The Pleasure Seekers’ Pauper Trail - William Dalrymple's "In Xanadu, A Quest"

Sometime in the 1600s, European travellers shifted from being explorers, pilgrims or merchants to travelling for pleasure. The 17th-century traveller Thomas Coryat was the first Englishman to visit Asia for pleasure, and he described his “greedinesse of seeing strange countries” as the “queen of all pleasures in the world.” Coryat is a gawky backpacker mistaken by Emperor Jahangir for a Western sadhu; assuming the visiting mendicant needed no more, the emperor handed the penniless pleasure seeker a measly 100 rupees to return home.

Pleasure seekers like Coryat might have helped establish trails of the popular kind. In the 1700s, wealthy Brits went on cross-Europe trips called the “Grand Tour.” In the era of carriages but no engines, they had little choice but to tread on choppy waters. Starting from the English Channel, they halted at French ports, crossed the Alps, fawned over art in Venice, Florence or Rome, and even paid the then newly excavated Pompeii sites a visit.

In the 1800s, with the introduction of the railways, came a new group of middle-class tourists, and the Grand Tour trail slowly fizzled out. Even as travelling for pleasure gained popularity, it was business as usual for the traders, pilgrims or settlers who inhabited foreign lands, hoping to make them feel more like home by prefixing ‘New’ to familiar names (Think New Amsterdam, New Haven). We also know about the 19th-century American trails where British families, seeking ‘greener’ pastures, followed maps, guidebooks and letters from previous settlers, finding luck at times and meeting their end at others. Now, we have people who travel for pleasure and people who follow well-documented trails. Put these two together, and you have travellers like the young William Dalrymple.

William Dalrymple’s first book, In Xanadu, A Quest, came out in 1986. He was all of 21 years old, a student of History at Cambridge. Dalrymple followed the trail of the Venetian Marco Polo, arguably the most famous of travellers, who made his way across the Middle East, Afghanistan and China to reach the court of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan in the 13th century. Polo journeyed for three and half years before meeting Khan at his summer palace in Shang-du, known as Xanadu in popular culture.

Portrait of Kubla Khan 

After winning a travel grant from his university, Dalrymple finds his travel companions in the feisty Laura and his delicate ex-girlfriend Louisa. Factors beyond his control, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for instance, makes him digress from Polo’s trail in several places, choosing the Karakoram Highway through Pakistan instead of the Silk Road directly connecting Afghanistan and China.

The book isn’t scholarly but is vastly entertaining. In his later preface to the book, Dalrymple is embarrassed by his opinionated younger self and gives us a fair warning. Thanks to the warning, and having read his later books, I decided not to take his uninhibited, coarse remarks too seriously. Take this one, for example.

“Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. Their men are almost all handsome with dark, supple skin and strong features: good bones, sharp eyes and tall, masculine bodies. But the women share their menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent. Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies. Here must lie the reason for the Turks’ easy drift out of heterosexuality.”

Marco Polo’s book, in Dalrymple’s words, is “surprisingly dull” as it’s more of a handbook for merchants, covering trade routes and warnings about robbers, while leaving out major sights and monuments like the Great Wall of China. But thankfully, William had other travellers to emulate. For instance, he talks of the two Byrons. One is Lord Byron, the wealthy genius poet who wrote in the 19th century, and the other is Robert Byron, the 20th-century travel writer who visited Persia and Afghanistan up to Peshawar—at the time part of India—and wrote a popular book called “The Road to Oxiana”, which Dalrymple ends up rereading while down with dysentery in Tabriz, Iran.

Polo’s statue in Hangzhou, China

There are quite a few discoveries that Dalrymple and his companion(s) make, of which some I’m convinced by and some I’m not. After a lot of struggle, they find carpet weavers of a particular Kilim tradition in Turkey and traditional silk loom weavers in Iran. I don’t consider them discoveries and think they were simply things their Western minds felt happy seeing in person. In fact, when he and Laura climb the ruins of the Sis Citadel in Turkey, Dalrymple is touched by the view and thinks they could be the first to have seen it in hundreds of years, and right on cue two goatherds arrive with their whole flock. The “discoveries” are akin to this experience.

As for the weavers, Dalrymple must have been content to debunk Henry Yule, the Victorian-era translator of Marco Polo’s “The Travels”, who in his footnote proclaimed that Anatolian carpet making had died out in the 19th century. But one discovery that really piqued my interest was regarding the Magi, the three wise men who visit Baby Jesus in the Bible. Many Bible scholars look at the Magi as symbolic characters rather than historical figures. But Polo, in his book, tells a story he heard in Saveh, Persia that gave an origin story to the Zoroastrians. 

The story goes like this: Baby Jesus gave a stone to the Magi, who returned with it and threw it into a well, prompting fire to descend from heaven. As we know, Zoroastrians were fire worshippers. Polo described the tombs of the three Magi as containing well-preserved bodies, but Dalrymple is unable to locate them even after trying all day. He initially thinks that the stone story is an attempt by the Zoroastrians to link themselves to the Abrahamic sects. But then mulling over Polo’s tale, he accepts the idea that the three Magi were likely to have been fire-worshipping priests from Persia. The use of the word of Persian origin, “Magi”, in the Bible, along with paintings of the Magi in medieval churches wearing Persian clothes, lends weight to the idea that people in the medieval period probably knew that the word Magi denoted priests from Persia, and not the astrologers or kings as popular fable holds.

Throughout the book, Dalrymple provides fascinating insights into several communities, some extinct, some alive.

