History: Reread and Rewritten

By Beth Green

One of the biggest thrills for me when researching a place to visit—whether for tourism or for living abroad—is reading about its history. I have written here before about reading a book just because I like the setting. But I also seek out works of both fiction and nonfiction to flesh out my concept of what a place was like at particular moments in time.

Following is a short list of a few historical books about China I often recommend to friends and other travelers.

* Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang, is one of those sweeping, epic tales that makes you want to flip right back to the start after finishing the last page. Part memoir, part novelized biography of the author’s mother and grandmother, Wild Swans tells the story of a family as well as a nation. From her grandmother’s bound feet to her mother’s work with the Communist Party, and finally to Chang’s emigration, Wild Swans illustrates the great changes China has undergone better than any other book I’ve read on the subject. At the time I read it, the book was banned in China. I got it from an expat friend, who got it from a friend, who brought it in from Hong Kong. And yes, I passed it on.

*Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’En. Often called just Monkey when in translation in the West, this is one of the four great classical novels of China. It describes the pilgrimage of a monk from China to India, on a quest to bring Buddhist scrolls back to his homeland. There is evidence the monk, Xuan Zang, was a real historical figure, but I’m guessing that the tale’s other characters are not: Sun Wu Kong, a monkey king; Zhu Bai Jie, an awakened pig; and Sha Wu Jing, an immortal general fallen from service in the heavenly court. If you travel in Xi’an or the western parts of China you’ll often find references to this party’s legendary journey.

*River Town and Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler.  These two books about journalist Hessler’s experiences, travels, and friendships in China since the 1990s are titles I often recommend to people who ask me for something to read about China’s contemporary history. (I mentioned River Town in my post about the Yangtze River, here.) Hessler moved to a small town in Sichuan province in the 1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer. His books reflect the amazing cultural and social changes that have taken place since that time, and also the changes in his own perceptions of China. He’s got a third book now, Country Driving, which I keep meaning to read.

*1491: The Year China Discovered the World, by Gavin Menzies. Probably known to my friends and family as the book I love to hate, I often recommend people read this book even though I doubt it’s historically accurate. (I’m not the only one. There was considerable controversy about this book’s claims.) Basically, the author asserts that China discovered the Americas and Antarctica before Columbus. I’m willing to accept that as a possibility, but then Menzies goes on to say that the Chinese influence from landings and shipwrecks on their voyages forms the basis for much of indigenous tradition in the Americas.

That’s where I get skeptical. However, what is fascinating to me about this book is the reception it got within China—my students loved it. The government loved it. It was featured on the news. It was widely available for sale (unlike Wild Swans, as I mentioned above, which features actual history.) So I recommend this book, because it has resonated with a huge population—it shows what they would like their history to reveal. Menzies followed up this book with two books I’ve yet to read:  1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance and The Lost Empire of Atlantis.

Do you have some favorite titles about the history of a place? Add them in the comments!

Off The Beaten Track--Why Write About England?

We're pleased to host author Jeri Westerson today as our guest poster. Jeri seems permanently ensconced in fourteenth century England, writing about Crispin Guest, her hard-boiled medieval detective in her latest medieval noir BLOOD LANCE, in print, ebook, and audiobook. For a series booktrailer, go to her website www.JeriWesterson.com.

Mystery authors like to choose the locations of their stories carefully. I know authors who choose certain cities and towns intentionally so they can build in a readymade readership. Readers like recognizing the café they frequent or the hair dresser or the main street the protagonist finds the body.

Other authors will choose a place and change it subtly to work with the landscape they need in their stories. Santa Teresa is a stand-in for Santa Barbara in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, for instance.

But I chose London. And not just any London, but a fourteenth century one. Now although London is a real place, the fourteenth century London is long gone. I know that we think of England as eternal and unchanging, but a city like London, even with its few remaining Dickensian streets, has changed a lot. Two great fires saw to that along with just the regular amount of tearing down and building up.

