Except in the unlikely event of a Japanese military defeat, the probable outcome of the present conflict would seem to be the extension of effective Japanese control (most probably through the well-tried method of puppet Chinese administrative units) over a considerable part of China north of the Yellow River.
For more than two years I have been stationed in Tokyo as Chief Far Eastern Correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. In this capacity I have traveled extensively in China, Manchoukuo, the Philippines, and other countries of East Asia, besides visiting almost every part of the Japanese Empire. I am grateful to the Editorial Board of the Christian Science Monitor for their kind permission to incorporate in the book some material which I have published in the Monitor. A similar acknowledgment is due to the editors of Asia, the Yale Review, Foreign Affairs, and Current History for authorization to make use of excerpts from articles which I have contributed to these publications.
William Henry Chamberlin
Although I had looked on Europe as but a halting-place, eight years had passed. Sometimes I thought half of these years were thrown to the wind, and they the best years of my life, but at other times I knew I had gained as well as lost. I had learned to know myself and I had won back my health. - had broadened my knowledge, learned something of the German people and a great deal about India and Indians.
My alliance with Virendranath terminated early in 1928.
To me he was not just an individual, but a political principle. For me he embodied the tragedy of a whole race. Had he been born English or American, I thought, his ability would have placed him among the great leaders of his age. Despite all this, I could not take up life with him again.
I was not to see Viren again until 1933′. Much time and what seemed centuries of events had flowed past. Hitler was threatening and Viren had left Germany for the Soviet Union, where he was connected with the Academy of Sciencesin Leningrad. Upon my arrival in Moscow he came to see me. He was at last growing old, his body thin and frail, and his hair rapidly turning white. The desire to return to India obsessed him, but the British would trust him only if he were dust on a funeral pyre. What happened to him after that I do not know?
In an effort to free myself from him totally, I had spent a number of months of 1927 in Denmark and Czechoslovakia, where I wrote my first book, Daughter of Earth. This book was a desperate attempt to reorient my life. I returned to Berlin in 1928 to teach at the university, but as soon as vacation time came I left for France, where I completed plans to go first to China and then to India.
For two years previous to this, I had been studying Chinese history. The Chinese “Great Revolution” of 1922-27 had broken on the rocks of class warfare when the Kuomintang had split the national front and begun war on the Communists. Many middle-class Chinese revolutionaries had fled to Europe and the Soviet Union. I had made friends with a few of them and had edited a book by one. Virendranath had tried to unite all subjected Asiatic people behind the Chinese Revolution, and I had become involved. To the turmoil of German life was now added a new element, the Chinese Revolution; and at this time I attended Berlin meetings in which Chinese and Germans of different factions actually fought one another physically.
The League against Imperialism had been organized by the Communists, with Virendranath as one of its founders. The Indian delegation to its first Congress included [awaharlal Nehru, and after the Congress in Brussels, Nehru came to Berlin, where I met him. He was a quiet, unspectacular man, totally unlike most Indian leaders. He was so modest and reserved that it was difficult to think of him as a political leader at all; yet he wielded tremendous influence over Indian youth. The Chinese Revolution had made a deep impression on him. Unlike China, India was unarmed. This major difference was a subject of constant conflict between the followers of Gandhi and the advocates of armed revolutionary struggle. Virendranath was an unrelenting advocate of armed struggle.
Returning to Germany from France in 1928, I halted in Frankfurt am Main, where I met the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung and signed a contract to act as their special correspondent in China. I was to hold this position until shortly before Hitler came to power, after which that old liberal daily was taken over by the Nazis.
In leaving Germany I was venturing into the unknown, entering a responsible profession in which I had but little experience. Sometimes the thought of this new task frightened me. With conflicting emotions of relief and desolation I waved farewell to friends as my train pulled out of Berlin en route to China through the Soviet Union.
As I saw it in late 1928, Moscow was very different from the city I had visited for six months in 1921 as a member of the Indian delegation. In 1928 I stayed less than two months. On both occasions, however, I visited schools, hospitals, factories, the opera, theaters, and the homes of the bezptizomi, or homeless waifs. In 1928 I also visited some of the collective farms in the neighborhood of Moscow.
On my first visit in 1921, the “azure city” period of the Russian Revolution was coming to a close and the cold gray dawn of undramatic hard labor was beginning. At that time grim Red soldiers, clad in captured British clothing and carrying captured British and French guns, were pouring into Moscow from the southern front, where they had driven out the White armies financed by England and France.
The Volga famine was beginning, and I saw thousands of refugees sleeping in railway stations and empty churches. Typhus was decimating the Volga region. Herbert Hoover’s relief organization was being organized and the Russians were suspicious. American intervention in the Soviet Union and Hoover’s black record in Hungary led Russians to believe that, as in Hungary, Hoover would try to do with food what interventionist armies had failed to do by armed force.
In 1921 everyone was ragged, but filled with hope and enthusiasm. Men with holes in the seats of their pants would say: “Anyway, we’re free.” Once some friends of mine left Moscow for Germany, but the engine steamed away toward the east and it was hours before anyone realized that the passenger cars were still standing in the railway station. Almost no telephone worked, no lock locked, and no train ran on time.
In all, I visited the Soviet Union during three different periods. Through all these years I maintained an interest in the fate of the bezprizomi. In 1921 the Government had issued a manifesto concerning the rescue of these homeless children, and committees were formed to round them up, examine and sort them, and place them in homes. The fate of these children affected me deeply because of my own childhood.
The Soviet Government regarded all children as its wards.
Years have now passed and I remember but faintly the individual dramas that were played out before the bezprizomi committees. A plainly-clad motherly woman of middle age, with ample hips and bosom, would often hold out her hands to a ragged, filthy little boy. The child would shrink back in fear. Carefully, deviously, the woman would talk and laugh with him, caress him, and slowly win him to her.
I went to a number of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries which had been fitted out as dormitories and schoolrooms for the children. Some buildings were being equipped with machinery and tools in order that the boys might be drawn into constructive and disciplined work. Any form of manhandling was forbidden, and the boys had their own self-government and tried any offending comrade.
In 1933-4, when I visited the Soviet Union for the third time, I was too ill to do much more than inquire about the fate of the bezptizomi. I learned that there were no longer any homeless children; and those who had once been waifs were men and women. Some were skilled workers or technicians, some university students, some officers or soldiers in the Red Army. Once, in a sanatorium in the Caucasus, I met a young agrarian economist, a graduate of Moscow University, who had been one of the 1921 waifs. In one of the Red Army rest homes I met two former bezprizomi who had become commanders. In the truest sense of the phrase, these men could say: The Soviet Union is my motherland.
Many of the foreign travelers were filled with a vitriolic hatred of the Soviet Union and would stare through the windows, calling attention to the poorly dressed people on the railway platforms. Though these foreigners had merely changed trains in Moscow, they felt that they had become authorities on Russian atrocities and tyranny. Certainly there had been many sad and tragic events during and after the Russian Revolution. But I never heard well-placed foreigners object to atrocities perpetrated by the White Guard armies against the Russian people, nor did they see anything wrong with the invasion of the Soviet Union by foreign armies during the Revolution.
For years there has remained deeply etched in my memory the scene that confronted me as I entered the Soviet Union in 1928. My train had passed through Poland and at railway stations I had watched fashionably dressed Polish ladies, painted and elegant, bid farewell to Polish officers in smart uniforms gaudy with gold braid. On a late wintry October day our train drew up at the Soviet-Polish frontier and I approached the customs station of the first socialist country. This building was rough-hewn out of great logs, and in the waning light it seemed to tower far into the sky and lose itself in the gloom. Before the entrance stood a tall Red Army soldier, his gray greatcoat reaching to the earth, his tall peaked cap with its red star shadowing his face. One end of his rifle rested on the earth and the fixed bayonet reached above his shoulder.
He stood as immovable as the powerful, rough-hewn building behind him. Beyond the scene stretched the gray, impenetrable darkness. Somewhere in that darkness I knew that people were struggling with the rudest forces of nature to build a new world of their own choosing, struggling alone and unaided. But always before the frontier station stood a guard, silent and watchful, facing the Western world. In such a position, I thought, had once stood the men who had founded my own country.
In Danzig Harbor I deserted the freighter and journeyed to Bel lin to look for the small office maintained by Indian exiles. The first person I met there was the Indian revolutionary leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. In New York I had often heard of him as one who had helped form an Indian government-in-exile and build up a world-wide network of Indian revolutionary activity. In fact, it was because of him and his colleagues that I had been imprisoned.
I found the personality and past life of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya compelling. In a very short time I had entered into a union with him; it was not a legal marriage, but I bore his name and was known as his wife. It was to last for nearly eight years, but became so complex that it tended only to aggravate my sick state of mind.
Whether or not I loved him I do not really know. Many years after I had left Viren I remember writing to an American friend that “to my astonishment and resentment Viren remains the center of my emotional life, and if he were in danger I suppose I would walk barefoot around the world to help him. Yet I would not live with him for a day.” That was long ago, and time again proved the great healer. That he loved me there is no doubt. Neither I nor others understood why, for he had little interest in women.
Thirteen years before he met me, Viren had married an Irish Catholic girl. Because he was a pagan who rejected all her efforts to convert him, she bought a special dispensation from the Pope to marry him. After the ceremony she informed him that a condition of the marriage was that any issue was to be Catholic. They quarreled and parted, she becoming a nun in some hidden English convent and he trying for years to have the marriage annulled. He failed and we were never legally married. As a result my American citizenship was twice challenged in later years by the British Secret Service, which claimed, with no good intentions, that I was a British subject. To a shocked American consular official in China I once explained the situation thus:
“My husband was married to a Catholic nun and for this reason could not marry me. You may call me a concubine if you will, but not a British subject.”
The official threw up his hands in despair.
Virendranath was the epitome of the secret Indian revolutionary movement, and perhaps its most brilliant protagonist abroad. He was nearly twenty years my senior, with a mind as sharp and ruthless as a saber. He was thin and dark, with a mass of black hair turning gray at the temples, and a face that had something fierce about it. He might easily have been taken for a southern European, a Turk, or a Persian. To me he seemed something like thunder, lightning, and rain; and wherever he had sojourned in Europe or England, he had been just about that to the British. His hatred for the islanders who had subjugated his country knew no bounds. ,
The foundation of his emotional life had been laid in the feudal Mohammedan state of Hyderabad. To this he had added a quarter of a century of intellectual training in England, Europe, and the Near East. His was a famous Brahmin family abounding in poets, singers, educators, and scientists. One of his sisters was the poetess and national leader Sarojini Naidu, and his younger brother was married to Kamala Devi, who later became a great leader. By race the family was Hindu, by culture a mixture of Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and the best of English liberalism. Viren’s father had been one of the first Brahmins to defy caste laws by going to England and later to Germany to study science. An outcast, he was forced to emigrate to the Moslem state of Hyderabad, where he became a pioneer in modern university education.
Viren had been educated by his father, by Moslem scholars and English tutors. He grew up speaking Hindustani, English, a smattering of German, and the court language of the Moslem world, Persian. Throughout his childhood he had heard his mother - a poetess and an advocate of the emancipation of women - referred to with contempt by Moslems, and this had generated in him emotions which he had never been able to reconcile. This was only one of the many conflicts that went on within him and made his mind and emotional life remind me of one of those Hindu temples in south India - repository of all the cultural movements of the ages.
In Heidelberg and Jena Viren had pursued the study of comparative philology. He spoke English like a ruling-class Englishman and had learned French, German, Swedish, and some Italian and Spanish. He had lived in Sweden for a few years and had not only mastered the language but gone on to study Icelandic. When he and I went with an Indian delegation to the Soviet Union in 1921, shortly after my arrival in Germany, he soon assimilated Russian and in his leisure time sought out men from Lithuania or Iceland, or haunted the encampments of gypsies, in order to compare their languages with ancient Sanskrit.
Like Nehru and many other men of the upper classes of India, Viren had absorbed British traditions of liberty. These he had come to apply to his own country - a practice that enraged most Englishmen. He and his colleagues, some of them caste-ridden, orthodox Brahmins, were among the early nationalist terrorists of India - as they were also among India’s early educators, scientists, artists, labor organizers, and, later, Communists. They hunted British rulers of India and Egypt with pistol, bomb, and knife. Some had been shot, some hanged, others imprisoned for life. In whatever sections of the world Indians gathered they were to be found.
Each summer, when groups of Indian students left England to spend their vacations on the Continent, one goal of pilgrimage was always Virendranath’s home. Of this they never dared speak, and some even preferred not to recall their conversations with him, for he made violent attacks on Hindu caste prejudices and Moslem superstitions. He would eat pork in the presence of Moslems and beef in front of Hindus. To Hindus he spoke of Hinduism as a “cowdung religion,” and he made the adherents of both religions writhe under the sting of his tongue. He taunted them by asserting that even in poetry they learned not from India, but from England, and that they believed England was the paradise to which their souls would go after death. His contempt for Indians aspiring to official posts under the British Government was boundless. He warned his students that only clerks watched time-clocks or lived an orderly, respectable life. When told that one must live, he would answer in the words of Voltaire: “I don’t see the necessity.”
He practiced what he preached. He never possessed more than one suit of clothing, which I was constantly darning, patching, and pressing. Nor did he care what he ate. When he had money, he gave it to anyone in need, so that we were forever in debt. Money was merely a means of working for the independence of his country. His attitude toward it had been formed by the great joint families of India and in particular by that caste of Brahmin teachers and scholars who gave their knowledge freely. Years later I found the same attitude among those intellectuals of China who also came from families in which the clan cared for the individual.
Virendranath turned more and more to the study of Marxism as a means of gaining independence for India; and he eventually became a Communist Party member. I always wondered just what new design was added to the Hindu temple of his mind by this act.’ I could never imagine him being regimented by any political party or following “lines” of thought and action. His mind. took the whole world as its province and drew nourishment from every age.
When Viren and I began life together, two eras and two cultures met. I was an American working woman, the product of a distorted commercial civilization, he a high-caste Indian with a cultivated, labyrinthine Brahmin mind and a British classical education. Though he hated everything British, he had an even deeper contempt for an American capitalism which judged all things by their money value. His mind was modern, but his emotional roots were in Hinduism and Islam.
Like a storm, he existed according to his nature, absorbing, influencing everything he touched. Our way of life was of his choosing, not mine; our home a small edition of that of a great joint family of India. Any Indian who became ill was brought to our home and nursed by me, and on one occasion I had two of them at once. Moslems and Hindus of every caste streamed through it as through a railway station or a hotel. Students came directly from their boats, carting all their bedding and cooking utensils. Some wore weird clothing. One student bought himself a woman’s straw hat with a bunch of grapes hanging down the side; it looked somewhat like a turban, and only with difficulty could we induce him to cease wearing it.
We were desperately poor, and because Viren had no possessions, I sold everything I owned in order to get money. Just as the year 1923 began, protests from the British caused the German Government to order Viren to leave the country. We met the problem by moving repeatedly and changing our name. But our debts and difficulties seemed to increase by geometric progression.
Whenever things seemed about to improve, new problems would turn up. Sometimes Moslems with their wives still half in purdah came to live with us. At other times we visited some who were very much out of purdah, including, for example, the Moslem leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his wife. Cold, sleek, cruel-faced, Jinnah was a great landlord who had married a Parsi woman, daughter of a millionaire Bombay factory-owner. Certainly Mrs. Jinnah could never be accused of living in purdah. She was a beautiful but superficial society woman, whom Jinnah displayed as he would a jeweled shirt-stud. She often wore nothing above the waist except a brassiere carelessly covered by the sheerest of lace saris.
Viren had hopes of inducing the two of them to establish a scholarship fund for poor Indian students in Europe, and when they once wired him to visit them in a German spa where they were recuperating from night life on the Continent, he went in high anticipation. But they were not interested in scholarship funds. Bored, they had thought of Viren merely as a diversion. He was a brilliant conversationalist and Mrs. Jinnah was perplexed by a great problem: she could not find the rouge and lipstick she desired and wanted Viren to look for them in the shops of Berlin.
Such incidents engendered a cold disgust within me. I was, moreover, harassed by domestic difficulties. Hindu and Moslem religious festivals were sometimes celebrated in our home, with dozens of men sitting in a circle on the floor. In the manner of India, no man could be turned away hungry. The cooking and preparation for dinners were therefore endless and the very walls of our home seemed to be permeated with the odor of curry.
Viren thrived on company, but I began to wilt and sink under the complexity and poverty of our life. Everyone understood and loved Viren; few understood me. To them I was a queer creature who grew ever more strange - as indeed I did.
I was with Virendranath and witnessed the power of his personality when his youngest sister, Suhasini, came from Oxford to see him for the first time. She had been born after he left India, and her mother had sung her to sleep with lullabies about her exiled brother. The British Government had forced her father to leave Hyderabad and live in Calcutta under perpetual house-arrest and her childhood had been overshadowed by tragedy. British police were forever raiding their home, tearing up pillows, and disemboweIing Suhasini’s dolls to see if her father had hidden messages or codes from his exiled son. The old man had died a prisoner.
Suhasini was a musician and singer, a woman of striking beauty and noble bearing. When she stood before her brother for the first time, neither spoke, and I saw Suhasini trembling. Viren’s face was tense with inner struggle; it was the first time in a quarter of a century that one of his family had come to share his life, and Suhasini must have reminded him of the tragedy of his father, his country, and his own long years of exile. In later years Suhasini returned to India as a Communist and labor organizer, earning her living as a singer. Her Communism had sprung from Viren’s influence. But it was years before she would bow her handsome aristocratic head and meet on a plane of equality with men of lesser station. Thus it was that member after member of Viren’s family, people of the highest caste and culture, broke the Brahmin bonds of privilege and placed their trained minds at the service of their country or of the dispossessed.
Perhaps my respect and admiration for such men and women robbed me of objectivity. As I saw Viren, his white-hot passion for liberty seemed never to wane; it communicated itself to every one of his countrymen who knew him. It was, in fact, the majesty of his life and intellect that bound me to him even in our most unhappy moments and long after our marriage had become a formality
It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great. — CONFUCIUS
Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely. — CHANG CH’AO
This is a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience of thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing. I should have liked to call it “A Lyrical Philosophy,” using the word “lyrical” in the sense of being a highly personal and individual outlook. But that would be too beautiful a name and I must forego it, for fear of aiming too high and leading the reader to expect too much, and because the main ingredient of my thought is matter-of-fact prose, a level easier to maintain because more natural. Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.
I should have liked also to write the entire book in the form of a dialogue like Plato’s. It is such a convenient form for personal, inadvertent disclosures, for bringing in the significant trivialities of our daily life, above all for idle rambling about the pastures of sweet, silent thought. But somehow I have not done so. I do not know why. A fear, perhaps that these form of literature being so little in vogue today no one probably would read it and a writer after all wants to be read. And when I say dialogue, I do not mean answers and questions like newspaper interviews, or those leaders chopped up into short paragraphs; I mean really good, long, leisurely dis-courses extending several pages at a stretch, with many detours, and coming back to the original point of discussion by a short cut at the most unexpected spot, like a man returning home by climbing over a hedge, to the surprise of his walking companion. Oh, how I love to reach home by climbing over the back fence, and to travel on bypaths! At least my companion will grant that I am familiar with the way home and with the surrounding countryside … But I dare not.
I am not original. The ideas expressed here have been thought and expressed by many thinkers of the east and west over and over again; those I borrow from the East are hackneyed truths there. They are, nevertheless, my ideas; they have become a part of my being. If they have taken root in my being, it is because they express something original in me, and when I first encountered them; my heart gave an instinctive assent. I like them as ideas and not because the person who expressed them is of any account. In fact, I have traveled the bypaths in my reading as well as in my writing. Many of the authors quoted are names obscure and may baffle a Chinese professor of literature. If some happen to be well known, I accept their ideas only as they compel my intuitive approval and not because the authors are well-known. It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler’s window.
I am not deep and not well-read. If one is too well-read, then one does not know right is right and wrong is wrong. I have not read Locke or Hume or Berkeley, and have not taken a college course in philosophy. Technically speaking, my method and my training are all wrong, because I do not read philosophy, but only read life at first hand. That is an unconventional way of studying philosophy -the incorrect way. Some of my sources are: Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family who has all the ideas that go into the breeding of a good woman in China; a Soochow boat-woman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor; my cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark; that writer of a column on astronomy (dead for some ten years now); all news in boxes; and any writer who does not kill our sense of curiosity in life or who has not killed it in himself … how can I enumerate them all?
Thus deprived of academic training in philosophy, I am less scared to write a book about it. Everything seems clearer and simpler for it, if that is any compensation in the eyes of orthodox philosophy. I doubt it. I know there will be complaints that my words are not long enough, that I make things too easy to understand, and finally that I lack cautiousness, that I do not whisper low and trip with mincing steps in the sacred mansions of philosophy, looking properly scared as I ought to do. Courage seems to be the rarest of all virtues in a modern philosopher. But I have always wandered outside the precincts of philosophy and that gives me courage. There is a method of appealing to one’s own intuitive judgment, of thinking out one’s own ideas and forming one’s own independent judgments, and confessing them in public with a childish impudence, and sure enough, some kindred souls in another corner of the world will agree with you. A person forming his ideas in this manner will often be astounded to discover how another writer said exactly the same things and felt exactly the same way, but perhaps expressed the ideas more easily and more gracefully. It is then that he discovers the ancient author and the ancient author bears him witness, and they become forever friends in spirit.
There is therefore the matter of my obligations to these authors, especially my Chinese friends in spirit. I have for my collaborators in writing this book a company of genial souls, who I hope like me as much as I like them. For in a very real sense, these spirits have been with me, in the only form of spiritual communion that I recognize as real-when two men separated by the ages think the same thoughts and sense the same feelings and each perfectly understands the other. In the preparation of this book, a few of my friends have been especially helpful with their contributions and advice:
Po Chiiyi of the eighth century, Su Tungp’o of the eleventh, and that great company of original spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the romantic and voluble T’u Ch’ihshui, the playful, original Yuan Chunglang, the deep, magnificent Li Chowu, the sensitive and sophisticated Chang Ch’ao, the epicure Li Liweng, the happy and gay old hedonist Yuan Tsets’ai, and the bubbling, joking, effervescent Chin Shengt’an-unconventional souls all, men with too much independent judgment and too much feeling for things to be liked by the orthodox critics, men too good to be “moral” and too moral to be “good” for the Confucianists. The smallness of the select company has made the enjoyment of their presence all the more valued and sincere. Some of these may happen not to be quoted, but they are here with me in this book all the same. Their coming back to their own in China is only a matter of time. There have been others, names less well-known, but no less welcome for their apt remarks, because they express my sentiments so well. I call them my Chinese Amiels-people who don’t talk much, but always talk sensibly, and I respect their good sense. There are others again who belong to the illustrious company of “Anons” of all countries and ages, who in an inspired moment said something wiser then they knew, like the unknown fathers of great men. Finally there are greater ones still, whom I look up to more as masters than as companions of the spirit, whose serenity of understanding is so human and yet so divine, and whose wisdom seems to have come entirely without effort because it has become completely natural. Such a one is Chuangtse, and such a one is T’ao Yiianrning, whose simplicity of spirit is the despair of smaller men. I have sometimes let these souls speak directly to the reader, making proper acknowledgment, and at other times, I have spoken for them while I seem to be speaking for myself. The older my friendship with them, the more likely is my indebtedness to their ideas to be of the familiar, elusive and invisible type, like parental influence in a good family breeding. It is impossible to put one’s finger on a definite point of resemblance. I have also chosen to speak as a modern, sharing the modern life, and not only as a Chinese; to give only what I have personally absorbed into my modern being, and not merely to act as a respectful translator of the ancients. Such a procedure has its drawbacks, but on the whole, one can do a more sincere job of it. The selections are therefore as highly personal as the rejections. No complete presentation of anyone poet or philosopher is attempted here and it is impossible to judge of them through the evidences on these pages. I must therefore conclude by saying as usual that the merits of this book, if any, are largely due to the helpful suggestions of my collaborators, while for the inaccuracies, deficiencies and immaturities of judgment, I alone am responsible.
Again I owe my thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Walsh, first, for suggesting the idea of the book, and secondly, for their useful and frank criticism. I must also thank Mr. Hugh Wade for cooperating on preparing the manuscript for the press and on the proofs, and Miss Lillian Peffer for making the Index.
LIN YUTANG
New York City July 30, 1937
If you love the hills and if you can rough it out, then the Manali to Leh route is an absolute must. Manali is situated in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, and is just an overnight train journey from New Delhi. Or you can take a flight to Shimla the state capital, and drive from there to Manali. Shimla was incidentally the summer capital of India during the British rule. And Leh is the capital of Ladakh, which belongs to the greater Tibetan Plateau. Though extremely inaccessible, but still, for centuries people have come to Ladakh - the traders from Central Asia, the pilgrims from Tibet, conquerors from Europe and West Asia, and finally tourists from across the world.
If you want to view the stunning lakes, mountains and monasteries of Ladakh, or enjoy the cold and harsh lunar landscapes you can of course fly directly to Leh, which is the highest airport in India. But it is always advisable that you drive from Manali, if you really want to enjoy the true beauty of Ladakh. And also, if you are driving from Manali, you can travel through the Manali-Leh road, which passes through some of the highest passes. It is actually the second highest motorable road in the world where you cross breathtaking altitudes of 5,328 meters above the sea level. The road crosses through four passes, including the world’s second highest motorable pass Taglang La. Incidentally, the highest motorable pass and also the third highest motorable pass in the world is also in Ladakh. Actually the word Ladakh means - ‘Land of the High Passes’, and thanks to Indian Military, these passes have now been made motorable.
Manali to Leh is a 485 km drive and is covered in 2 days. But this road is open only between June and September, in other times it is non-motorable even for the military. As you leave Manali you will first reach Rohtang Pass which is a very popular tourist destination in India, and then you will move to the cold desert areas of Lahaul-Spiti in Himachal. The landscape starts to get barren once you cross the small settlement of Keylong. And then you come across hairpin curves, dirt tracks, glacial streams and the occasional landslides. Almost for the entire 2 day drive the rivers that will give you company are roaring Beas, Chandra, Bhaga and Indus.
Be prepared - the road is sure to tax you. Sometimes the Oxygen levels become so thin that you can start to get a headache. This is the first sign of Altitude Sickness. If you are coming from the plains, always stay a couple of days in Manali to acclimatization before you venture deeper.
Most tourists stop over at Darcha for lunch on the first day. After Darcha you will be crossing the Lungalacha Pass and then you move in to the incredible Rupshu valley. As you move from this desolate land, you approach Baralacha La, which is sure to blow your mind. From here you move on to Sarchu Serai, which is where most travelers in this route halt for the night.
The next morning is another early start. Today you will be crossing the second highest motorable road in the world at Taglang La. The first stop over is at Whisky Nullah where you get absolutely pure water in natural form. You will also meet the Indus, which has been witness to one of the oldest civilizations - the Indus Valley Civilization.
