High Tartary

by Owen Lattimore, Orville Schell

An insightful and recondite chronicle of a journey through Chinese Turkestan retracing the ancient routes that were once essential to world trade offers a rich and revealing portrait of one of the world's most unfamiliar and fascinating areas. Reprint.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, China

386 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Owen Lattimore was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England, where he taught Chinese History, richly flavoured with personal reminiscences.

Reviews

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sequel to Lattimore's previous book, The Desert Road to Turkestan. While the first volume starts in Beijing in 1926 and concludes in Urumqi in 1927, this book starts in Urumqi, heads west to the then-Soviet border, then south through Xinjiang, the Tian Shan mountains, and the Himalayas to Kashmir where it ends in 1928.

Lattimore makes keen observations, by the standards of his time and even in ours - he spoke Chinese, Mongolian, and even some phrases of the less-spoken Turkic languages in the region. He was one of a handful of Western travelers who would 'discover' or travel through the region, but he recognized that this place was caught in a clash between empires. He points out settler colonization, population transfers, language instruction, the importance of regional governors (the Ma clique) and perhaps in the broadest sense he recognized the uncertain political atmosphere that would eventually continue through to the Soviet occupation of Xinjiang in 1934, the mass rebellion in 1937, and the Ili Rebellion in 1944.

This Kondansha edition includes a short biographical essay by Orville Schell about Lattimore's later life and career, as well as maps and a list of placenames that clears up the outdated transliterations.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Owen Lattimore occupies an odd niche in the world of American studies of the Far East, half-adventurer (at least in his early days) and half-scholar, raised in Tianjin, fluent in Chinese but fascinated by the subjects of this memoir, the people and geography of the Mongolian region. He knew some of the languages, could distinguish peoples and cultures, down to the horses they used. While an improvement on the players of the Great Game for influence in Asia and the scholar Europeans who high-mindedly looted archeological sites for their museums, he was still capable, as "High Tartary" shows, of condescending Orientalism. He was the kind of man who married a woman who matched him in travel and writing acumen but who mentions her only off-handedly in this book about a trip that they took together (except for the long, arduous journey she took to catch up to him). Still, it is a stunning record of a time that has vanished, 1930, when Soviet Russia ineptly faced a feeble warlord-torn China across a land with people who mostly wanted to be left alone, except for whatever money and usable goods might come through.
Lattimore's sympathy for the people and their way of life is remarkable despite the power imbalance between the traveler and his helpers. And he went on to a distinguished career in journalism, crowned perhaps and reaching his greatest fame as a target of the drunken inquisitor, Shameless Joe McCarthy. Perjury charges against Lattimore were dismissed and he went on to a distinguished and influential career, unlike McCarthy, whose influence lives on wherever politicians disdain thought and the search for knowledge.

[Bill Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, combined with The Desert Road to Turkestan, details the author's remarkable journey from Peking to Leh in Kashmir. Nineteen months of travel by cart, camel, horse and on foot in the late 1920s. His wife joined him for the last seven months for their honeymoon. Informative adventure story.

[Trent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Travel writing from the 1920s that perhaps has not aged well.