I have a few copies of maps from about the early fourteenth century and a stunning one from the sixteenth century. What enthralls me about these two maps is how much London grew in two hundred years and how much it also remained the same.

London began as a Roman settlement—Londinium—but even before the Romans arrived, the prehistoric natives had sporadically settled in the area. William the Conqueror, the last successful invader to England, secured the Anglo-Saxon walls around the city and built his keep within it. We know this keep today as the Tower of London. The walls of Anglo-Saxon London stretch from Ludgate and Newgate to the west, to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the north, Aldgate in the east, and Dowgate in the south. Over the centuries, farmland began to be gobbled up for more and more city dwellers, well outside the city’s original walls. And the Thames, once its own sort of border, became merely one more thoroughfare, cutting the city in two. The north side was where all the main attractions were and the Bankside in Southwark, was traditionally the place where the brothels and low-life’s lived. Since actors were also considered low-lifes, the southbank is also where they put the theatres in Shakespeare’s day.

By the sixteenth century, we can see how much the city had spread outward. The city of Westminster was only a few miles from the heart of London. But London encroached so much into the land between, that there is no telling where London leaves off and Westminster begins. And Westminster is where the kings had their palace, the footprint of which is covered today by the Parliament buildings where Big Ben’s Tower stands.

I am attracted to the long-lived history of England. And I gave a clue to that in a paragraph above. I stated that William the Conqueror was the last successful invader of England…and that was almost a thousand years ago. I don’t think any other country in the world can boast of that.

And it is that settled history that allows for traditions to carry on to this day. England had a brief period during their civil war in the seventeenth century where they abolished the monarchy (curse you, Oliver Cromwell!) but the people, having had enough of the Lord Protector’s puritanical attitudes, brought it back. There is a ceremony in the Tower of London where they perform to this day the oldest continuous military ceremony—something that they’ve been doing at the Tower for seven hundred years—called the Ceremony of the Keys, where a warder of the Tower locks all the castle’s gates in a procedure that takes ten minutes. And he--or someone like him--has done this every single night for the last seven hundred years. The warder was only slightly late once during World War II when London was being blitzed by the Germans. A bomb fell close to the Tower and the warder and his guards had to duck for cover…and then they proceeded on with it. They sent an apologetic note to the king. Now that’s tradition, people.

And I love that. I love the continuity of the English. I love that they love their pomp and traditions and have maintained them for generations. There will always be an England, or so it seems. And it’s fun to write about it and have my fictional protagonist Crispin Guest wade into the real history and make a home for himself there. I love that I can look at a fourteenth century map of London and put his dwelling on a real street and then look on Google Earth and find that same street still there. I giggle with delight at such permanence because I live in southern California, where even the ground doesn’t stay in one place all the time. Oh for permanence!

Off the Beaten Track: Thailand in My Bookcase

We're pleased to host Caron Eastgate Dann as our guest poster this week. Caron is a writer, university lecturer and journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of The Occidentals (as Caron Eastgate James), a novel set in 19th-century Thailand, and the non-fiction book  Imagining Siam: A Traveller's Literary Guide to Thailand. Caron was born in New Zealand and also brought up in the US and the UK. She lived in Thailand in the 1990s, where she worked as a teacher and a journalist, before returning to Melbourne in 1999. She blogs regularly at CaronDann.com.

I have an entire bookcase devoted to my collection of more than 200 books in English on Thailand. I have novels and short stories, travel writing, travel guides old and new, architecture, politics, history, memoirs by Western expats, popular culture, academic studies, picture books, children’s books and more.

My publisher used some of the books in my collection to form a montage for the cover of my non-fiction book, Imagining Siam: A Traveller’s Literary Guide to Thailand. This was problematic, as it took a year to get all the copyright permissions to use the covers—I even had to find the original designer of my own book’s cover and ask him if we could use it (he said yes).

My bookcase.

For my collection, I scour second-hand stores, online as well as brick-and-mortar bookshops, for likely volumes. I also buy new books in English about Thailand as they are published.

I started to collect these books when I lived in Thailand in the 1990s. The original Asia Books store on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, with its rickety stairs leading to several floors of books, was my haven in those days. I also belonged to the Siam Society, which had a library of 20,000 books on South-East Asia and which would allow me to borrow books for a month at a time.

Before I wrote my historical novel, The Occidentals, set in 19^th-century Siam, as Thailand was known then, I did six months of full-time research, which meant reading and indexing all the relevant books I could find. In those days, before the internet, this meant compiling a hand-written index-card system, which you can read more about here.

In this blog, I would like to share with you some of the titles from my treasured collection.

Best find

One of my most exciting finds was a small, innocuous-looking book with a plain purple cover and what looks like the title part of the original dust jacket cut out and stuck to it. I bought this book for $88.80 US in 2006, via the internet from a bookseller in Ohio.

The book is a short novel called Simo: The Story of a Boy of Siam. The author is Pastor Dan F. Bradley, born in Siam in 1857, the son of the missionaries Dan Beach Bradley and Sarah Blachly Bradley. The book was first published in 1899 by The Ram’s Horn Company, Chicago, and is thought to be the first English-language novel set in Siam.

The first novel written in English
that was set in Thailand.

The title page says that Bradley is the president of Iowa College (now Grinnell College), so this edition of the book must have been published during his presidency, between 1902 and 1905, though there are no dates within, only that it is copyright 1899, to the publisher, Fred’k L. Chapman.

Most unusual

Walt Disney’s Siam (1958) is a bizarre book written to accompany Disney’s Oscar-winning 1954 film of the same title in its documentary series The World and Its Inhabitants. Its author, Pierre Boulle, was the same one who had written one of the best known novels set in Thailand, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952). Boulle is a strange choice, since his dark prose in that novel is the opposite of a Disney treatment.  Boulle went on to write Planet of the Apes (1963).

Walt Disney’s Siam is written as a strange, fantasy-style guided tour, translated from Boulle’s French. It reveals itself to be also an anti-communist tract (the Cold War was at its height at this time). The Chinese in Thailand are presented as living in “smelly hovels” in “dirty and narrow” alleys where they run “miserable shops” (Boulle 1958:48). In comparison, the Siamese are presented as a simple yet happy people (close to the European stereotype of the noble savage), whose educated class speaks Western languages and wears European clothes.

I find this to be quite a sinister book, despite (or perhaps because of) its Disney logo that conjures associations with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. My copy appears to have been a library book, and inscriptions in the front say “Bangkok 1964” and “Presented by Mr. and Mrs. R. Davey, October, 1981”.

The elephant in the room

Yes, it’s Anna Leonowens, the school teacher who was employed to teach some of the royal children and wives of King Mongkut in the 1860s, and whose story was made famous in the romanticised musical, The King and I.

Leonowens has been vilified for telling lies about herself and for sensationalising aspects of her time in Thailand and criticising the King. I don’t want to elaborate on that here, as I have written about Leonowens extensively in Imagining Siam and in an upcoming article in the Journal of Oriental Studies Australia.

I do have multiple editions of her books, including The Romance of the Harem and The English Governess at the Siamese Court, though my budget doesn’t extend to purchasing a first or early edition.

I also have many books about Anna, including both editions of the most recent biography, Bombay Anna, by the US academic Susan Morgan. (Get the second edition published by Silkworm Books, which has interesting updates on the first  edition, published by University of California Press.)

My most interesting vintage book in this section is actually more about Anna’s son: Louis and the King of Siam, by W. S. Bristowe (Chatto & Windus, 1976). This is the first book that alerted me to the fact that there was more to Anna’s real story than was portrayed in the largely fictional The King and I. I borrowed this book many times from the Siam Society in Bangkok in the early 1990s, then made do with a photocopy that a friend kindly made and bound for me. I was delighted when, in 2007, internet shopping allowed me to buy a copy of the first edition for myself.