You will know that you are closing in on Leh once you have reached the Moray Plains. The gateway to Ladakh from Manali is at Upshi. Once you have reached Leh, make sure that you have complete rest for a day because the road is extremely demanding. Plus you can also acclimatize with the high altitude.
Taking cue from the ancient Silk Road or Silk Route that traversed an amazing distance of more than 8000 kms or 5000 miles through high altitude passes, dry inhabitable deserts, picturesque snowbound lakes and mountain caves connecting China with Asia Minor and Southern Asia, the Karakoram Highway (KKH) is an amazing feat of human endurance and achievement. It today links China’s Xinjang region with northern Pakistan’s Abbotabad district.
It is the highest paved international road in the world across the Karakoram range of mountains. It goes through the Khunjerab Pass at an altitude of 4,693 meters or 15,397 feets, and is also the highest paved International Border Crossing. Yet another amazing feature of this fantastic highway is that, it cuts through the collision zone between Asian and the Indian Sub continent where China, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India come within 250 kms of each other. In terms of strategic and military importance, the Karakoram Highway (KKH) is indeed of high importance.
The Karakoram Highway (KKH) also known as the Friendship Highway in China. It was built by the governments of Pakistan and China, and was completed after 20 years of toil and strives in the year 1986. 810 Pakistani and more than 50 Chinese road-building workmen had reportedly lost their lives while constructing this amazing Highway, mostly due to landslides and high altitude sickness.
The Highway, connecting the Northern areas of Pakistan runs around 1300 kms from Kashgar in the Xinjiang region of China to Havelian, which is located in the Abbotabad district of Pakistan. An extension meets the legendary Grand Trunk Road at Hasan Abdal, west of the Pakistani capital Islamabad. However, not all parts of this super highway is quite motorcar worthy. According to Lee Freeman of Australia who cycled through the KKH as a tourist, “It cannot be called a highway at all since a large section of it, specially the one that runs through Afghanistan, is merely a cattle-track”. Vivid photographs taken by him of the road condition affirms his statement. Abdul Ghani of Pakistan who made a thrilling trip to China through the KKH soon after its completion remarks, “The Karakoram Highway follows the Indus river here for 340 kms, and it’s all like this, narrow and winding, with a steep drop to the river, isolated and awe inspiring.”
On June 30, 2006, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Pakistan Highway Administration and China’s state-owned Assets Supervision (SASAC) to rebuild and upgrade the KKH. “The width of the highway,” according to SASAC, “will be expanded from 10 meters to 30 meters, and its transport capacity will be increased three times. Also, the upgraded road will be constructed to particularly accommodate heavy-laden vehicles and extreme weather conditions.”
“The Karakoram Highway, following the ancient Silk Route that once connected famous landmarks that are now lost to time,” said a tourist recently traveling through the KKH, “today offers an opportunity to visit these sites and capture some of the magic of old times as historical figures like Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and Taimur Lang or Tamerlane had all once marched through this Avenue de la Fame.
The Karakoram Highway, in recent years, has become a destination for adventure tourism. The road has also given mountaineers and cyclists easier access to many high mountains, glaciers and snowbound lakes, providing routes to Gilgit and Skardu from the Pakistan end of this amazing highway.
The Karakoram Highway is truly amazing - it is important historically, communicates East and West Asia and the scenic beauty is simply fabulous.
Floating on the blue waters of the south-eastern Indian Ocean is a garland of islands of astounding beauty… where time almost stands still and from where returning back to the world of mundane affairs is as excruciating as being torn away from the womb. This paradise on earth, called the Maldives, is a dream come true to those in search of exotic travel destinations.
Maldives is actually a cluster of hundreds of tiny coral islands that are divided into 26 atolls. Each atoll has hundreds of islands, most of which are uninhabited. However some of the islands have villages, and in others there are resorts. Tourism is restricted in Maldives and so, there are no more than 1resort per island. And some of these resorts you will come across in Maldives are truly world class. One such place is the Paradise Island - if there is Paradise on earth, it is here in Maldives. And Paradise Island is among the best places from where you can enjoy Maldives.
White sandy beaches, palm shaded coastlines, secluded luxury resorts, snorkeling, shark feeding, night-fishing - if your holiday ideas run along these lines, then welcome to Paradise Island. People from all over the world flock to the magical Paradise Island in Maldives, which is referred to simply as Paradise by the locals.
‘An escape to paradise’ is what strikes every visitor to Paradise Island. The island is located only 9.6 km from the airport and is at the Male’ Atoll. It has 40 water bungalows and over 200 breathtaking beach bungalows. A water bungalow is a place to stay that is actually on the sea itself. These bungalows have a glass floor from where you can see marine life all around you. Just imagine you lying down on your bed and watching the fish swim in the coral bed. Or a shark wanting to feast on the school of colorful fish.
You can just sit back and relax away your time soaking in the sun, or take a stroll around the island sampling tropical savories in the different restaurants. If you would like to stretch a leg, there are quite a few options, ranging from Beach Volley ball to scuba diving and other water sports. Paradise Island resort is plush with modern amenities. You can pamper yourself with a Japanese Shiatsu Massage or treat yourself to a sauna. If you feel a craving for your favorite Pizza, just order your fill on Pizza express.
The island is a great place from where you can visit the other islands in the locality. Just hire a boat (locally referred to as Dhoni). There is a seaplane that will take you over longer distances that are in the other atolls in Maldives.
You can visit Paradise Island and Maldives from Bombay or Cochin in India by air. It is just a short hop away. There is also a ship service between Cochin and Male, the capital of Maldives.
Shintoism is one of Japan’s largest religions. It also holds the distinction of being the native religion of the land. Having originated in Japan and being almost exclusive to the country, Shintoism is believed to date back to the prehistoric times as a religion which preached paying respect to nature and in particular certain sacred sites. These sites were probably used to worship the Sun, rock formations, trees, and even sounds. Since the people of Japan used to associate a deity with each of these things, this led to a complex polytheistic religion. The deities in Shintoism are known as Kami-sama. Shinto itself means ‘The way of the Kami’. The forms of worship celebration in Shinto are all meant to express gratitude to the Kami for what has been, and to secure their continued good favor in the future.
After the sixth century, Shinto gradually became a religion of shrines, with set festivals and rituals, overseen by a separate priestly class. Many festivals are large community celebrations for particular parts of the year such as spring planting, fall harvest, or other special events in the history of a location or shrine. Other celebrations are performed for similar purposes on a smaller scale at home or in a neighborhood shrine.
Cleanliness is a major emphasis in the Shinto festival. Ritual washing, neatness and order, and personal sincerity are all ways in which cleanliness is emphasized. Since the earliest days, Shinto has been the source of a code of honor and action for the Japanese people. This code stresses a gratitude and respect for living things, deep appreciation for natural beauty, and a preference for the simple and unadorned. Thus the lines of a raked stone garden both symbolize and become the ripples of water surrounding the large upright stone(s) in the gardens’ center. Out of respect for the lines in the garden, one treats other human beings with the greatest of respect, not knowing where the ripple effect of one’s action may encounter another human being. The tranquility of this harmony between the human, natural, and divine elements is the source and goal of Shinto celebration.
Worship of Shinto is done at shrines. It is an indigenous religion and has no holy book, no founder, and no canon. There are three essential elements in any form of Shinto worship. The first step is the all-important act of purification, a ritual washing involving water. The second step is an offering to the Kami, which is usually food or money. The third step is offering a prayer to the Kami, of both thanksgiving and petition for the future. Music, dance, and ritual reenactment of planting, harvest, or history are often involved in the large community celebrations. The Shinto celebrations bring the Kami into the presence of the daily life of the community.
Shinto began to fall out of fashion after the arrival of Buddhism, but soon, Shinto and Buddhism began to be practiced as one religion. On sites of Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples were built, and people began to adhere to both. Today, most Japanese adhere to Shrine Shinto, and also to Buddhism.
Vietnam is a land that strikes a tourist immediately with its stunning natural beauty. Talk of Vietnam and the images that sprig to mind are those of the Red River Delta to the north, the Mekong Delta to the south, and almost the entire coastal strip with its rich tapestry of brilliant green rice paddy fields, tended by the local women in their conspicuous conical hats.
But there are more pictures to Vietnam than these, and you will see them if you delve deeper into the country, both geographically and culturally. The central region of Vietnam offers a more rounded picture of the country’s roots and origins. The major sites of interest are loosely gathered around the three main towns in the region, Hoi An, Hue and Da Nang.
In the heart of the coastal provinces, between the North and South Vietnam, is the imperial city of Hue. It was the capital of southern Vietnam during the 18th century. Hue is still untouched by rampant westernization that is noticeable in the rest of the land, and still remains a non-westernized enclave of Vietnam’s traditions, and an important repository of its ancient past. Populated by majestic temples, ancient tombs and the imperial citadel, Hue is a place in which time seems to have stopped. In the inland highlands of Central Vietnam are found many of Vietnam’s ethnic minority groups.
Hoi is a small seaport town where Chinese, Japanese and French architecture blends in perfect harmony under the mossy-clad houses.
Between Da Nang and Hue, the road merges into the hills until it reaches the excellent panorama of Hai Van Pass. The impressive views in the north and the south have always been strategically important, and this explains the cluster of rugged pillboxes and older French forts, complete with bullet holes. Today it’s a place for tourists to stop off and stretch their legs.
50 km south of Hoi An are the best ancient ruins of Vietnam. The remote My Son Temples are a testament to the Cham civilization of 7th to 13th centuries.
Central Vietnam is slowly opening up and becoming more accessible to tourists. Vietnam is unique in offering an opportunity to see a country of traditional charm and rare beauty while rapidly opening up to the outside world. As the frontier between former North and South Vietnam, the Demilitarized Zone saw some of the worst ravages of the war with the devastation still very obvious. But on a broader basis, Central Vietnam is a picturesque area graced with emerald paddy fields and some surprisingly attractive beaches and beautiful lagoons.
Speaking of beaches, Central Vietnam also has one of the country’s most picturesque and uncrowded beaches at Nha Trang. If you love serene, calm beaches, you’ll just adore Nha Trang. In fact, the idyllic Central Vietnam coastline is frequented by photographers from all over for that great shot of the sea and the sand.
Amarnath Yatra
Whatever may be your idea of a tour, trek or a holy journey to a divine place, the charisma of a Himalayan pilgrimage surpasses all. The valley of Kashmir attracts people from all over the world for its breathtaking splendor and a trek through the Kashmir Himalayas is no exception. Add to it the sensational joy of finding a stalagmite phallic ice formation that waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon. Intriguing yet captivating. You know what I am talking about – the journey to the Amarnath caves in the high Himalayas in India where your fellow trekkers will all along be singing devotional hymns in praise of the God of rage and fury, Shiva.
After all, its Shiva’s domain and all are going to take a darshan of the all powerful, in the form of a lingam formed of natural ice in a cave that is ensconced in a glacial backdrop. Also found alongside are the ice formations depicting Shiva’s consort Parvati and their son Ganesha.
How is the Yatra organized?
Amarnath yatra is organized every year by the government of Jammu & Kashmir in India during the month of Sravana (July - August), the actual date depending on certain circumstances. Anyone may participate in the yatra or trek if he or she feels like. But the person needs to be in sound health as there is a lot of walking involved in high altitudes. There are a number of tour operators who take care of all formalities like extension of visas, arranging permissions, hiring ponies, booking of halting places en route, looking after creature comforts, making rail or air reservations and other arrangements.
Base point for the Yatra
The base point of the Yatra is the picturesque hamlet of Pahelgam that is a few hours from Srinagar. During season (July-Aug), this sleepy little place is all agog with communities speaking Hindustani, English, French, German, Chinese and Japanese. In fact, people from all over the world congregate here to take part in the ceremonial Amarnath yatra every year. The starting point of the Amarnath yatra is another charming Himalayan tourist spot named Chandanwari (2895m or 9500 ft), which is just 16 km’s from Pahelgam. From thereon, the trek gets precipitous and is accessible only on foot. Some prefer pony rides for this 11 km journey to yet another stunning Himalayan lagoon known as Sheshnag (3547m or 11730 ft) where people usually relax and rest. 13 km’s from Sheshnag is Panjtarni (12729 ft), the last stopping point. The final destination is just 6 km ahead, surrounded by snow-clad Himalayan peaks and ethereal encompassments.
Climatic Conditions
Climate in the high Himalayas during July-Aug is erratic and unpredictable. Remember, this is also the rainy season. So adequate protection against sudden snow is always good. Unexpected changes in temperature affect pilgrims often in the Amarnath Yatra.
High in the Koh-e-Baba range (3000 meters) of the Hindu Kush Mountains, the five lakes of the Band-e Amir are Afghanistan’s greatest natural wonder. They used to attract tourists in hordes from all over the world before the problems started. And the problems have continued for so many years that the Band-e Amir lakes have now been forgotten by the outside world.
The amazing thing about them is the high retaining wall that surrounds each lake. The five Band-e Amir chain of lakes constitute of the Band-e Gholaman (slaves), Band-e Qamber (Caliph Ali’s slave), Band-e Haibat (grandiose), Band-e Panir (cheese), Band-e Pudina (wild mint) and Band-e Zulfiqar (sword of Ali). Of these, the Band-e Haibat is the largest and the deepest with an average depth of more than 80 meters. Although the high retaining walls appear to have been formed by calcium carbonate precipitates, the local legends tell a different story. Caliph Ali is believed to have miraculously raised the walls to dam a perilous river course and thus gain the confidence of the local pagan king whom he converted to Islam. Next to the legendary Bamian Buddha statues (alas no more there), the Band-e Amir lakes are one of the most amazing sights in Asia. The landscape is stunning and looks other-worldly.