The Ismai’ili Assassins of Syria. I didn’t know about them before reading the book. You might know them from “Assassin’s Creed”, but to a video-game Luddite like me, this was new. The assassins were politically motivated suicidal murderers of the 11th century in Persia and Syria who took down powerful men as varied as the Seljuk Muslims and the Crusade leaders.

Nestorian Christians in Kashgar. Their origins were in 5th-century Syria, and the typical Nestorian service was rather unorthodox, with the queen “tottering with drunkenness” alongside her priests, much to the chagrin of pious Christians of other factions. Unfortunately, they were wiped out in Eastern Turkey along with Armenian Christians during the 1915 genocide of Christian minorities. Kublai Khan seemed to have had a Nestorian guardian, and the Nestorian Christians in his court might have influenced him to consider taking up Christianity. Dalrymple also missed out on a lead to meet the few surviving Nestorian families in Kashgar, China, having thought none survived there.

Uighur Muslims in Sinkiang. We can see from Dalrymple’s accounts how vastly the Uighur Muslims differ from the majority Chinese, though his writing lean towards the funny rather than the sympathetic. Those doing their Namaz on the train are given no heed by the workers cleaning the carriages, who simply sweep and mop them back to their seats. In 2020, we read reports of the Uighurs being kept in concentration camps and shot at when trying to flee, and reading this account now seems quite dark.

Dalrymple is generous in doling out insights about the Crusades and the Ottoman empire, but when the book enters the Afghan realm, the prose turns laconic, dwelling on absurd and surreal experiences rather than on history. One of my favourite episodes involves Dalrymple’s search for “The Victory,” the mahogany toilet seat at the British Consulate in Chini Bagh, Kashgar, installed in 1913. He says the British Consul-General George Macartney used it, writer Peter Fleming used it and archaeologist Aurel Stein used it, so why not him? He fails to find it during his stay at the Bagh, trying his best to slyly creep past the caretakers and search every nook and cranny.

 

             And my absolute favourite must be the incident involving Dalrymple’s great-great-great-grandfather, James Pattle. Pattle was a senior official of the Bengal Civil Service and the greatest liar of India, a title born out of his tall claims such as rowing across the Atlantic in a hen coop. After his death, the ship carrying his body back to Britain catches fire and explodes when the sailors guess that the body has been preserved in a cask of rum and bore a hole into it to get at the booze. It is a story so horrific yet hilarious because Dalrymple frames it so.

The greatest liar of India

Laura, as soon as they step into Pakistan, removes her black chador, which she had dutifully clung to in Iran, and does a celebratory dance, much to the amusement of the Pakistani customs officials. Also, while attempting to climb Pir Sar near the River Indus, Dalrymple gets on a raft to cross over to the other side, but the men there think he wants a pleasure ride and bring him right back to the original spot! It was also interesting to know that Pir Sar was the last site Alexander conquered before making his unfortunate way back.

One fact that sounded funny but was not: a quote from Lord Byron is included in the book where he remarks on the difference between Turks and the West. “We prefer a girl and a bottle, they prefer a pipe and a pathic. They are sensible people.” I thought he was being sarcastic until I realised Byron was into young boys and often wrote them in and out of his will. Byron was truly scandalous.

I’m afraid my knowledge of the Mongols is quite limited. I heard the name Xanadu in the movie “Citizen Kane”. Xanadu is the massive mansion where Charles Kane lived, and until I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”, I had no idea that it was an actual ruined city. I was amused that the person who first reported Xanadu to the west, a British physician named Dr. S. W. Bushell was content to publish it as a geographical report and leave it at that.

Some random things from the book: I always love it when a book makes you do a little research based on the names listed. I’m jealous of the Brits, Scots and the Irish because their family histories are so well documented that at least one figure in each generation is bound to have a Wikipedia entry of their own.

Lord Byron had a daughter called Ada Lovelace, who is credited with publishing the first computer program. Peter Fleming, the travel writer mentioned in the book, is the brother of Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator. Recently, I met an Irish writer who travelled all the way to the Nepal border hoping to see the McMohan line. His great-great uncle, I think, was Sir Henry McMahon, after whom the line is named, and who drew the boundary between Tibet and British India in 1914.

Dalrymple at one point in the book says he had had enough of travelling like a pauper among the ghastly carriages and filthy, cramped-up spaces, and living off food that made him and his companions sick for most of the journey. He vowed never again to “travel on a heap of coal slag, never again to stay in a hotel that smelt like a morgue, and never again to use a squatter that belched up its contents over the user.” Words spoken too soon. Eight years later, he took on another arduous journey, tracing the steps of 6th-century monks John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius across the Eastern Byzantine world, capturing the experience in his book “From the Holy Mountain.”

While staying in Old Acre, Dalrymple gets out his maps and draws a black line between Jerusalem and Acre. He notes that this line was only about a quarter of an inch long, whereas Lahore was three feet away at the edge of the map, and Peking lay halfway across the room on an entirely different sheet. At the end of the book, having completed what felt like an impossible mission, he relates to the void Richard Burton felt after pulling off his feat of entering and leaving Mecca, a city forbidden to non-Muslims. 

“The exaltation of having penetrated and escaped the Holy City without damage was followed by languor and disappointment. I had time upon my mule for musing upon how melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are in shadows not substantial things.…’”

Trails are cut out for us; all we have to do is draw a line from where we live to our destination and moodily deliberate whether we have the tenacity and wherewithal to do what it takes, eventually finding where our glories lie, be it in shadows or in substantial things....

William Dalrymple. Photo Courtesy : Chandradeep Kumar