Most beautiful

I have glorious picture books on Thai architecture, food, maps and travel. Three of my favourite in this category are:

Thai Graphic Design, compiled by Anake Nawigamune (River Books, 2000).

I bought this book while visiting my old home town of Auckland, New Zealand. My friend from school days, Yvette, was taking me on a tour of the best second-hand book shops there, and I saw this book on display in the window. I am interested in the design of logos, film branding, and so on, so this suited me perfectly and has a marvelous retro feel to it.

Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, by Philip Cornwel-Smith, photos by John Goss (River Books 2005, second edition 2008).

I worked with the author of this book, Phil, at Bangkok Metro magazine in the late 1990s, so I was curious to see his book. It didn’t disappoint. Apart from Phil’s amazing attention to detail in finding out about myriad aspects of Thai popular culture, the funky design and hundreds of photos are terrific. When I worked at Metro, one of the many mysteries of life in Thailand that we liked to discuss was why the cats all had short, twisted tails, and why it was so hard to find out why. I was amused to see Phil had researched this phenomenon, and in Very Thai he concludes that it is a genetic deformity, and, thankfully, not a result of mutilation.

The Grand Palace, by William Warren, photos by Manop Boonyavatana (The Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary, 1988).

I sourced this book online and was lucky to find a pristine copy. Warren and Manop were given extensive access to the Grand Palace in Bangkok, to many areas not open to the public, including the Inner Palace, or Nang Harm. The large-format book contains intriguing photographs inside the old residences of the many wives of King Chulalongkorn, who ruled from 1868-1910, and who was the last Thai king to keep what westerners call a “harem”.

Travel guides

It’s difficult to find old travel guides. This is because they are often updated regularly, and people throw away their old copies and buy the new one. Luckily, I kept my first Lonely Planet guide to Thailand (1990). It’s interesting to compare that older volume with the later guides. Discussion of guides formed a chapter in my book, Imagining Siam.

I was lucky enough to find a copy of a 1950 book, A New Guide to Bangkok, published in Bangkok by the Hatha Dhip Company and compiled by Kim Korwong and Jaivid Rangthong. It is a revised, illustrated edition of the original 1949 volume that was an almost-instant sell-out.

It’s great that some publishers in Thailand are reprinting classic old guides as well as travellers’ memoirs, and these are an important part of my collection, too. The Kingdom of Siam 1904, by A. Cecil Carter, for example, was reprinted by the Siam Society in 1988, while The 1904 Traveller’s Guide to Bangkok and Siam, by J. Antonio, was reprinted by White Lotus in 1997.

Antonio’s guide reminds us how difficult travel used to be in tropical countries such as Thailand:

The Occidentals and its German translation.

At a place called Puei Heng, some six days’ journey by bullock cart from Pak Preo through the jungle, there are numerous mines of stephanite…Travel in the interior to the foreigner is fraught with great difficulty and inconvenience…For instance, whenever business necessitates a visit to the interior, the system employed is to procure kwien [sic] (bullock carts) in which travellers deposit their luggage while they make the journey on ponies and, by easy stages, meet the caravan at certain spots where they may tie the pony to the back of the kwein in which they may accommodate themselves in case of rain” (Antonio 1997:57).

I could go on and on about my collection: amazing memoirs by intrepid explorers in centuries gone by; modern travel tales of east meets west; historical and contemporary novels released by publishers that recognise Thailand can be the setting for a million fabulous stories; a small but growing collection of writing in English by Thais; superbly researched scholarly books; histories and collections of historical photos.

Many of the older books I have reveal Western prejudices and assumptions of superiority that seem so wrong today. Yet I believe these books should continue to be read uncensored, because they are part of a literary and cultural history that should not be rewritten, but that can provide valuable lessons in our progress (or otherwise) toward non-racist thinking and a more inclusive, peaceful world.