Tourists used to throng the lakes to witness the astounding change of hue of each lake according to the light and timing of the day, due no doubt to the high mineral content of the water in the lakes. “Just at sunset - we reached some large terraces of snow, so flat that I realized that they were a chain of frozen lakes. The waterfall had frozen into bloated stalactites, streaked with intense copper oxide green and turquoise blue and sulfur yellow, creamy with snow where they had struck the water”, described a veteran tourist.
After destroying the Bamiyan Buddha despite worldwide protests against such vandalism, why the Taliban did not mine the lakes remains a mystery. The bad news is, the adjoining area still remains unsafe even for pedestrians. The road that takes the visitor to the fascinating Band-e Amir lakes lying approximately 75 km west of Bamiyan should only be attempted during the height of summer or autumn, because there is a lot of snow at other times. In favorable weather, the trip takes about five hours and the vehicle should be hired from Bamiyan.
Since the lakes could not be declared either a heritage site nor given the status of a national Park, many ecological and conservation problems hang high over the Band-e Amir lakes. Several warring factions planted numerous landmines along the route to the lakes in 2001. Though some of the explosives have been cleared, enough remain to pose serious threat to all life forms around the area. As peace is limping slowly back in Afghanistan, the volume of tourism is sure to grow and so the environmental protection wing of the local government would do well to raise awareness for preservation of the lakes and its surrounding areas. The outside world will hopefully one day soon again discover the incredibly wondrous beauty of the 5 lakes in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.
Welcome to one of the most exciting cities of the world - Tokyo. One of the world’s major global cities and a bona fide mega city, Tokyo is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, which is the home of the Japanese Imperial Family. It is also the capital of Japan.
Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolis) as an administrative region is one of 47 prefectures of Japan and is not administered as a single city. It consists of twenty-three central “special wards” and many suburban cities.
About 12 million people - 10% of the population of Japan live in Tokyo, while approximately 33 to 35 million people live in the entire Greater Tokyo conurbation, making it effectively part of the most populated urban area on the face of the planet. Many also feel that Tokyo is the costliest city in the world, and also has the most congested streets.
Tokyo holds many attractions for tourists. Getting to see every attraction would take weeks. Thanks to a very convenient train and subway transport system (with signs in English), it is easy to visit most of these attractions if you plan in advance.
Japan is a land of many shrines and temples scattered throughout the land. Of these, the Imperial Palace (Kokyo), the Meiji Shrine, and the Sensoji Temple are the three most popular ones in Tokyo. Kokyo is the home of the Emperor and Crown Prince and their families. The Meiji Shrine is dedicated to Emperor Meiji, and hence the name.
Tokyo also holds many festivals, large and small, throughout the year. Of these, some of the most popular ones include the Shishi Matsuri (lion dance festival), held in Spring (March-May), the Tokyo Bay Fireworks in Summer, the Tokyo Jidai Matsuri during Fall and the Hatsumode New Year’s Prayers at Meiji Shrine, Sensoji, and other major shrines and temples in Winter.
Tokyo also offers an array of locations famed for their scenic beauty, such as the magnificent Tokyo Tower, the grand Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building Observatory, the unforgettable Rainbow Bridge walkway, the Sunshine City Observatory in Ikebukuro, and the Fuji TV Headquarters Observatory in Odaiba. Should you feel like taking a stroll in a park, choose from the many beautiful and immaculately maintained parks found in Tokyo. These include the Hibiya Park, the Jingu Gaien, the beautiful East Garden of the Imperial Palace, the Meiji Shrine Inner Garden, the Sumida Park and plenty more.
And who can escape without doing a little shopping while in Tokyo? Tokyo has various shopping districts famous for specific products. For example, Akihabara is well-known for its dazzling electronics stores, Shinjuku for cameras and books, Ginza for department stores and luxury goods, Shibuya and Harajuku for teenage fashion, and Jinbocho for used (and new) books.
Take time to explore the fascinating city of Tokyo. One trip may not be enough to experience everything that this great city has to offer. But whatever you gather will make for memories of a lifetime.
When in Bangkok, there’s no dearth of activities to take part in. The “City of Angels”, as it is fondly called by the locals, offers something for everyone. However, when you mention Bangkok, there are a few things that spring to your mind first. And among these are the famous Bangkok massage parlors. Paying a visit to one of the many massage parlors for the perfect end to your day’s activities is a favorite with many tourists and locals alike.
For the first time visitor to one of these massage parlors, it’s often asked: “When do I get there?” What’s the best time to visit these massage parlors - is it after midnight, or perhaps early in the afternoon? In general, the best time is between 5 - 6 pm, as that’s the time when you get to see the maximum number of girls in the “fish tank” or “fish bowl”.
However, there are exceptions. Different establishments may have different timings. So it’s perhaps a good idea to call up the authorities at the parlor of your choice, and ask for the best time. The best models (even those featuring on the covers of the local Penthouse magazines) are available during these “best times”. You surely don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to let them be at your service.
It’s worthwhile to remember that most of the massage parlors close at 1 am. So their last call would be at around 11 pm. However, like always, you can also find parlors that remain open 24 hours.
Many look upon Bangkok massage parlors as the ultimate entertainment experience in this exciting city. If you have not tried it, you ought to, at least once. Most massage parlors in Bangkok observe a similar operating procedure. Upon entering the parlor, you will be ushered into a reception area where you get to meet a bevy of attractive young girls in a glass gallery. This gallery has a nickname - the “fish bowl”, based on its resemblance with one. Help yourself to a drink if you like while you admire the ‘exhibits’.
And then, you make your choice.
Once you have decided on your girl (or two), just beckon the manager and tell him the number. The girl you have picked will be brought out to greet you, and have a drink with you, or just head up to the private room.
In the room, you can choose to order another drink and one for the girl, from the tea lady. Have a quick chat if you are similarly inclined, and get on with the business of pleasure. Depending on the option that you have chosen, you will first be treated to a sudsy bath, or, if you have chosen the body massage, you will receive the rubber mattress treat. At a massage parlor, two’s often better than one. Opt for two girls and ask for a “sandwich” massage. It’s an extremely pleasurable option that you will remember for long.
Like a large teardrop fallen from southern end of the Indian peninsula, Sri Lanka or Ceylon or Sinhal is a small island country that has witnessed many crucial battles with the powerful South Indian kingdoms over the centuries. After the fall of Anuradhapura, the erstwhile capital of Sri Lanka, Pollonnaruwa was first declared as the capital city of the country in 1070 CE by King Vijayabahu-I who defeated the Chola invaders and reunited the country once again.
Surrounded by a vast water-body called Parakrama Samudrya that provided protection and also served as a perennial source of water, the ancient city of Pollonarrua or Polonarrua thrived well under the able king Parakrama Bahu-I (1164-97). By then, Buddhism had reached Sri Lanka and Buddha’s images and edicts were widely displayed all over the country.
Being himself a devotee of Lord Buddha, King Parkrama Bahu adorned the capital with splendid architectural monuments and monoliths including those of the founder of Buddhism. Apart from the colossal statue of the recumbent Buddha, the gifted king also erected numerous temples, vihars, chaittyas and stupas throughout Polonnaruwa that invites people from all over the world for their magnificence and glory even today. What strikes the tourist most is the architectural splendor that has been so painstakingly preserved even after decades of exposure to the elements. In fact, the ruined city of Polonarrua is one of the few wonders left of the bygone days, when sovereigns not only ruled over their subjects but also cared for them.
To promote eco tourism in Polonnarua, the ancient city has been divided into two parts - new and old, and the ruins into five principal areas that include the famous ‘terrace of tooth relic’, Northern city group, the Rest House group (the royal palace enclosure) and others. Besides, the world Heritage Site has been so carefully laid out now that you can visit all the monuments and edifices on foot or may be, on a hired cycle if a car is not readily available.
Some of the relics are indeed superb like the Gal Vihara that consist of a group of four Buddha images situated in a place called the “Cave of the spirits of knowledge”. Here, each image is carved into stand-alone granite pieces of which, the 7 meter tall image of standing Buddha is the most impressive. No less imposing is the 14 meter long reclining Buddha that is beautifully carved out of a single granite piece, while the rest are of minor importance.
The ruins of the Pollonaruwa Council Chamber or Audience Hall are another great place of attraction in this ancient city. The structure was the King’s formal center for government where day-to-day affairs of the state were carried out, and the King also met his foreign dignitaries. Sitting pretty on a three-tiered granite platform due east of the King’s palace, the Council Chamber was once connected to the royal palace through a covered colonnade.
The ancient city of Polonnaruwa was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. Tourists have been visiting the ruins of a great city ever since.
Bikers the world across are a different class. They think different, they behave different, and of course they travel different. Bikers form communities and go on expeditions to places that are extreme, much like the way they think. Perhaps the Tibetan Plateau is much like the mind of a biker, harsh and cold, and yet warm and inviting. And so it was sure to be a matter of time before biking expeditions started to enter the Plateau and even reach Lhasa, the ‘Roof of the World’. Biking through Tibet has become a latest fad.
One beneficial aspect a non-biker would notice immediately is that when you are on your bike, you are closest to nature, non-bounded by the steel body of the vehicle. And this adds on a whole new meaning when you are crossing the stunning landscapes of the Tibetan Plateau.
Biking through Tibet was simply not possible particularly for people from other parts of the world. However the restrictions have been relaxed only recently, in anticipation of a number of foreign tourists taking the train to Lhasa. Though a biker still needs many permits and this can be a real hassle, but the expedition is at least possible today.
Most biking trips to Tibet start off either from Beijing or from Kathmandu. It is better to form your own interested group and then approach a travel agent who can arrange all the permits for you. Or may be you can also join a group that has already been formed.
You will first be taken to Shigatse which is the second largest city in Tibet. From Shigatse you will bike on to Lhatse and then halt for the night at Shegar. The morning view from Shegar is awesome as you are very close to Mt. Everest. Your next destination will be the Everest Base Camp, from where mountaineers climb the north face of the highest peak in the world. While you are biking through this region in Tibet you will also cross Ronghpu which has the highest monastery in the world. Spend a few hours in the monastery to know how the monks spend a solitary life in such extreme seclusion. You can also meet the head monk to receive his blessings for the rest of your biking trip.
On the way back you will cross the Friendship highway and reach Tingri and then onto Nyalam, which is where most bikers rest for the night.
However there are operators, who take bikers on a different trail and cross the Khamba-la Base Camp, the Khamba La pass at 4970 meters, Nakartse, Yumdrok, the Karo La pass at 5045 meters, and then onto Gobsi and the Simi La pass. There is yet another third route that goes through Sichuan, Zhongdian and Qinghai. While biking through Tibet you will come across watermarks on rocks indicating that once the Himalayas was under the sea, and you may even come across fossils if you are lucky.
Biking through Tibet is an endurance test both for the biker and his mean machine. So keep your bike in top condition before you even plan to come on this trip. Remember, this is the ‘Roof of the World’, and so it is going to be really cold. Though the day temperature will be warm, but the nights can get bitter. Storms can happen with snowfall anytime, so you have to be ready. April to October is the best season for biking through Tibet.
Phuket and Krabi together make the brightest jewels in South East Asia. Situated in Thailand on the banks of the Andaman Sea, these two provide some of the finest beaches in the world. But that is not all. Phuket and Krabi have coral reefs with exciting under water sea life making them a diver’s dream, great mountains from where the adjoining blue lagoons look lovely, hundreds of small islands in various shapes and sizes, and forests including marshy swamps.
Phuket is actually an island, actually the biggest in Thailand, and is 900 km south of the capital city of Bangkok. But the easier way to reach Phuket is by air - just take a flight to the Phuket International Airport which has seen a lot of foreign tourists in recent years. And these tourists have not been restricted to Asian countries only, who have known about the beauty of the place for decades, but from far away Europe, America and Australia as well.
Krabi on the other hand, though just a hop away from Phuket, has not enjoyed so much international acclaim as a tourist destination. Though Krabi has a long history of continued settlement - archeologists have dated skeleton and pottery remains back to the Stone Age, but the fact that Krabi is probably as beautiful if not more as Phuket was known to Thais only, until a few years back. But now things are beginning to change. An increasing number of tourists are visiting Krabi as well, and the tourist figures are rising - notwithstanding the Tsunami, which hit hard these twin jewels in the South East.
Among all other attractions at Phuket and Krabi what mesmerizes the tourists the most are the coral reefs and the impossibly sheer limestone outcrops that rise out of the sea particularly in the Phang Nga Bay. But there are other places as well like the Phi Phi Island, Racha Islands and the Similan Islands. Never miss out on the Phi Phi Islands while you are at Krabi as the islands have some exciting caves that contain prehistoric paintings of men, women and animals. Also see how the locals erect bamboo poles in stiff cliffs to get birds nest for the popular bird’s-nest soup. An accidental drop would mean sure death. Another great cave in a stiff cliff and surrounded by water and mangrove forests is the Hua Gah Lohk cave. Legend has it that this was home to a bigheaded ghost. Apart from the paintings, you will also find thousands of shells here, one on top of another. How they got here is a mystery. Did the ghost love shells?
Diving is a popular sport here. Actually the Similan Islands is among the top 10 dive spots in the world, and so divers from all over the world come to Phuket and Krabi to visit the abyss and be one with the corals and the marine life. Diving trips lasting up to weeks are also organized for the distant islands. Many of these islands are uninhabited and pristine.
Another activity that is picking up is rock climbing. The exotic limestone cliffs jutting out of the sea look awesome but are not without danger as well. And this is what attracts adventurers from across the world to try their skills.
Tibet the ‘Roof of the World’ is all set to become accessible like never before. For centuries Tibet ranked at the top among the most inaccessible parts of the world - both geographically due to its extreme terrain, and politically since international movement was strictly restricted. But all that is set to change now with the opening up of the railroad that is going up to Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet.
