Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: pulp history


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For all the Gold in Tibet – part 1

Let’s leave on a tangent, for a while. A couple of posts, no more.

As we mentioned in the last post of the Challenge, in his plan to make Tibet a technological power, the 9th Panchen Lama had found an ally in an American called Gordon B. Enders.
Enders was to supply the Panchen Lama with plane-loads of modern gear – from radios to tractors – and to start up the industrial revolution in the Himalayas.
But what about footing the bill?
How would all those tonnes of stuff get paid?

“Unknown to most of the world, the monasteries of Tibet have been collecting gold dust for at least six or seven centuries. This gold belongs to the ruling power because the Church and the Government are the same in Tibet. How much gold has thus been accumulated, it is hard to say, but it has been estimated to be about $100,000,000.”
(Gordon B. Enders, interviewed in New York, 1936)

22372ik4vrmk9f_orig_GOLD DUST

But the story of Tibetan gold is much older tha the 9th Panchen Lama and Gordon B. Enders… Continue reading →


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Eating the mammoth

The first time I heard about eating a mammoth was in the mid ’70s – a huge exhibition was held in Turin, sponsored by the government of the USSR, and among the exhibits there was a baby mammoth.
And there was this brochure that explained that mammoths were found along the Lena river, in Siberia, and almost certainly one or two specimens had been “consumed as food” in the decades immediately before and after the Revolution.fav6_3_09_Lorie_KarnathExplorer004294

But it turns out that there’s been a long-standing… story, or legend, or piece of spurious news, about that time they served mammoth meat at the Explorers Club in New York.
It was in 1951. The story was reported in The Christian Science Monitor, and a newspaper like that would never lie, right? Continue reading →


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Pulp History: Our Man in Peking

edmundbackhouseHis index entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is short and to the point…

Backhouse, Sir Edmund Trelawny, second baronet (1873–1944), Sinologist and fraudster

Born in 1873, the son of a banker, Edmund Trelawny Backhouse arrived in China in 1899. He soon hooked up with George Ernes Morrison, correspondent for the Times. First he worked as a translator – he knew Russian, Japanese and Chinese, Manchu and Mongolian – and later as a provider of insider information from the Chinese Imperial Court – him being a close friend of the Grand Councilor Wang Wen-shao, the Grand Eunuch Li Lien-ying, Viceroy Hsü Shih-ch’ang, Prime Minister Tuan Ch’i-jui, Finance Minister Liang Shih-i, etcetera.
The only problem being, of course, that he had no contacts whatsoever in court.
He was making things up. Continue reading →


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A bad girl, or so she said

I fall easily in love with the women of yesterday – especially those that I discover in my search for what I usually call pulp history.

220px-Emily_HahnFor instance – Shanghai, 1930s, a party in the Italian consulate, one of the guests is a beautiful woman chaperoning a gibbon wearing a diaper.
I put that in my novel, The Ministry of Thunder, and I was told I was silly.
But it’s a historical fact : the gibbon was called Mr Mills.
The beautiful lady was Emily Hahn.

Born in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri, Emily Hahn was the first woman in America to get a degree in Mining Engineering – basically because she had been told she would never get it, and it was an unsuitable job for a woman.
And indeed it was – in the sense that she was ostracized, and had to find another way to make a living. So she started writing.

Sort of. Continue reading →


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The last flight of the Gremlin Special

margaret hastingsThe lady portrayed here by the side is Corporal Margaret Hastings, WAC.
She was one of the survivors of the Gremlin Special1, a C-47 Skytrain that, on the 15th of May 1945 crashed in unexplored Shangri-La valley, New Guinea.

Margaret Hastings, described as a woman that “liked her liquor, in moderation, and her men, also in moderation”, had apparently joined the service to escape a life of spinsterhood in her hometown.
She was thirty, and beautiful – spinsterhood?

This seems to have turned into a women & airplanes sort of week, so, why not take a look at the adventure of the Gremlin Special? Continue reading →


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Why not keep going?

amy-johnsonDo they still have aviation races?

OK, let’s start from the beginning.

Amy Johnson was one of those women that always fascinated me – as a person, and as a representative of a category, a group of people.
Amy Johnson was an aviatrix.
Now, maybe today the  term is exist and politically incorrect, but I live at the borders of the Empire, so I can shrug it off – Amy Johnson was a pilot, a flyer, and yes, an aviatrix.
She took to the sky escaping a career as a solicitor in London.

Continue reading →