Dalrymple: In Xanadu

In Xanadu
A Quest
William Dalrymple
(Collins, 1989)
314 p.

For some reason I had thought William Dalrymple hailed from the early decades of the twentieth century; I had pegged him as a contemporary of classic travel memoirists like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Douglas, and Robert Byron. Not so. This, his first book, describes his overland journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu, north of Beijing, undertaken in 1986 while he was on summer leave from his undergraduate studies at Cambridge. He’s not much older than I am.

The starting point and destination were not arbitrary. The previous summer he had walked from his native Scotland to Jerusalem, following one of the Crusader routes, so Jerusalem was a natural launching point. His aim was to follow in the footsteps of the great medieval traveller Marco Polo, who had gone to Xanadu in the thirteenth century. The king there, the famous Kubla Khan, grandson to Genghis Khan, had asked Marco Polo to return bearing a holy relic from the West, a wish that he was never able to fulfill. Dalrymple, therefore, set out to finally satisfy the Khan’s request, bearing a phial of holy oil from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Any land journey of such a distance is bound to encounter obstacles, but the primary ones for Dalrymple and his companions (two, sequentially: between Jerusalem and India, a woman whom he had just met, and, thereafter, his estranged girlfriend!) were political: they had to go through Iran, and they had to get into China. I hadn’t realized how challenging it would be for a Westerner to travel in Iran at that time; it seems to have been a dreadful place — I put the comment in the past tense, though I don’t know if it’s much different now. Dalrymple did manage to get in, through, and out again. When they crossed the border into Pakistan:

It was like coming up for air. I rolled up my shirtsleeves for the first time in over a fortnight. Laura whooped, tore off her black headscarf, tossed her black stockings over the barbed wire, and danced a jig on her chador, to the delight of the Pakistani customs men.

I’ve not usually thought of Pakistan as a particularly cheering place, but it seems that in comparison with Iran it was golden. And, actually, Dalrymple surprised me with his positive appraisal of the country, which inspired in him one of his more lyrical moments:

When I think back to that time in Lahore, in my mind’s eye I always see the town at twilight. It is the best time of day. The great Indian sun hangs over the domes and the chattri, and it is then that you notice the smells: the sweet, heavy scent of dung fires, a whiff of monsoon-wet casuarina, the odour of sweating coolies. In the bazaars the barbers are shaving the businessmen and the derzi are bent over their sewing machines. There are garish film hoardings at the corners and beneath them are men selling samosas and men selling fruit. There are quacks and cobblers and women in black calico cowls. There are children, everywhere and all about, flying kites and playing cricket, scuttling after the bullock carts and chasing the pi-dogs.

Dalrymple was travelling on a budget, as students do, and so the journey consisted of a concatenation of trains, rental cars, taxis, backs of trucks, and walking. Conditions were generally pretty rough, and sleeping accommodations were worse: often dirty, infested, or dangerous. The travellers were occasionally overcome by GI infections, abandoned by roadsides, or detained by authorities. For the latter contingency they travelled with a semi-official letter from Cambridge University stating the scholarly interest of their journey, and this helped more than once, including in Iran, where a policeman’s discovery that they studied at “the most famous university in the world” resulted in a ride in a police limousine instead of an arrest.

Dalrymple seems a basically amiable young man, though he can occasionally be caustic. I sometimes thought of Evelyn Waugh, also a great, and sometimes acerbic, traveller. We are told that the people he encountered were, inter alia, “ugly” or “stupid”, and maybe it was so. He likes to transcribe conversations in which his interlocutors speak bad, often amusingly bad, English, but of course the joke would be on us were the shoe on the other foot. Still, it is quite funny, and those conversations were among my favourite parts of the book.

China was their final frontier; Xanadu is located in northern China, just shy of the Mongolian border. At first it seemed they might not get into the country at all, but diplomatic strings were pulled and they managed to get travel papers in order. Once inside the country, however, they went on the lam in an effort to follow Marco Polo’s route through a region of the country that had been forbidden them, which resulted in an entertaining cat-and-mouse game with the officers of the Public Security department.

Their route took them through northwest China, where they travelled among the Uyghurs, the Muslim population whose plight in modern China has been well publicized. They seem to have been mostly neglected at the time of Dalrymple’s travels, and he does not bend over backwards to paint them in a good light (“The Uigers have many fine qualities, but they are not a gallant race.”) But he does develop a certain affection for them, and tells a funny story about accepting an invitation to see Dr No at the movie theatre with one of them:

As the spider crawled upwards the background murmur in the cinema got louder and louder. At the moment Bond tossed the beast off his chest and onto the floor, crushing it with his shoe, the cinema exploded. The Uigers rose from their seats and bawled ‘Allah-i-Akbar’ (God is all-powerful).

*

Without wishing to spoil the drama, I think it’s safe to report that they did eventually reach Xanadu. What had once been a lavish pleasure-palace of the Khan is today — or, at least, was in 1986 — an abandoned ruin in the middle of nowhere. As it turned out they were arrested by Public Security on the very morning on which they hoped to complete their journey, but were, by a kindness of the officers, brought to Xanadu as a stop on their deportation route.

I knelt before the place where the throne of the Khan used to stand. I unscrewed the phial then tipped the oil onto the ground. For a second it floated on the surface, then it slowly began to sink into the earth, leaving only a glistening patch on the mud where it had fallen. Then, in the drizzle, halfway across the world from Cambridge, Louisa and I recited in unison the poem that had immortalized the place in whose wreckage we stood…

Below, beside the Jeep, the Mongols stood shaking their heads. As we walked back toward them the Party cadre revolved his index finger in his temple. He grunted something in Mongol. Then he translated it for us: “Bonkers, he said, “English people, very, very bonkers.”

“Personally,” said Louisa as we got back into the Jeep, “I think that he could well have a point.”

They were believed to be the first Europeans to see the site since it had been first rediscovered, by a British legation, in 1872.

It’s a good book: well-written, entertaining, and built around an intriguing historical idea. I confess I don’t have a great deal of interest in many of the places he travelled through, but I enjoyed the tale in the telling nonetheless. Dalrymple later wrote another well-received travel book, about Mount Athos, a destination closer to home in more ways than one, and based on my experience here I’m kindly disposed toward it.