The new railroad is popularly referred to as the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, and it goes from the Western Chinese city of Lanzhou to Lhasa. In between it passes through some of the finest terrain you can ever come across making it among the most scenic railroad journeys. The Euro Rail routes, Rocky Mountain routes, railway lines in Canada, Scandinavia and Australia included. Though the Qinghai-Tibet Railway originates from the city of Lanzhou, but the fact is that, trains to Lhasa go from six other cities - they include Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xining and Guangzhou. The longest stretch is the Beijing-Lhasa route, and this 4064 km journey takes 47 hours 27 minutes to cover.
Since the train to Lhasa passes some of the highest passes and mountains, Altitude Sickness may be a worry, and so, the train has 2 Oxygen sources - Oxygen is released into the cabins when the train enters Tibet after Golmund, and there are personal Oxygen Canisters as well. You might need it because after Golmund the air becomes really thin, actually you get half Oxygen as compared to what you get at sea level. So take the precautions to enjoy a world of stunning landscapes you are about to enter.
Snow capped mountains are all around you as you pass through stark lunar landscapes. Not a green leaf anywhere. This is some landscape that is not available anywhere, at least in such a huge magnitude. After all, you are passing through the Tibetan Plateau - the Roof of the World. The only animals you will come across are sheep, donkeys, a wide variety of birds, and herds of wild yaks. And of course the endangered Tibetan Antelope. The cars are completely transparent, and so, you are always close to the scenery all around you.
En route, you will pass through Lake Namtso, the huge Qinghai Lake where as many as 20 rivers and streams flow into, Kunlun Mountain, Yangbajing thermal spring as well as the incredible and famous Potala Palace.
Here are some facts on the Train to Tibet:
- It is the highest railway in the world. As many as 960 kilometers are located 4,000 meters above sea level. The highest point is at 5,072 meters, 200 meters higher than the Andes Railway in Peru.
- 550 kilometers run on frozen earth, which us another record.
- Tanggula station at 5,068 meters above sea level is the highest station in the world
- Fenghuoshan Tunnel at 4,905 meters is the most elevated tunnel.
- The Qinghai-Tibet Railway to Lhasa is also referred to as the ‘Sky Train’, the ‘Lhasa Express’, ‘Rocket to the rooftop of the world’, and simply the ‘World’s highest railway’.
- To say the least, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway to Lhasa is an engineering marvel.
Stretching over an expanse of 87.5 sq km in the Himalayas between 3360 and 3900 meters, and carpeted with more than five hundred varieties of exquisitely beautiful flowers, and surrounded by snow-capped mountains in the Indian state of Uttaranchal, is the legendary Valley of Flowers or the Nandan Kanan (Playground of the gods).
Situated within the Chamoli Garhwal region of Uttaranchal, the Valley of Flowers offers a panoramic view of the Himalayan peaks all around - the Gauri Parbat (6590m) and the Rataban (6126m) looming high over the eastern horizon; Kunt Khal (4430m) to the west; Saptsring (5038m) towering over the south, while the 6479m high Nilgiri Parbat stands guard at its northern boundary. Surrounded by some of the highest peaks in the world, this is a place of tremendous unspoilt and virgin natural beauty. The Valley of the Flowers has been declared a National Park in 1982 and is now a protected site. The valley is also home to some of the most endangered species like the snow leopard, musk deer, bharal, mountain sheep and the Himalayan black bear.
Apart from flowers that include Himalayan orchids, poppies, rhododendrons, primulas, daisies, geranium and many others carpeting the ground with their profuse bloom, flowering plants like calendula, aconitum, gentians, etc. that are used in preparation of medicines are also found in the Valley of Flowers in abundance.
The location of the Valley of Flowers has been a closely guarded secret with the local pundits or religious gurus till 1931 when a British mountaineer, Frank S Smythe and his companions lost their way to the base camp while returning from an expedition to Mt. Kamet, and stumbled into the valley. Mists clearing, they were astounded to find themselves sitting pretty amidst a flowery bed. Fascination drove Smythe to revisit the place in 1937 and in the following year, he introduced the place to the world in his book, ‘The Valley of Flowers’. And thus the place was appropriately named. It was “a valley of peace and perfect beauty where human spirit may find repose”, he commented.
Most of the flowers in the valley appear as the snow melts after the long winter months. During the monsoon (July-Aug) there is a burst of blooming flowers all over the place when butterflies come alive with their ethereal colors, and the Himalayan avifauna starts breeding. It surely resembles at such times the real playground of the Gods. However, unwarranted human intrusion has created many problems in the recent past and to safeguard the unique natural heritage of the place, unauthorized trekking, camping and related activities have been banned within the Park area since May 1980.
Organized treks to the enchanting Valley of Flowers National Park begin at Govindghat, a tiny hamlet in Uttaranchal that can be reached from Rishikesh and Badrinath. In the trek you will come across breathtaking landscapes against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains and glittering glaciers. Thereafter, the trail narrows to gradients and rock faces till it reaches the Park through forests. At times, it gets pretty tough and the weather in the high Himalayas is often unpredictable. Nevertheless, a trek to the Valley of Flowers is worth all the hazards to reach the “Playground of the Gods.” It sure is a lifetime experience. A testimonial of the tremendous beauty of the Himalayas.
Bodh Gaya is the ultimate pilgrimage destination for Buddhists where people from all over the world come to visit. It is located 113 km’s south of Patna, which is the capital of Bihar in Eastern India.
Bodh Gaya is famous for its association with Goutama Buddha, the fonder of Buddhism who attained Nirvana or the ultimate release from the cycle of reincarnation, sitting under the Bodhi Tree in a secluded part of the place. The small town of Bodh Gaya near the main city of Gaya is one of the four holiest cities in Buddhism and attract thousands of Buddhists who come to visit and pay respect to the sacred place every year. Tropical in climate, Bodh Gaya gets fairly hot in summer (April to June) though the winter (October to February) is pleasant and comfortable. So most people prefer to come here in the winter months.
A pilgrimage trip to Bodh Gaya centers round the intricately carved Mahabodhi Temple that has a large gilded image of Lord Buddha that is believed to have been built around 3rd century BC by the mighty emperor Ashoka. Bodh Gaya has also been accredited the status of a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992 - it is today recognized as an ancient seat of culture and religion.
Buddhists from a number of countries including China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Nepal have created their respective temples and monasteries here in reverence to the Lord. Pilgrims also come to visit the Bodhi Tree for its association with the great event. It is here that Lord Buddha attained enlightenment. Although the tree has long been dead, the present one is a descendant of a sapling that was presented by ardent devotees from Sri Lanka decades ago. The Archeological Museum in Bodh Gaya is another center of interest for the pilgrims as it houses several ancient artifacts related to the original Mahabodhi Temple.
Temples and monasteries built around the Mahabodhi Temple by artisans and craftsmen from countries like Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Japan, China, etc. reflect the architectural style, exterior, interior decoration and idols of their respective countries. Buddha’s idol in the Chinese temple is more than 200 years old and has Chinese traits in it, while Japan’s Nippon Temple resembles the structure of a pagoda. The Thai temple is an exact replica of a place of worship in Thailand, complete with golden tiles and a curved roof. The temple built by the Nepalese look similar to the Buddhist temples you will come across in Nepal.
Apart from being a significant Buddhist pilgrim center, and an archeological site, Bodh Gaya is also renowned for the various meditation courses that are offered by numerous foundations and organizations. The courses are mostly conducted in the winter months.
The eventful past of Bodh Gaya is documented by many including the Chinese traveler, Huen Sang (Xuanzang) in the 7th century. According to him, the place was at the heart of Buddhist culture for centuries until it was destroyed in the 13th century by the Turkish army. As in the earlier days, people throng Bodh Gaya in respectful reverence during the full moon day in the month of Vaisak (April-May) that is observed elsewhere too as the august day of Buddha Purnima.
Sri Lanka is home to over 400 species of birds, and this alone makes it a veritable paradise for every bird watching enthusiast. This rich abundance of avian variety in Sri Lanka can be attributed to the tropical climate and wide geographical diversity - from mountains to lowlands, and dry plains to lush forests. Of all the varieties seen here, there are about 25 endemic species, native to Sri Lanka only and largely confined to the rainforests of the hill zone.
When you plan to go on a bird watching spree in Sri Lanka, remember that the best time of year for sightings is between November and April, especially in the months of February and March. It is around this time that the migrants, of which there are a staggering 198 species, arrive after their flight from colder zones from the North. The best time of the day for observation, as most avid bird watchers would agree, is early morning, right after daybreak. The only exception to the rule would be for the people-friendly ‘Townies’, like the black house crows, common mynah, sunbirds, parakeets, etc.
With close to 421 bird species comprising endemic, resident and migrants, Sri Lanka remains a fascinating destination for close encounters with the avian kind within a relatively short period. Starting from wet zone jungles to the dry zone wetlands, bird watching tours arranged by local sightseeing groups provide an excellent opportunity of observing Sri Lankan avian fauna under the guidance of professional birdwatchers. Due to the small size of the avian territory, the bird-lover can conveniently visit nearly all the best sites in the country in under two weeks’ time. With a little planning and preparation, a visitor can judiciously combine the sites for endemics with sites of general wildlife interest for a satisfying experience in bird watching.
Sri Lanka’s abundant bird-life makes the island a true Ornithologist’s paradise. With such a variety of environments, ranging from wet to dry zone, forest to jungle, and hill country to low lands, there’s no dearth of fascinating locations to spot these beautiful birds at. Most of the endemic kind, such as the Sri Lankan Grackle, is restricted to the wet zone, while birds such as the Whistling Thrush and the Yellow-Eared Bulbul are to be found in the hill country. Others, like the brilliantly plumaged jungle fowl, the striking red-faced Malkoha and the shy brown-capped Babbler can be found in forests and sanctuaries throughout the island. Among the best areas for sighting these birds are the Sinharaja Rain Forest Reserve and the Adam’s Peak Wilderness Sanctuary.
The large lakes in the dry zone also attract numerous varieties of duck, while larger aquatic birds such as stork, heron, egret, spoonbill, pelican, and ibis can easily be seen in the wetlands, especially at Wirawila, Kalametiya and Bundala National Park (which is also famed for its large flocks of migrant flamingoes).
Come to the kingdom of birds in Sri Lanka. It’s a memory worth collecting. The feathered friends are waiting.
The great Mughals (also Moghals) that ruled India for more than three hundred years were gifted with many qualities, though a few were fanatics too. Emperors like Shahjehan and Jehangir contributed to the cause of art and literature, while historians agree that the great king Akbar was an ideal ruler. Perhaps the most legendary edifice left by the Moghals is the Taj Mahal at Agra, but the gardens they built in Srinagar, Kashmir are great achievements too, and draw tourists in hordes as well. Describing the scenic beauty of Srinagar, Akbar went eloquent - “If there is heaven anywhere in earth, it is here, my friend, it is here”, he quipped to his intimate friend and mentor, Birbal.
If you ever get to Kashmir, you must pay a visit to the Shalimar Baugh garden in Srinagar to appreciate its charming beauty, against the backdrop of snowcapped mountains and the air of seclusion and repose perennially present here. Shalimar was built by Emperor Jehangir for his beloved wife, Nur Jahan, or ‘the Light of the world’, and was rightly called ‘the garden of love’. Measured 540m x 183m, Shalimar Baugh is built in terraces with traditional water channels running down through the middle. The upper terraces were held in reserve for the royalty and included a pavilion that was supported by jet-black marble pillars intricately engraved and curved. The pavilion also served as a banquet hall. The optical illusion of the rows of fountains and the shade trees gradually receding towards the horizon makes it an amazing landscape. Son et Lumeiere (sound & light show) performed every night nowadays within the garden premises brings back the memories of by gone days to the delight of visitors at the Shalimar Baugh.
Yet another striking beauty is the Nishat Baugh garden that is situated on the banks of the Dal Lake. Comprising twelve terraced flowerbeds that sequentially descend down till almost merging with the still waters of the Lake - it is a sight to behold. Measuring 548m x 338m, Nishat is probably the largest of all Moghul gardens in Srinagar. Designed by one of the brothers of Queen Nur Jehan, Asaf Khan, it was built in 1633, following the same pattern as Shalimar. However, how the 12 signs of the zodiac were embodied within those 12 terraces is a grand mystery. A walk through the garden lined with rows of Cypress and Chinar trees is an exhilarating experience.
Though smaller in dimensions (108m x 38m), the Chasma Shahi Moghul garden (the royal spring) is no less eye-catching. Situated well above the hillside, the central theme of the garden is a natural spring cascading down through the terraced flowerbeds and the pavilions, running gracefully all the way over gleaming granite. The water is used to run the fountains within the garden as also to dampen the flowerbeds. Laid out in 1632 by Ali Mardan Khan, Chasma Shahi includes three terraces, several waterfalls and fountains, and an intricately designed aqueduct. Meticulously maintained with water ducts and channels in perfect working order, the Chasma Shahi is a must for people eager to visit the Moghul gardens in Srinagar. Water coming out of the fresh water spring is also believed to be good for digestive disorders as well. However, unlike the other gardens, a nominal entry fee is levied for the Chasma Shahi.
Besides the three major gardens laid out in Srinagar by the great Moghuls, there are a few more Moghul gardens in the picture post-card city, but compared to the Shalimar Baugh, Nishat Baugh and the Chasma Shahi, they only play a second fiddle.
The answer probably is no. Though it is a stupendous work to reconstruct the colossal monuments, help nevertheless, is pouring in from various parts of the world.
