Mongol Journeys

by Owen Lattimore

Only Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and their wild invading hordes have a place in history outside their native homelands. Of Kublai Khan, his fame is only connected with the imperial palaces of China. In this book, the author sets out on different journeys to discover the truths of life in this vast land. He seeks to witness the great sacrificial festival to Genghis Khan.

324 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 1941

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

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although many try, few travelogues manage, as Lattimore does in chapter seven of this book, to blend history, ethnography, folklore, travel memoir and political commentary into a single seamless view of a time and place and state of mind. What makes Lattimore's work all the more breathtaking is the sheer remoteness of his subject, in time as well as space.

Mongol Journeys is an account of a liminal space—the Mongolian frontier, where settled agricultural China meets the old pastoral lands of the Steppe—at the transitional moment of the 1920s and 1930s when the settled, farming lifestyle of the lowlands was achieving its final ascendance over nomadism. The society that Lattimore describes was, in his time, the last remnant of a world-system that once stretched from Paris to the Pacific and is, in our time, completely vanished. Lattimore himself meanwhile, traversing and reporting on that world, is an essentially modern Westerner. Such a juxtaposition and, in Owen Lattimore, such a conscientious, knowledgeable, respectful eye through which to experience that world, is virtually unique to encounter and a joy to read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

2006 edition of an interesting historical travelogue originally published in 1940. Gives a very different perspective on geo-politics and some fantastic images of mongolia as it was in the 1930's. Read this in Nepal and really enjoyed it.