Ankara-born Chris Aslan spent seven years living in Khiva, an old Silk Road town in what is now Uzbekistan, where he founded a silk carpet workshop. Expelled in 2005 during a purge of foreign NGOs, he then spent three years in Khorog, a town on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. Told by the authorities that perhaps he’d better leave there as well, he had a spell in Kyrgyzstan. In each place, Aslan clearly intends to “help”, whether by attempting to provide livelihoods at a time of chronic unemployment in Uzbekistan, help yak herders commercialise their animals’ down (competitive with cashmere, it seems) or to establish a school for carving walnut wood.
Travel-writing
History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, historian Manan Ahmed Asif shows one evocative way to attempt urban history and narrative for South Asian cities.
In 2016, journalist Clare Hammond embarked on a project to study the railways of Myanmar—a transportation network that sprawls the country, rarely used and not shown on many maps, and often used at the pleasure of the country’s military.
When Mark O’Neill first came to Taiwan in 1981 to study Mandarin, the island was under martial law that had been in place for several decades. Since then, Taiwan has undergone momentous changes to become a modern and prosperous democracy while remaining one of the world’s geopolitical hotspots, a great deal of which O’Neill witnessed and covers in The Island.
Railways are major public infrastructural projects; one would therefore think it should therefore be easy to find out which rail lines exist and at what times trains are running. Not in Myanmar. Aside from the well-known main lines, Clare Hammond a myriad of smaller branch lines in remote parts of the country, with little information as to when the trains will run or if the lines are even operational.
Harry Franck died in 1962. This latest edition of his work consists of a few excerpts from his original Roving Through Southern China published in 1925. The original much larger book described two years of roving that took Franck as far as Yunnan, but these excerpts focus on the few months he and his family spent living in Canton in the winter of 1924. The excerpts are supplemented with some very useful footnotes from Paul French explaining some of the things Franck mentions that are no longer familiar to the modern reader.
For years, Andreas von Buddenbrock has been filling sketchbook after sketchbook with ink drawings that all aim to capture the places and people he comes across; from market stalls and their vendors to high rises and dilapidated buildings to lush, winding nature trails.
The Glass Islands: A Year in Lombok chronicles Australian Mark Heyward’s triumphs and struggles in building a house on the Indonesian island directly east of Bali. The idea behind the title is that the islands of Indonesia are opaque and don’t reveal their troubled histories apart from in the odd transparent, or glass-like, moment.
Just a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa heard about this community, she decided to travel to Guangzhou and China to learn more. She met traders, drug dealers, surgeons, visa over-stayers, former professional athletes, and many more trying to live, work and stay in China.
It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian Empire’s practice of exiling political prisoners to Siberia.
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