Nearly one thousand seven hundred years ago, two large standing Buddha statues were carved out of the sedimentary rocks in the valley of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. These immense sculptures were as high as 53m and 38m, the larger one believed to be the tallest representation of a standing Buddha in the world. When in 1996, the Taliban rose to power in Afghanistan, it started indulging in systematic destruction of Afghan art and cultural images and icons, that were deemed to be in violation of the tenets of Islam, to them.
However, when the Talibans expressed their desire to destroy Afghanistan’s priceless and monumental sculptures, the Buddha statues carved into the Hindu Kush mountain range in Bamiyan, the whole world went against it. A senior political leader ruefully commented that the proposed action, if carried out, may tantamount to India’s decision to destroy the Taj Mahal on similar but opposite grounds. Directors of world-renowned museums begged for the statues to be kept for the sake of posterity. The United Nations sent special envoys to Afghanistan to prevent the vandalistic attitude of the Talibans towards such priceless examples of world heritage.
Incidentally, the Chinese traveler Hiuan Tsang first reported the statues in 632 describing the larger Buddha as ‘glittering with gold and precious ornaments. Both the statues combined classical Indian and Central Asian symmetry and poise. Their faces were modeled on that of the Greek god Apollo while the bodies were clothed in Greek robes’. The carvings survived myriad invasions and wars, ravages of time and were a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists world over. They were also one of the wonders of the ancient world. Despite protests from people, governments, political parties and national leaders, Taliban militia destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha’s before U.S toppled them in the Afghan battle.
Recovering from the after effects of the vandalism unleashed by the Talibans, amateurs and professionals from across the world has offered their services to reconstruct the statues in right earnest. Afghan sculptor, Amannulah Haiderzad returned to Afghanistan in April 2002 after a 23-year exile to lead a reconstruction project of the Bamiyan Buddha’s. The Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata in November 2005 declared a $60 million project to create the Bamiyan Buddha’s with Laser beams and computer-aided equipment.
Later, a group from ETH Zurich completed computer reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddha’s that may serve as the basis for a physical reconstruction. Results of the image-based 3D reconstruction of the statues, performed on three different data-sets in parallel and using different photogrammetric techniques and algorithms is currently being viewed with interest by the United Nations World Heritage Site chapter.
Hopefully, sometime soon, the Hindu Kush would again be alive with people singing in praise of Lord Buddha and his eternal teachings.
If you have not been to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, you can very well decide to come to Maldives - and rest assured, the beauty is no less.
Atolls form when an underwater volcano tops, surrounded fringing reefs sink into the ocean or the sea level rises around them. The fringing reefs grow gradually, forming circles with lagoons inside in the form of islands. The Maldives, where the word Atoll originated, is a group of such coral islands, sitting atop an ancient volcanic mountain range off the coast of India. Since most of the atolls are composed of coral reefs and sand bars, they attract a wide variety of marine life that includes colorful tropical fish and larger predators who come in search of them. The crystal clear water adds charm by way of displaying the amazing world of tiny marine creatures playing in the knee-deep water. The climate being tropical and the swaying palms providing the ideal shade, it requires but little imagination to see that such an island is a heaven on the earth.
There are altogether 26 atolls in Maldives that have been divided into twenty administrative districts and a capital city is at Malé. The atolls in Maldives vary in dimension and class too. Sometimes, there are hundreds of island in an atoll, and while most of them are not inhabited, some are fairly populated. Haa Alifu atoll is at the extreme north and Seenu atoll is at the extreme south, and the islands there are lived in. The largest atoll in the Maldives and perhaps in the world is Gaafu Alif while the smallest is the Gnayivani atoll. Maldives is a very small and peaceful country, and so thousands of people come to visit. But sometimes traveling between the various atolls can be a bother, because the distance from one atoll to another can be quite big. And so sea planes and bigger vessels cover the greater distances. A small boat is called Dhoni and a Dhoni is a great option for island hopping within an atoll.
The atolls of Maldives attract people from all over the world for their ethereal bliss, coral beaches and the temperate climate. An assortment of hotels, resorts and retreats complete with private swimming pools and seaside bars and restaurants welcome visitors from far and abroad. Cruising could be another interesting pastime while in the Maldives. And the atolls are particularly delightful for all diving enthusiasts. You can choose between a diving safari and a relaxing cruise through the atolls. Since most of the cruise vessels are equipped with professional diving equipment and are staffed with qualified diving instructors, diving could be a pleasurable experience even for the beginner. Alternatively, you can opt for snorkeling in the atolls.
A word or two about the luxuries afforded by some of the five or six star resorts hotels and spas in the Maldives. Tourism is restricted here and so, no more than one resort per island is allowed here. And some of the resorts are really world class - the Hilton, Taj and others… many of the atolls offer the ultimate in luxury. But the prices can be a bit steep for the budget traveler. There are cheaper city hotel options as well in the capital Malé from where a tour of the atolls can be organized.
An unexplored area in Earth - in 2006? Is this a fantasy? No Sir, this is a reality, here in Vietnam. Yes in Vietnam there is this amazing area known as the Cuc Phuong forest, and it is as yet unexplored. An unexplored forest is a great passion as it gives an explorer the trill of going someone where no one has gone before. But it is also useful for the scientist as it is an important area for biodiversity. Since no one has gone before, there has been almost no interaction with the local plant and animal life, and so, you can never be sure what you will find in such a forest.
Decades of violent struggle, civil war and internal conflicts have left most of the forested regions of Indochina in a perpetual gloom and even today, after peace has returned to the devastated landscape, certain regions of south-east Asia still remain unexplored and uncharted.
Take for example Vietnam. The country’s forested land is yet to be explored though it is fairly rich in both flora and fauna - specially the avifauna. Only in recent years have efforts been made to create nature reserves to protect the various species including the endangered ones. In Cuc Phuong National Park that was inaugurated by the legendary statesman, Ho Chi Minh in 1962, there exist a wide variety of plant, bird and mammal species that have been listed in the World Red Book. However, much of it still remain unexplored, and so a mystery. Cuc Phuong also boasts of varied wildlife and natural beauty though much of it is lost as a result of illegal felling and indiscriminate killing of wild animals.
Another curious aspect of Cuc Phuong is its numerous grottoes where samples of pre-historic tools and implements were discovered only in 1974. Another exploration a couple of year later unearthed ancient tombs in an artificially ornamented cave that is believed to be several hundred years old. The cave can be reached through a long staircase going down below where many stalactites were found in bizarre shape and sizes.
The 200 sq km forest in Cuc Phuong is home to an amazing variety of wildlife including some that were believed to have been long extinct. Visitors in the recent past have recorded sighting of the famous indo-Chinese Tiger, Clouded leopard and the exceptionally rare Delacour’s Langur. Besides, the Park contains a plethora of avifauna that includes bar-bellied, blue-rumped and eared Pitta, white winged Magpie, limestone Wren-Babbler, red-collared Woodpecker and Pied Falconets.
Treks to Cuc Phuong, which is around 160 km’s away from Hanoi can be arranged through privately owned tour operators. It takes about a couple of days to explore the mysteries of the forest’s ambiguity and weirdness. The trip usually combines a short trek through Cuc Phuong with a visit to Kenha village, a picturesque rural village in the Red River delta.
There are a good many reasons for calling Japan the ‘Land of the rising Sun’. One that is quite logical concerns its location on our planet that is easternmost. Since the sun rises in the east, its rays perceptibly reach Japan first and so the saying is justified. Another version relates to the ancient Japanese who believed that there was no landmass existing in the world, east of their country and hence called their land ‘Nippon’ or land of the rising Sun. No matter whether the Sun is partial to the Japanese or not, people living in the land of the rising Sun are adept in rising to any occasion whenever the situation so demands.
Japan consists of four major islands - Hokkaido in the north, Kyushu in the south, Honshu and Shikoku. Of these, Honshu is the largest. Although the total land area in Japan is around 378,000 sq km, only 16% of it is habitable and/or arable, since the rest is mountainous and inhospitable. The obvious result is the immense density of population. Also, Japan is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, meaning the country is prone to earthquakes. Japan experiences around 1500 seismic occurrences every year. So, the housing and construction schemes in Japan are more restricted as compared to other countries.
Unlike other Asian countries, the climatic condition in Japan varies much. While Hokkaido in the north experiences freezing cold, Okinawa in the south has tropical climate. Japan is affected by Typhoons during September, but the hazards are mostly limited to the southern islands.
Being one of the leading industrial superpowers having teams of skilled workforce with strong work ethics, Japan has advanced on various industrial fields, surpassing many. Innovative thought process and technical advancement of the Japanese have helped them achieve topmost niches in several industrial fields where others had not been so successful. Japanese car- makers had almost beaten hollow most of the big American manufacturers with the introduction of front wheel drive cars in the USA that never skid or slip on a road surface that is covered in ice. Being a pioneer in the field of cellular phone manufacturing, Japan today is probably the largest supplier of mobile phones in the world. In electronics and allied trade, companies like Sony, Nokia and Mitshubishi have reached legendary dimensions. Roboting technology is currently sweeping Japan to such an extent that all hazardous jobs in the not too distant future are likely to be taken over by robots, replacing the human agency altogether.
People from the land of the rising Sun have also made ample contributions to the cause of art, literature, cinema and music. Great Japanese filmmakers like Kinji Fakasaku, Elji Okuda and Yasijiro Ozu have made award winning movies that have gained worldwide applause.
According to eco gurus, however, Japanese economy that represents almost 15% of the world economy may suffer a lot in the foreseeable future since the scenario is undergoing fast change with China and India hitting hard on the world market. With globalization working in full swing, electronic goods made in China are fast replacing Japanese products for their cheaper price and easier availability. Is this an indication that the Sun is on the point of setting in the land of the rising Sun in the near future? But never rule out Japan, remember, they rose like the Phoenix since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Before it was closed to foreigners in 1949, the north face of Mt. Everest was as popular as the south route to the summit. While the south ridge has to be approached from Nepal, the north face needs to be climbed from China and Tibet. Though there are 15 other routes to the summit, these are the 2 routes that have been most popular - the southeast ridge, and climbing the north face. The southeast ridge is technically not as challenging as the north ridge and this is another reason why the north face is less frequented. However the fact that the north face is more challenging means that many mountaineers prefer this to the route through Nepal. In recent years, foreigners have again been allowed by the local authorities to scale the north face of Everest.
As described earlier, an expedition to the north face needs to approach the summit from Tibet. All groups must first go to Rongbuk Glacier which is at 5,180 meters (17,000 ft) above the sea level. This is where the mountaineers set up their Base Camp. While trekking to the Base Camp, you will also pass through Rongphu Monastery, which at 18,000 feet’s is the highest inhabited place on earth. Many western travelers spend a day at the monastery to get the blessings of Buddha and also for a first hand experience of an alternative way of living up in the Himalayas.
The view of the north face of Mt. Everest is incredibly spectacular from the Base Camp. So even if you are not a mountaineer it might make sense to just visit the Camp and view the peak. Plus, since you are on the other side of the Himalayas, you will then be standing on the bare and alpine Tibetan plateau, and will be able to view the vast expanse of snows of the Himalayas. All the mighty peaks of the world, including the north face will be exposed in front of you. Let me tell you, just standing there with all that snow ahead and the vast Tibetan Plateau behind, can be overwhelming.
After the Base Camp, members of the party begin the ascend by slowly climbing to Camp II at 20,000 ft, Camp III that is also the ‘Advanced Base Camp’ at 21,300 ft and then need to climb the Rongbuk Glacier to reach Camp IV at 23,000 ft. At Camp IV, they come across the rocky north ridge that needs to be climbed to reach Camp V at 25,500 ft. Above this lies the legendary and scary ‘Death Zone’. Mountaineers now need to manage several gullies, steep climbs, slabby slopes - not for the weak at heart to reach Camp VI at 27,000 ft. This is where they rest a night, make all the prayers, and finally go for the peak after negotiating the First Step, Second Step and Third Step. Behind these steps, lies the highest point in the world. And you have climbed the north face of Mt. Everest.
There are commercial expeditions to the summit that start off from Katmandu, go to Lhasa, on to Rongphu Monastery and then on to the peak. These expeditions will take you up the hill, and also make you have a taste of the cultural and religious sides of Nepal and Tibet.
Speak of nightlife in Bangkok, and it’s sure to raise a few eyebrows and elicit some hushed sighs of excitement. However, Bangkok has come a long way from its sleazy old days of bawdy and rowdy fun, and has emerged as the capital of “cool” of East Asia. Today, a night in Bangkok promises a host of entertaining activities, and provides plenty of opportunities to have fun in a safe and wholesome way.
Bangkok today boasts of a richly diverse nightlife scene featuring everything from excellent live music and good jazz clubs to ultra cool bars, trendy clubs and great restaurants. Take a walk along the Khao San Road and discover the throbbing heart of the backpacking universe. It’s the definitive destination in Bangkok for a raucous, anything-goes night out with its laid-back, cosmopolitan milieu. A growing contingent of fashionable locals to complement the multi-cultural mix, along with a slew of sophisticated bars and clubs, makes this the perfect spot in town to eat, drink, shop and dance without a care in the world.
An assault of high decibels of the latest techno groove will greet you as you walk down the road, but you can also find scattered servings of Indie, rock and reggae to add variety. In fact, there’s something for everybody here!
The locals often call Bangkok “KrungThep”, which means “City of Angels”. KrungThep is actually an abbreviated version of its full name, which holds the record for being the longest name of a city in the world. As I was saying, in Bangkok, there is always something for everyone. If you like clubbing, you’ll find no dearth of clubs in the City of Angels. Perhaps you enjoy watching your favorite sport while sipping beer. Sports bars are where you should be at. If you feel like playing some pool, the sheer number of pool bars in the city will overwhelm you, not to mention the plentiful players to test your skills with.
To pacify your belly rumbles, taste the finest in Thai cuisine at one of the countless restaurants and food-joints around. Just be aware of the legendary traffic jams of Bangkok. They can slow the pace down a bit if you’re not careful. It’s probably a good idea to travel with a local guide if you are not familiar with the city.
Bangkok has superb venues that appeal to all sorts of musical tastes. Thais are known to enjoy live music, and Bangkok offers great opportunities to listen to great tunes in a number of settings, ranging from loud and lively pubs, to dimly lit bars and classy hotel lobbies. Cool jazz, classical, retro, rock - Bangkok serves all.
Looking for something more adventurous? Take your pick from the many so-called Go-Go Bars in Bangkok. These much talked about (and somewhat notorious) bars that put Bangkok’s nightlife on the map still draw a lot of attention. Beautiful women and hunky guys bare almost all in sizzling live performances while moving sensually to rhythmic beats.
Other attractions of a night in Bangkok include attending the famed Ladyboy shows, featuring a fusion of Hollywood glam, disco diva and mythical creatures from the East, with a dash of comedy and spectacular costumes, cultural shows showcasing the best of Thai arts and culture. Last but not the least, pay a visit to one of the massage parlors for the perfect end to your day’s activities
Jungle Lodges of India, some belonging to the government while others privately owned, offer excellent accommodation and full board. They are mostly located within National Parks, Tiger Reserves or close to the wildlife sanctuaries. They are strewn all over India, catering to various catagories of tourists, both national and international and are usually of two types - standard jungle safari lodges and luxury jungle resorts.
Here are a few jungle lodges of India that stand out…
Claridges Corbett Hideaway
Named after the legendary hunter of man-eating leopards and tigers in the Himalayan foothills, Jim Corbett National Park is one of the finest wildlife parks in India that is home to a multitude of flora and fauna. The Park being set in the natural surroundings is the perfect retreat for wildlife enthuasists and nature lovers.
Claridges Corbett Hideaway near Ramnagar (5 Km from the Park) offers excellent accomodation with all modern amenities and services. It is a four and a half hours journey from New Delhi and is connected with very good roads.
With terracotta style huts built around a pleasant orchard on a bluff overlooking the river, the resort has 40 spacious guest rooms. All double-bedded rooms are air conditioned with running hot and cold water available in attached western style toilets. Rooms are fully furnished with refrigerators. Being close to the Corbett National Park, this resort is the natural choice of many visitors. The resort serves clean and healthy continental food and is also known for its suberb Indian cuisine. A pool-side bar well stocked with branded Scotch and French cognac is an added attraction to this remarkable luxury jungle resort.
Tuli Tiger Resort in Kanha
The lush green meadows, lofty sal and bamboo forests are the ideal habitat of tigers in Kanha National Park, located near Jubbalpur which is an overnight journey from new Delhi. Sighting a tiger here is quite common, perched high above the elephant back. There are quite a few tantalising jungle resorts in or near the Tiger Reserve where a stay may become memorable.
Situated in the heart of Kanha, the Tuli Tiger Resort beckons all animal lovers. With the warm adventurous feeling of camping amidst wild animals in an Indian forest with complete security and best of comforts, this jungle resort has all modern amenities including air conditioned cottages with attached baths. A vast waterbody that extends to about 80,000 sq.mts makes the eye travel to far and remote where it meets a rivulet, ultimately joining the main river called Banjar. Facilities include open air barbeque and traditional restaurant serving Indian and continental dishes.
Periyar Jungle Resort
Situated within the confines of the lofty western Ghat mountains in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, Periyar National Park & Tiger Reserve is one of the most captivating wildlife parks in the world. The Taj Garden Retreat is set in a three and half acre estate of coffee, orchards and spices at the periphery of the Periyar National Park. It is nestled above 2,700 feet high on an escarpemnt with excellent view of the neighboring hills and dales.
Cottages built on stilts are elegantly furnished with private mini bars, CTV with satelite programs and international direct dial facilty. All rooms have private balconies overlooking the misty hills or the surrounding lush green foliage. Facilities include multi cuisine resaturant and ehtnic bar overlooking lush green hills and stocked with fine selection of wines, cocktails and liquer.
With the mighty river Bramhaputra as its northern limit and the range of Karbi hills in the south, the Kaziranga National Park extends to well over 430 sq kms on the river’s south bank in the Indian state of Assam. This is where the Indian one horned rhinoceros can be found in most numbers, thanks to the efforts of wildlife wardens and the Park’s exclusive security arrangement. This endangered species, almost on the brink of disaster a few years back is now thriving well.
Kaziranga was a swampy, malaria ridden inaccessible wetland where local hunters had their hay day till 1905, when the government (then British) under Lord Curzon voiced his intention to turn it to a Reserve. By then, the rhinoceros population in the area had dwindled down to a mere 14 and the slaughtering continued unabated. However, the declaration was finalized soon and the area was officially closed to hunters in 1908. In 1950, it was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary and in 1974, accorded the status of a National Park. Kaziranga, in the local Karbi dialect means ‘where the mountain goat has got the water’.
The approach to Kaziranga is superb. The ride is comfortable and smooth, undulating tea estates alternate with forest and rice fields on either side. Along the horizon you can just about see the Bramhaputra in the distance. Soon, a turn off leads to the Kaziranga Wild Grass Resort. Gracefully built in the colonial style, the Wild Grass is a simple, elegant rural Inn, surrounded by silence, greenery and an ambience of real relaxation. The place is said to lure visitors even when the Park remain closed during the rainy season for its tranquility and excellent service. The resort arranges elephant rides and jeep safaris within the Park and trained mahouts locate rhinos within a remarkably short time. There are many other resorts inside the forest and outside as well.
Seeing the Rhino and the Tiger from atop the elephant is an incredible experience. You can get extremely close to the animals and reach out to inaccessible areas that a vehicle cannot go to when you are riding an elephant.
Apart from rhinos, Kaziranga boasts of wild buffalos and herds of wild elephants. Also seen are wild boars, porcupine and the king of the Indian forest, the Tiger. Crested serpent eagle and the gray-headed fishing eagle can be seen idly circling above the marsh land while the swamp partridge, bar-headed goose, Bengal florican storks, whistling teals and herons are sighted early evenings. Pelicans are also found occasionally within the precincts of Kaziranga.
Daybreak at Kaziranga is a breathtaking transition from cold gray to brilliant gold. Gilded grass turns to green as the nip in the air ebbs and a new day dawns on the grassland. As graceful silhouettes against the glowing horizon, swamp deer trot past the herd of wild buffalos wallowing in mud when tea is served in your room.
Evenings under the star-studded sky are ethereal. With glasses in hand, tourists relax around the campfire, startling at the sudden trumpeting of an elephant nearby. As the night wears on and the silvery moon climbs higher on the horizon, the awe-inspiring roar of a roaming tiger from the distant woodland seem to fill the very air you are breathing.
Best time to visit the Park is between November to April. The nearest airport is at Jorhat.
Shillong, situated at an altitude of 4,908 ft (1,496 m) above sea level is the capital of Meghalaya, one of the smaller states of North-Eastern India. It is also the district headquarters of East Khasi Hills. Over the years Shillong has grown in size and significance in its own traditional way from a mere village in its formative years to an important city of North Eastern India. It now has a population of approx. 260,000. Shillong had been the capital of undivided Assam till January 21, 1972 when it was re-christened as the capital of the newly formed state of Meghalaya and Dispur became the capital of Assam.
Shillong had been the summer capital of Eastern Bengal and Assam for many years. In 1874, on the formation of Assam as a Chief Commissioner’s Province, it was chosen as the headquarters of the new administration because of its convenient location between the Brahmaputra and Surma Valley and more so because the climate of Shillong was much agreeable than tropical India. In fact, Shillong is subject to vagaries of the monsoon. The monsoons arrive in June and drench the landscape till the end of August. It’s warm, and sometimes humid, during summers but winters get quite cold. October-November and March-April are supposedly the best months to visit Shillong. However, on a broader level, Shillong is blessed with very agreeable climate round the year.
According to popular legend and folklore, the city has derived its name from “Leishyllong”, the Supreme Being who is said to be dwelling on the forested Shillong Peak, standing 1,965 mts. above sea level, overlooking the city. Shillong has one of the largest golf courses (the world’s wettest) in Asia and the golf course is called “Glen Eagle of the East”. It is also considered one of the best in India. It is situated in the center of the city, close to the polo ground and witnesses many golfers from all over the world every year who come here to test their skills.
It enjoys the rare distinction of being one of the few natural golf courses in Asia. Not only is the Shillong course scenic and enjoyable, it is also challenging. The course is a veritable dream-come-true for golfers looking for exotic and challenging courses for their favorite sport. It is set in an undulating valley peppered with pine and rhododendron trees. The tight fairways, carpeted with a unique local grass, which hardens the soil, are difficult to negotiate. The number of out-of-bounds streams that crisscross every fairway makes it all the more trying. Obstructions come in the form of bunkers, trees and rain.
A group of British Civil Service officers introduced golf to Shillong in 1898 by constructing a nine-hole course. The present 18-hole course was inaugurated in 1924. The longest hole is the 6th, which is a grueling 594 yards. So if playing some stimulating golf in the perfect climate is on your mind, there’s only one place to head for. Pack your clubs, call your cabby and call up your travel agent. Get ready to discover “The Scotland Of The East”.
While in Shillong, do make it a point to visit Cherrapunji, which is the wettest place in the world. Also visit the stalactite and stalagmite caves of Tura.
Get ready to take a dip in the Arabian Sea this time. Walk along golden beaches, sometimes bustling with activity and sometimes serene, feel the warm caress of the sand under your naked feet, soak in the sun as much as you want and let the cool breeze from the Arabian Sea make life worth living. Welcome to Goa!
Goa is India’s second smallest state in terms of area (after Delhi) and the fourth smallest in terms of population. It is located on the west coast of India, in the region known as the Konkan, and is bordered by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and Karnataka to the east and south. The Arabian Sea bounds it to the west. Panaji (Panjim) is the state’s capital, and Vasco-da-Gama (Vasco) its largest city.
Portuguese merchants first landed in Goa in the 15th century, and annexed it shortly after. The Portuguese colony existed for about 450 years, until it was successfully taken over by India in 1961.
Goa is internationally renowned for its beaches and is visited by hundreds of thousands of foreign and domestic tourists each year. In fact, Goa has become one of the most popular holiday destinations for travelers and tourists from the Occident. Take a walk along its almost unbroken 100 km coastline of beaches and you’ll see why. If the pleasure of the sheer walk doesn’t thrill you enough, take time to look around and you’ll be awed at the venerable cathedrals of the bygone era (in Old Goa) and remnants of Portuguese architecture, while sipping on some “Feni”, the locally produced alcoholic beverage made from cashew fruits.
Mention Goa to anyone who’s been there, and you’ll remind him of its warm, inviting, near-tropical beaches. And while the rest of Goa - its culture, food, inland scenery, and cities - are all well worth visiting, Goa’s beaches are what makes it one of India’s major tourist attractions, attracting an officially-estimated 2 million visitors each year. “Palolem” is Goa’s southernmost beach, about 35 miles south of Panaji. The beach is strikingly beautiful with its white sand on a blue bay hemmed in by two headlands. Locals will offer to take you out in small boats to watch the dolphins. Believe me, it’s worth it!
If you’re looking for more solitude, the lonely beach of “Agonda”, just north of Palolem, is an excellent choice. It is edged by palms and casuarinas, with a large hill sitting to the south.
Among the safest beaches for swimming is the “Bogmolo” Beach, just south of Panaji. Interestingly, it was among the first of Goa’s beaches to be discovered by tourists.
Goa has a unique blend of cultural diversities with a charming East-West mix. Bulk of the visitors you’ll find in Goa are from different parts of India, but the quarter-million from abroad have an influential role to play because of their spending capacity. Among the foreign visitors, and increasingly among a section of young visitors from India, Goa is currently renowned for its electronic music parties and of course, the plethora of enjoyable activities on its beaches.
This year take a vacation of your lifetime. Come off the beaten track. Come to Kohima and visit the cemetery of a division of British soldiers that laid their lives, fighting against the Japanese. The wonderful epitaph erected over the graves of 1400 soldiers and thoughtfully preserved by the British War Memorial Committee says.
When You Go Home
Tell Them Of Us And Say
For Your Tomorrow
We Gave Our Today
Kohima, popularly known as the Switzerland of the East is a sleepy little hill station situated at an altitude of 1495 meters and is the capital city of Nagaland, a tiny North eastern state in the Indian peninsula where an epoch battle was fought between the British army and the Japanese soldiers during the Second world War. Kohima is less than 3 hours drive from the airport at Dimapur through scenic roadways. Fairly good hotels with neat and clean furnishing are available en route. Cuisine preferred are mostly continental though local food may also be sampled.
The state of Nagaland is a narrow strip of mountainous territory lying to the east and south of Assam, north of Manipur and west of Mynamar. Meandering streams, high mountains, deep gorges and silent valleys together with a rich variety of flora and fauna has set this tiny state apart from the rest of India. Curiously enough, it is the only state in India where English is the official state language. No less than sixteen groups of Tibeto-Burman tribes inhabit the state whose arms are as colorful as their dresses. For sight seeing, a couple of days should be enough. Taxis and three wheelers are available throughout the day and a trip to the War Memorial and the cemetery will cost very little. A visit to the State Museum may be quite rewarding as relics of ancient Naga culture are preserved here with care and concern. Clay models of Naga warriors and their weapons are displayed in the Museum in a backdrop of wooded hills and terraced paddy fields. However, no orientation is made anywhere of the Naga Headhunters who once created terror in this close-knitted yet multi-tribal land of Nagas.
Another historic site not to be missed in Kohima is the Khonoma Gate, opening into the village of the namesake where the British once fought with bullets against the Nagas armed with rusty swords and poisoned arrows and were defeated. This is around ten kilometers from Kohima and the place is still remembered as a site of valor and courage for which the Nagas are well known. Another distinctive feature of Khonoma is its paddy fields. These terraced crop-growing fields yield at least twenty different varieties of paddy or rice during each cultivation phase and the produce is collected in twenty different containers for marketing to the plains people. It is common custom for the village elders to taste each different type of rice after harvesting that is celebrated with much éclat and fanfare.
Eastern Himalayan Mountains surround Kohima in all directions. A day’s journey to the Japfu Peak, 3048 meters above sea level is indeed worthwhile. Japfu is the second highest peak in Kohima from where a panoramic view of the town is absolutely enchanting. Mokokchung and Zunhebote, located at a distance of 160 and 150 kilometers respectively from Kohima are two picturesque small townships at high altitude, the earlier being the cultural center of Ao Nagas.
The Forbidden City (referred to in Chinese, as the "Purple Forbidden City") is actually the Chinese imperial palace that was used by the mid-Ming dynasties. This palace is in the center of Beijing, and no visitor to this Chinese city misses it. The City is currently popularly referred as the Palace Museum. The Forbidden City occupies 720,000 square meters or 7,747,200 sq ft or roughly 180 immense acres. This amazing palace is thus bigger than the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the Vatican and also the Kremlin.
There are 9,999 rooms inside the palace. All the rooms have beautifully painted wood. Strangely, the inner sanctum rooms were forbidden to women, barring the Empress only on her wedding day. Although no longer occupied by the royalty (nevertheless, there is no royalty in modern Peoples republic of China), the Forbidden City remains a symbol of the country’s imperial past.
The UNESCO lists the Forbidden City for its huge collection of preserved ancient wooden structures - it became a World Heritage Site in 1987 as the ‘Imperial Palace of the Ming and Quing Dynasites.’
There are two major parts in the Forbidden City. The Outer Court and the Inner Court.
Outer Court - It has three halls that were used for Coronations, Investitures, Weddings and other ceremonial events. The incredible Hall of Supreme Harmony belongs to the Outer Court. The imperial library, archives, and the lantern storage area were also a part of the Outer Court.
Inner Court - northern, eastern and western parts of the palace form the Inner Court. It includes three other halls that were used more often, on a daily basis actually for administration and other purposes. The Palace of Heavenly Purity was a part of these courts. This is where the Emperor lived, accompanied by the immediate family, maidservants and eunuchs.
There are royal gardens all around the Forbidden City. Zhongnanhai is a building complex that has two lakes around it. Incidentally, it is now the Headquarters for the Communist Party of China. There is also the Beihai Park that is also at the center of a lake - it has now become a park. The Ming Emperor hanged himself when a rebel army attacked, and the place where it happened is Jingshan Park, which is also referred to as Jing Shan or Coal Hill.
When Yuan Dynasty ruled China, Forbidden City was a part of the bigger Imperial City. Yuan Dynasty was succeeded by the Ming Dynasty, and the first Hongwu Emperor went to Nanjing and made it the capital. By royal order, Mongol Palace was razed.
The Forbidden City has gates on each side. It is surrounded by walls that were made thick so that it could bear cannon attacks.
Most international tourists to China come to Beijing. If you are planning a trip to Beijing, do not miss out on the Forbidden City. There is much more to China than just the Chinese wall.
Jungle Lodges of India, some belonging to the government while others privately owned, offer excellent accommodation and full board. They are mostly located within National Parks, Tiger Reserves or close to the wildlife sanctuaries. They are strewn all over India, catering to various catagories of tourists, both national and international and are usually of two types - standard jungle safari lodges and luxury jungle resorts.
Here are a few jungle lodges of India that stand out…
Claridges Corbett Hideaway
Named after the legendary hunter of man-eating leopards and tigers in the Himalayan foothills, Jim Corbett National Park is one of the finest wildlife parks in India that is home to a multitude of flora and fauna. The Park being set in the natural surroundings is the perfect retreat for wildlife enthuasists and nature lovers.
Claridges Corbett Hideaway near Ramnagar (5 Km from the Park) offers excellent accomodation with all modern amenities and services. It is a four and a half hours journey from New Delhi and is connected with very good roads.
With terracotta style huts built around a pleasant orchard on a bluff overlooking the river, the resort has 40 spacious guest rooms. All double-bedded rooms are air conditioned with running hot and cold water available in attached western style toilets. Rooms are fully furnished with refrigerators. Being close to the Corbett National Park, this resort is the natural choice of many visitors. The resort serves clean and healthy continental food and is also known for its suberb Indian cuisine. A pool-side bar well stocked with branded Scotch and French cognac is an added attraction to this remarkable luxury jungle resort.
Tuli Tiger Resort in Kanha
The lush green meadows, lofty sal and bamboo forests are the ideal habitat of tigers in Kanha National Park, located near Jubbalpur which is an overnight journey from new Delhi. Sighting a tiger here is quite common, perched high above the elephant back. There are quite a few tantalising jungle resorts in or near the Tiger Reserve where a stay may become memorable.
Situated in the heart of Kanha, the Tuli Tiger Resort beckons all animal lovers. With the warm adventurous feeling of camping amidst wild animals in an Indian forest with complete security and best of comforts, this jungle resort has all modern amenities including air conditioned cottages with attached baths. A vast waterbody that extends to about 80,000 sq.mts makes the eye travel to far and remote where it meets a rivulet, ultimately joining the main river called Banjar. Facilities include open air barbeque and traditional restaurant serving Indian and continental dishes.
Periyar Jungle Resort
Situated within the confines of the lofty western Ghat mountains in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, Periyar National Park & Tiger Reserve is one of the most captivating wildlife parks in the world. The Taj Garden Retreat is set in a three and half acre estate of coffee, orchards and spices at the periphery of the Periyar National Park. It is nestled above 2,700 feet high on an escarpemnt with excellent view of the neighboring hills and dales.
Cottages built on stilts are elegantly furnished with private mini bars, CTV with satelite programs and international direct dial facilty. All rooms have private balconies overlooking the misty hills or the surrounding lush green foliage. Facilities include multi cuisine resaturant and ehtnic bar overlooking lush green hills and stocked with fine selection of wines, cocktails and liquer.
What do Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two men to set foot on Mount Everest (on May 29, 1953), the World Heritage Himalayan Railway (chosen by UNESCO) with its quaint little toy trains, and some of the finest tea in the world, have in common? Its Darjeeling, the undisputed "Queen of the Hills", situated some 665 km’s. away from Calcutta (now Kolkata) in Eastern India.
Mark Twain once said of Darjeeling that it’s "the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once - by even a glimpse - would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the world combined."
And nothing could be closer to the truth.
In 1835, Darjeeling was given to the East India Company by the King of Sikkim. It became a popular resort for the British who wanted to escape the sweltering heat of the plains and seek cooler comforts in the north. The town of Darjeeling today occupies an area of 11.44 sq. kms. and has a population of about 100,00. The name Darjeeling itself has two parts to it - ‘dorje’ meaning ‘thunderbolt’ and ‘ling’ meaning ‘place’. So Darjeeling is ‘the Land of Thunderbolts’. However, the serene beauty of the place will have you believe otherwise. The snow-capped peak of the Kanchenjungha in the lap of the lofty Himalayas afar, the sleepy villages shrouded in fog, the lush tea-gardens dotting the landscape, the smiling Sherpa children - Darjeeling, it is said, refuses to age even after a thousand glimpses.
Darjeeling situated some 2134 meters above the sea level, with a splendid range of natural beauty provides a wide variety of activities from leisurely scenic walks and popular sightseeing to more grueling activities such as trekking and river rafting for the adventurous. There’s so much to do while you are in Darjeeling. A visit to the Tiger Hill, standing 2590 meters above the sea level, at daybreak will simply take your breath away as you witness the mesmerizing sunrise over Mt. Kanchenjungha, which is among the tallest peaks in the world.
Then take a walk to the beautifully exotic Japanese Peace Pagoda, the unforgettable Ghoom Monastery (Ghoom also boasts of having the highest railway station in the world), ride the train around the engineering marvel of the Batasia Loop, catch wannabe mountaineers in training at the Tenzing Norgay Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, lose yourself among the orchids at the Lloyd’s Botanical Gardens and pay your homage at the Dhirdam Temple, built in the style of Katmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple.
The Senchal Lake, located some 10 Kms. away from the town and supplying water to the local population, is a place of great beauty in itself. The hub of activity of the city is centered on the Mall, which has a variety of shops, restaurants and hotels. A pony ride along the beautiful walkways around the Mall will remain etched on one’s memory for eternity.
Darjeeling, in the final impression, emerges as a collage of rocks and forests, trickling streams and gushing waterfalls, deep gorges and steep mountains and a most diverse universe of flora and fauna. It takes just one visit to realize the truth of Mark Twain’s words: "…would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the world combined."
The Yuan Xiao Lantern festival takes place under a full moon, marking the end of the Chinese New Year season. This 2000-year-old Chinese tradition closes out the Lunar New Year and is observed on the 15th day of the first month in the Chinese Lunar calendar although it may change each year. Surprisingly enough, it has roots in both Hinduism and Buddhism, and is celebrated in countries like China, Taiwan and Thailand as also among Asian immigrant communities all over the world. Apart from its festive outlook, Yuan Xiao also marks business and other closings, depending on the region where it is practiced.
Yuan Xiao (Teng Chieh in proper Chinese) feature fireworks and folk dancing when hundreds of people go out in the streets with festive lanterns of every size and shape, hanging them in homes as well as carrying them to parks and temples. Lanterns usually appear in the shape of dragons, birds or exotic animals. Also, people write propitious phrases and axioms on the lanterns to ward off evil spirits and welcome the good ones. Some go to the extent of decorating their lanterns with riddles and even award prizes to those who can solve them. So it becomes a contest as well.
A sense of gayety and exhilaration overwhelms the festivities and everyone seems to enjoy the event. The light given off by the lanterns are believed to usher celestial figures down to the earth for the people to see them. Though it is more prevalent in the oriental countries, but it is also observed in India. Somewhat similar methods are adapted to attract heavenly bodies. Believers put lighted candles or tiny electric bulbs on rooftops (Akash Pradeep) at night during certain times of the year.
Another significant part of the Yuan Xiao festival features a special kind of food called Yuanxiao. Sticky rice flour is made into stuffed dumplings to be taken by all, and it symbolizes family unity, prosperity and happiness. It is believed that the custom of eating Yuanxiao originated during the Eastern Jin Dynasty in the 4th century that ultimately became popular during the Tang and Song periods. The fillings inside the dumplings or Yuanxiao are either sweet or salty. While sweet fillings are made of sugar, walnuts, sesame, osmanthus flowers, rose petals, sweetened tangerine peels or jujube paste, the salty variety is filled with meat or vegetables or both. Whatever the filling, it is a ceremonious eating where everyone must have a bite.
It may be relevant to mention here that the Lantern festival has origins in the belief of Brahmanism, a branch of the Hindu religion, and is thought to have evolved during the 1st century as a ceremonial observance of the edicts of Lord Buddha. However, the Chinese have celebrated the Lantern Festival since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E - 221 A.D.).
If there’s one place on the planet that reminds you of true eternal love, it must be Agra and its most famous architectural structure, the Taj Mahal. For a memorable romantic holiday that will remain etched on your memory forever, come to the place that epitomizes true love and unflinching devotion for the whole world.
Situated by the banks of the river Yamuna, Taj Mahal is a sheer poignant poetry in marble, one of the most extravagant monuments ever built in the name of love. Over the ages, the Taj Mahal has emerged as a grand tribute to the timelessness of art and love. Built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1652 in the memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, the Taj Mahal has immortalized their love for posterity and now stands as an emblem for its purest form.
It is said that the main architect of this piece of marvel, Isa Khan, came all the way from Shiraz in Iran. Relive the love story as you fix your eyes upon its pure white marble shimmering silver in the soft moonlight, exuding a shell pink glow at dawn and at the close of the day, or taking on the tawny fiery hue of the majestic sun. The Taj serves as a symbol of eternal love where the heartbroken Shah Jahan was finally put to rest alongside his beloved Mumtaz. History has it that soon after its completion, Shah Jahan was deposed and put under house arrest at the nearby Agra Fort by his son Aurangzeb. According to legend, he spent the remaining days of his life gazing through the window at the Taj Mahal. At that juncture in his sad life, there were just two things - the Taj Mahal and the memories of his beloved departed wife, Mumtaz. Upon Shah Jahan’s death, Aurangzeb buried him in the Taj Mahal next to his wife, the only disruption of the otherwise perfect symmetry in the architecture.
Apart from its symbolic significance, the Taj Mahal is also considered the finest example of Mughal architecture, a style that combines elements of Persian, Indian and Islamic. It’s interesting to remember that while the white domed marble mausoleum is the most familiar part of the monument, the Taj Mahal is actually an integrated complex of structures.
The Taj Mahal is often described as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Millions of tourists have visited the site, making it one of the most popular international attractions in India. It is also popular choice among honeymooners. It has featured in countless works of art, including literature, music, paintings, cinema, fashion and more, as an emblem of eternal beauty.
Truly enough, the Taj is an embodiment of a kind of love that refuses to die with age, a perennial saga of amour that started with the Mughals and will probably continue as long as humanity will.
