Editor’s note: We’re delighted to introduce our new column “The China Archive”. In addition to our reviews of new titles, every month or so we’ll be reaching up into the China shelves to dust off an older book (often from the deep archive, sometimes in more recent memory) that we think you should know more about. In this opening salvo, Jeremiah Jenne takes us back to a bygone era of travel writing in the 1930s.
Is it possible for a China book to feel dated and current at the same time? In News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir, first published in 1936 by Jonathan Cape, the British travel writer Peter Fleming (elder brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond) recounts a 1935 journey from Beijing to India. Traveling by train, horseback, caravan and on foot, he describes going “three or four thousand miles by way of North Tibet [Qinghai] and Sinkiang [Xinjiang]. The latter province, which had until recently been rent by civil war … was virtually closed to foreign travellers.”
A foreign correspondent trying to replicate Fleming’s journey in 2023 might encounter similar obstacles. Today, it would be the efforts of the Chinese government to obstruct independent reporting from the region, using considerable surveillance and security resources. In Fleming’s time, the situation was the result of a weak state: Chiang Kai-shek’s government had to rely on proxies — usually local militias — to control China’s far west (part of the swathe of central Asia broadly termed ‘Tartary’ at the time) and recover what little was left of their authority in the wake of the recent Kumul Rebellion.
In the 1930s, the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang were wild places, still reeling from the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1912. Access was limited. Banditry was rife. Local satraps controlled most of the province. Economic isolation and the breakdown of social order left communities in desperate poverty. Foreign powers furthered their strategic goals by sending money and weapons to dubious allies. It was a geopolitical hot zone, as unwelcoming to Chinese officialdom as it was to passing Etonian travelers. Fleming’s plan to traverse it then was akin to someone today smashing their iPhone on a rock then setting off on foot from Khartoum to Mogadishu.