The Exile's Bazaar
  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact

Notes from a fascinating world.

The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.

Mauritius on a Shoestring

8/27/2018

 
Was I planning to come to Mauritius? I was not. I thought I’d go to Mauritania. And no, I didn’t simply confuse the two countries and buy the wrong ticket. But I had seen lovely photos that my friend Haley posted on Facebook a few weeks earlier. And then I realized that it’s “winter” in Mauritius right now, which means that it’s not high season and yet each day is perfect with a high of 25 degrees celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), dry, and sunny day. Coming from a muggy summer in Southeast Asia, that sounded to me like heaven.

Except I didn’t realize that each perfect day often starts with an early morning downpour. And so the other morning when I went outside at 6am to meet the driver, the heavy rain surprised me and convinced me that the tour was surely canceled. He looked at me funny when I asked: of course it wasn’t. He had a dozen French people in the van all going to the same place. He knew, I didn’t, that in an hour’s time there would not be a cloud in the sky.
Picture
The reasonably acceptable waters around Benitiers Island, Mauritius.

Read More

The Opium War: Imperial Twilight

8/20/2018

 
Picture
Captain Francis Austen, Royal Navy, commanding the HMS St. Albans, sailed to Canton at one point in the years leading up to the Opium War. The Chinese government obliquely sought his assistance against the pirate queen of the Pacific, but in the end the British sailed away again without helping. Francis, who would eventually rise to the rank of fleet admiral, had a little sister by the name of Jane. That’s right, Jane Austen. Her novel Persuasion, about a naval captain coming home after years at sea, comes to mind.

Jane Austen’s big brother is just one on a long roster of fascinating figures that populate the portrait that the historian Stephen Platt paints of the Opium War. His new book, Imperial Twilight, is terrific reading for anyone interested in this episode in history.

Platt’s central thesis is that the Opium War was a highly contingent event that didn’t need to happen at all and certainly didn’t need to happen in the way that it did. Had the former prostitute Shi Yang, known to history as Zheng Yi Sao or Cheng I Sau (“wife of elder brother Zheng”), not rise to become a pirate queen commanding 70,000 men, the British might not have been impressed with how weak Chinese naval defenses were. Had Captain Austen understood that it was official policy in Beijing not to seek foreign help in dealing with the pirates, so that the governor in Canton could not openly meet with him, he might not have returned home to report on what he thought was insolent treatment by the Chinese.


Read More

The Opium War, Part I

8/13/2018

 
PictureThe Jardine House with its distinctive circular windows in Hong Kong.
I have been very slowly catching up on Homeland. Slowly mostly because of the inconsistency of Netflix: in one country, one set of shows would be available, and in another it would be a different offering. So I would follow Carrie Mathison’s adventures for a third of a season and not be able to find out what happened next for weeks or months.

So I was five years late to the remarkably thinly veiled reference to the British bank HSBC in season 3 episode 2 of the series. “HLBC,” the fictional bank on the show caught laundering money for terrorists (as HSBC was charged with doing in real life), one character says, “has been trafficking in human misery since the Opium Wars.”

The Opium Wars! That’s a turn of phrase enough to prick up any pair of Chinese ears. The history of modern China, as told in textbooks both foreign and domestic, typically begins with the First Opium War or simply “the Opium War,” which ended in 1842 with the first of many “unequal treaties” that would plague China for over a hundred years to come — the so-called “Century of Humiliation.” (The Second Opium War or the Arrow War of 1856-60, though also significant, did not mark the beginning of a new era.)


Read More

Xinjiang

8/6/2018

 
Picture
At Kashgar's weekly livestock market.
As a would-be writer, I am often filled with self-loathing. It’s okay; it’s an occupational hazard. But today, a very specific failure weighs on me, the failure so far to keep a promise.

Three years ago, I traveled through Xinjiang, China’s massive northwestern “autonomous region” (of course it’s not actually autonomous) that is the historical homeland of the Uyghur minority, a Muslim Turkic population that prefers to call the area “East Turkestan.”

I traveled there to research the book I was trying to write. While there, in the old center of traditional Uyghur life, Kashgar, a kindly man whom I call “Yusup” in the manuscript asked me to make him a promise. “Tell our story,” he said. “Write about us. Let the outside world know what is happening in Xinjiang.”

And so far, as I have failed as yet to publish the book, I have failed to keep my promise.

Read More

    Author

    Writer, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home."
    Follow me on Twitter (@W_T_Han) and Instagram (@wthtravel).
    ​https://www.scmp.com/author/william-han

    同是天涯淪落人,
    ​相逢何必曾相識?

    Updates Mondays.

     
    Want to be notified of new posts?
    Get newsletter
    Powered By Constant Contact
     

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016

    Categories

    All
    Afghanistan
    Africa
    Amazon
    America
    Antarctica
    Anthropology
    Archaeology
    Architecture
    Argentina
    Armenia
    Art
    Astronomy
    Books
    Brazil
    Buddhism
    Caribbean
    Caribbeans
    Caucasus
    Central America
    Central Asia
    Chile
    China
    Christianity
    Cinema
    Colombia
    Costa Rica
    Criticism
    Cuba
    Culture
    Easter Island
    Economics
    Ecuador
    England
    Essay
    Ethiopia
    Etymology
    Europe
    Family
    Film
    France
    Goths
    Halloween
    Hinduism
    History
    Huns
    Iceland
    Immigration
    Inca
    Indonesia
    Iran
    Iraq
    Islam
    Japan
    Kenya
    Korea
    Law
    Linguistics
    Literature
    Maldives
    Martial-arts
    Mathematics
    Medicine
    Mexico
    Middle East
    Mongolia
    Mythology
    Nepal
    New Zealand
    Pacific-islands
    Panama
    Persia
    Peru
    Philosophy
    Politics
    Portraits & Encounters
    Portugal
    Psychology
    Race
    Refugees
    Religion
    Rome
    Russia
    Science
    Sherlock Holmes
    Singapore
    South America
    Spain
    Sri Lanka
    Superman
    Syria
    Taiwan
    Television
    Travel
    Travel Advice
    Ukraine
    United States
    USA
    Uzbekistan
    Vaccination
    Voltaire
    Women
    Writing
    Zoroastrianism

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact