The people are idolaters and subject to the Great Khan and use paper money. They live by trade and industry. They have plenty of silk and make cloth of gold and silk of many varieties. There are merchants here of wealth and consequence. There is no lack of game, both beast and bird, and abundance of grain and foodstuffs. There are two churches here of Nestorian Christians.
(Marco Polo)
Sian is a big city
(Peter Fleming)
The issue of the guns carried by Peter Fleming on his journey caused an amusing exchange on The Times when Fleming and Maillart came back from Asia. The object of the scandal was the following passage – printed in The Times on the 18th of November 1935 and later included in New from Tartary.
Our armament consisted of one .44 Winchester rifle, with 300 rounds of pre-War ammunition of a poorish vintage, which was not worth firing; and a second-hand .22 rook rifle, which surpassed itself by keeping us in meat throughout the three months during which there was anything to shoot.
a .44 Winchester
Some readers were shocked at the idea of a Westerner facing the dangers of the Silk Road with such inadequate armaments1.
Some promptly wrote to The Times expounding their opinions.
One letter in particular is worth reprinting, together with Peter Fleming’s response to it. Continue reading
Both Fleming and Maillart carry a Leika camera.
Based on the writings of Peter Fleming, the camera has been identified as a Leica III (also known as a Leika F), a model produced between 1933 and 1939.
It has been argued that Maillart (that carried two cameras) had discovered the Leica – a very advanced camera, for the time – through her photographer friend (and possibli lover) Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and had later suggested the same model to Fleming1. Continue reading
And so it begins.
On the night of the 16th of February 1935, Peter Fleming and Ella “Kini” Maillart leave Peking in the company of the Smigunov, Stepan and Nina, two Russians that will act as guides and interpreters for a part of the trip.
Both Fleming and Maillart are journalists, and they both want to see what’s goin on in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkistan, a region that was last visited almost ten years before by Owen Lattimore and has been sinking in civil war and chaos ever since.
Their plan is to travel from Peking to British India, following a southern route through Western China – the hardest route, but also, they hope, the least guarded.
The two journalists are officially going to Koku Nor to shoot some game. They are traveling light1, and they are not exactly friends.
Or are they? Continue reading
So apart from old clothes, a few books, two compasses and two portable typewriters, we took with us from Peking only the following supplies: 2lb. of marmalade, 4 tins of cocoa, 6 bottles of brandy, 1 bottle of Worcester sauce, 1 lb. of coffee, 3 small packets of chocolate, some soap, and a good deal of tobacco…
Ready to go?1
As you can see from the menu in top right corner of this page, there is now a static page for the Karavansara Reading Challeng 2016 – this will serve as an introduction to the project, and a repository for links and other information that might be required.
Also, I’m refurbishing the @karavansarablog channel on Twitter, and will use the #KaravanChallenge hashtag for announcements, blog post diffusion and, why not, scheduled live chats on Twitter.
AND we have a badge, that you see here on the left – feel free to steal it and expose it on your blog, website or social media to spread the word about the Challenge.
You can link it back to http://Karavansara.live, or to the above mentioned page.
Cheers, and thank you!
I’ve been made aware of a cool thing called PlacingLiterature, which does… well, what I’m planning to do as part the Karavansara Reading Challenge 2016: make a map, plot book scenes on it.
Placing Literature is the global clearinghouse for location-based literary information, collecting crowdsourced information about books and the locations where they take place—and displaying them all on an interactive world map. Since launching in June 2013, readers, educators, librarians and authors have mapped nearly 3,000 places from novels, short stories, poems and plays ranging from Shakespeare to Kerouac.
The site has been freshly relaunched, and while I still like the Google Earth because it has more features, functionalities, whistles and bells, it almost seems a pity not to use PlacingLiterature.
I mean, new launch two weeks before the beginning of the Challenge?
If this isn’t a sign…
On the other hand, it looks like they are chiefly interested in fiction.
But check out both the site and their blog – there’s lot of stuff in there.
I might start submitting scenes from pulp books1.
Anyone cares to join in?2
Karavansara 