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[Jordan Pt.6]《Remembrance Day》: From the trenches of France to the deserts of Arabia

11/11/2018

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'When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild "War to End Wars"
And another wild Armistice day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.'​
- Excerpt from 'Armistice Day' (1918) by Robert Graves
As part of school tradition we used to walk for fifty miles (80 km) in the English countryside - which would have taken a staggering 24 hours of almost non-stop walking to complete. It may be a hard walk, but it was hard to imagine if I was born eighty years earlier, I would have gone straight to war having completed that. The walk, originally created as a test of endurance for students about to enlist in WWI is today the rite of passage before we all leave school.
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Officers' Training Corp at the school's parade ground. From 1914 til the end of the war, all students in my school must attend 12 hours of military training to get ready for enlistment.
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During those years, almost everyone from my school ended up fighting in the Great War. One out of five former pupils who fought were killed; with 700 names of WWI war dead being carved into the stone walls of the school chapel (another 350 names were added after WW2), it is still England's biggest war memorial today. But the school didn't only give Britain soldiers during the war, it also her one of England's finest and best known war poets - Robert Graves.
Graves' vivid account of life in the trenches - detailed in his autobiography 'Goodbye to All That' (1929) - is still being regarded as some of the best accounts from a British soldier's perspective.

​He once wrote about how he had found a fallen comrade who had
'forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. He had been hit in 17 places.' Graves was himself so severely injured that at some point he was assumed dead.
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The war poet, Robert Graves, in officer uniform.

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'Fortitudine Vincimus': An Extraordinary Story of Antarctic Survival

18/10/2018

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‘Men wanted for hazardous journey:
Small wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness,
Constant danger, safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in event of success.’
- Hiring advertisement of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917)
​At a talk in Hong Kong, I came across the surviving images of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917). When the crew of HMS Endurance had to abandon ship, each men were allowed to take only two pounds of personal belongings. Any extra weight, the leader of the expedition Ernest Shackleton reckoned, would only diminish their chances of survival. The rest of more than four hundred photo plates were deliberately destroyed by Shackleton to prevent anyone from being tempted to take them along. They were about to embark on an impossible march to safety.
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Alexandra Shackleton, the granddaughter of the great explorer Ernest Shackleton at the RGS Lecture in Hong Kong.
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Images from the Imperial Trans-Antartic Expedition (1914-1917) on display at a lecture by the RGS of Hong Kong.
This expedition was to be the last of its kind in the ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’ - a time before machines would start to play an important role in expeditions. With the HMS Endurance stuck and later altogether crushed by pack ice, Shackleton had no doubt his expedition was going to fail. Yet just as the ship's name suggest - 'Fortitudine Vincimus' (Latin meaning 'By Endurance We Conquer', taken from Shackleton's own family motto) - Shackleton would pluck triumph from this disaster and turn it into one of the most extraordinary story of determination and survival.

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Limehouse: London's First Chinatown

12/8/2018

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'He had thought that the Lascars were a tribe or nation, like the Cherokee or Sioux:
He discovered now that they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese.'
-Excerpt from 'Sea of Poppies' (2008) by Amitav Ghosh
For generations, the sea has provided the livelihood of my family: since time immemorial my ancestors had intermarried with the Tanka people, the ‘boat people’ or ‘sea gypsies’ who have traditionally lived on junks and fished along the southern China. In my grandfather’s time, they had been for three generations marine surveyors and witnessed first-hand how Hong Kong turned into one of the busiest trading ports of the world. My uncle who later joined the navy would become the first of my family to settle in Britain.

​And it was the connection to the sea that brought the first Chinese to Britain - who were seamen serving onboard European ships. Since I have always have an interest in knowing more about my predecessors - the first Chinese migrants in Britain, I took a walk around the site of London’s first Chinatown.
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A 1930s photo of Chinese shops at London's first Chinatown in East London. (Getty Images)

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[Jordan - Pt. 5] Ma'an: The Birth of Modern Jordan

10/5/2018

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'The inhabitants cultivate figs, pomegranates and plums in large quantities but they do not sow their fields. They purchase their wheat from Karak, which their women grind: and at the passage of the Hadj they sell the flour as well as the fruits to the pilgrims.’
- Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (Swiss traveller and orientalist, 1784-1817)
​on Ma'an in his book 'Travels in Syria and Arabia Deserta' (1882)
A man came into my hotel room, uninvited, he sat down and turned on the TV. Not that I really mind anyway. I am in Ma'an, a deeply conservative but a closely knitted community situated in remote southern Jordan.
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In my 'hotel' room at night in Ma'an. (2018)
Ma’an has in recent years been known as a town of instability and unrest. With a high proportion of Bedouin tribes who might prefer tribal rules to national laws - Ma’anis were often being stereotyped as an uneducated people from the backwater of Jordan. This feeling of humiliation, coupled with economic distress and isolation from the national mainstream, Ma’an has for the past few decades become the launching pad of several nationwide riots.
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To add to the humiliation, in recent years Ma’an has attracted international media’s attention as the ‘hotbed of extremism’. The signs are not entirely visible today, the ISIS flag hoisted at the traffic circle was long gone – but the moment I arrived at the bus station, the now defaced graffiti and slogan by ISIS sympathisers were all rather visible with a little attention.
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And old ISIS Flag graffiti in Ma'an, now defaced. (2018)
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The portrait of the Saudi kings in a shop in Ma'an. The first Saudi king, Ibn Saud, had relied on a group of the Islamic fanatics to help him on his conquest and the founding of Saudi Arabia. (2018)
Ma’anis I met had denied that Ma’an has any ISIS sympathisers at all, but yet a few I met had shared their desire on a state ruled by Sharia, the strict Islamic law enforced in neighbouring Saudi Arabia – and territory under ISIS control.
It’s must be even more humiliating to the locals once you looked deeper into history. For centuries, Ma’an was a thriving oasis town and known as the 'Gateway of Arabia'. It was the major stop on the historical Syrian Hajj Road between Damascus to Mecca and Medina, Arabia's own Silk Road of pilgrimage and trade.

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[Jordan - Pt. 4] Adnan: Promised Land for the Forsaken People

30/4/2018

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“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she.
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”


- Excerpt from 'The New Colossus' (1883), by Emma Lazarus (American poet, 1849-1887)
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The view from Mount Nebo - where God supposedly showed Moses the Promised Land, but had forbid him to enter. (2018)
As a tourist I was often reminded by my guidebooks about the Christian holy sites in Jordan: there is the river where Jesus was baptised; or the hill where God showed Moses the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’. Jordan itself formed part of the Biblical Promised Land. But in modern times, Jordan seemed more like the place where they banished those forsaken by God. In our own time, we have heard about the plights of the Syrians and Iraqis, who make up for at least 30% of Jordan’s population today.
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One of the defining images of the Armenian Genocide (1914-1923), showing an Armenian mother next to a dead child in the fields of Aleppo, Syria. Many died on this 'death march' from the different parts of the Ottoman Empire to the Levant. (By the American Committee for Relief in the Near East)
By the turn of the 20th century it was the Promised Land of yet another people: the Armenians who faced a genocide went on their ‘death march’ to here, and perhaps the least remembered were the North Caucasians who were facing a genocide a thousand miles away. Back then the poor arable land in today’s southern Syria and northern Jordan was the least populated areas within the country, making it an ideal place for the Ottomans to implant the unwanted people who would help to develop this stretch of empire backwater.
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Sunset in Zarqa (2018)
I had taken the bus to Zarqa, 15 miles northeast of the capital Amman. The uninspiring industrial town is today slowly becoming part of the sprawling capital. There is not much that catches the eye here. The only local inhabitant who had ever made it to international spotlight was reportedly a quiet but uncompromising young man here. Later in his life, this high school dropout, and later petty criminal would form a militant group called Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. This would gradually evolve into the ISIS as we know it.
But I didn’t come here to follow the story of a world renowned terrorist. I have come to find a people who are now part of Jordan’s fascinating multi-ethnic population, a people whose homeland in the snowy mountains I have visited – but yet I would never thought about meeting again in the semi-desert towns of Jordan.

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[ Jordan - Pt. 3] Hajj Fort: A night in the desert

24/4/2018

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Our route (2018)
​Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, is the mandatory religious duty a Muslim must perform at least once in their lifetime. For centuries, the Attabukiyah, the 1,300 km long Syrian Hajj Road linking Damascus to Mecca was the main thoroughfare.

In the old days Hajj didn’t only have a religious implication; it also expanded the possibilities of science, commerce and politics in the Islamic world. Hajj pilgrims would have carried with them the exotic goods from home to pay their way, others bore the latest concepts and ideas - the essentials of the intellectual life of the Islamic World. This would in turn inspire Muslim advances in mathematics, optics, astronomy, navigation, transportation, geography, education, medicine, finance, culture and even politics.

The Attabukiyah was by and large Arabia’s own ‘Silk Road’.
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'Pilgrims going to Mecca' (1861) by French painter Léon Belly (1827-1877). It depicts the column of pilgrims' caravan on Hajj towards Mecca. Notice the different clothings, including a pilgrim in his white Chokha, the long cloak with front-breasted pockets for bullets, native to the Caucasian mountains.
In the 16th century, Arabia became part of the Ottoman Empire’s possession, and so did the organisation of Hajj. Under the leadership of the Emir al-Hajj, the ‘Commander of the Pilgrims’, caravan of Muslim pilgrims once stretched across miles of hostile desert, following the very road that Mohammed would have used in his early years as a merchant.

Back then, to have earned the honorific title ‘Haji’, meaning someone who has successfully completed their Hajj, was not an easy task. This stretch of desert was notorious for Bedouin raiding and was extremely dangerous. In response the Ottomans constructed a series of Hajj forts along the way, protecting the pilgrims and traders on their long journey to the Holy Cities.
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Arriving at the Hajj fort - visible in the distance.

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[Jordan - Pt. 2] The Sinai: History of Desert Travelling

15/4/2018

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'Would you like to travel to Arabia?' asked Professor Kastner.
'Why not,' replied Niebuhr, 'if someone defrayed the expense?'
- Between Carsten Niebuhr (18th century German explorer) - the sole survivor of the first scientific expedition to Arabia, and his professor at the Gottingen Academy.

​I only knew I wanted to get to Jordan.

After a brief search online, the only affordable way was to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai and travel overland to Jordan. There is a reason why the flight to the Sinai was so cheap: an attack at a Sufi mosque rocked the town of Arish in Sinai a week before I booked my flight. ​Although the North Sinai had long been known for its lawlessness, attack of such scale was rare. With more than 200 dead and 100 injured, it was the deadliest attack in Egyptian history.
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Waiting for my flight to Sharm el-Sheikh, Sinai.
Despite the rock bottom ticket prices there were few tourists on-board my flight. Until a few years ago Russian tourists were still flocking to the Sinai for an affordable package holiday away from the cold winter at home. All that changed in 2015. In October a bomb exploded on the Metrojet Flight 9268, killing all 217 mostly-Russian passengers on-board. Around me today were mostly Egyptian migrants looking for a cheap way to get home.

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My travel route in the Sinai (2018)
​Situated between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, the Sinai was where ancient Egyptians came to mine for copper and turquoise - much in contrast to its rather colourful modern history. In 1956, Britain and France invaded the Suez Canal at the Sinai in order to topple the Egyptian president and to halt his attempt at nationalising the canal. The subsequent failure had shown the world that Britain could no longer dictate their own interests in far-off places. It was here that Britain's role as a world superpower came to an end - but it wouldn't be the last time that Britain goes to war under a false pretence in Arabia. 
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A decade later, Israel would occupy the Sinai - a region three times the size of Israel itself. Wars would continue to haunt the peninsula for years to come, making it one of the deadliest frontiers in the world: in 1973, 1,200 tanks gathered here in what was to be one of the biggest tank battles in history. It was only in 1982 that fifteen years of Israeli occupation finally came to an end.

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[Jordan - Pt. 1] Prelude: Lawrence before and after Arabia

30/3/2018

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‘I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites [Arabs] the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.’
- Excerpt from ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) by T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) 
As an island nation, exploration is very much part of our history and tradition. Early modern explorations had little scientific value or otherwise. Men were often lured into the deserts and other inhospitable landscapes simply because of the obsessive - and often destructive urge to go beyond the boundaries of human experience.

​Others went in search for the fame and reputation they would earn by the time they have completed their almost certainly arduous journeys. London was at the heart of the planning of these expeditions and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in Kensington was the arch sponsor for plenty of them.
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Former building of the Royal Geographical Society at 1 Saville Row. The Palestine Association, founded in 1805 to promote the study of Palestine would be incorporated into the RGS in 1834. It would be another 30 years before it emerged as the new Palestine Exploration Fund.
'We are obviously only meant as red herrings [...] to give an archaeological colour to a political job.'
- Excerpt from a letter by T.E. Lawrence to his parents (1914)
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The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) today at Hinde Mews in London. Notable former members included Lord Kitchener (1850-1916), Charles Warren (1840-1927) and most famously T.E. Lawrence.
But the Englishman who would most famously be associated with the deserts of Arabia didn't start off at the grand lodge of the RGS. Just before the war in 1914, Thomas Edward Lawrence walked down this narrow backstreet in London to the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). The PEF, today shadowed by a century of modern buildings, was founded in 1865 and is 'the oldest organisation in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant'.

​At the request of the British Museum, the young archaeologist was to map out the biblical Exodus route in the wilderness of Zin. He knew best however, that the real mission behind was to map out the unknown area east of the Suez Canal in case a war was to break out between Britain and Ottoman Turkey. He was transforming from an archeologist into a spy.

My interest in T.E. Lawrence - 'Lawrence of Arabia' - began years earlier. The account of his desert exploits during WWI, in which he led Arab Bedouin tribes against the Ottoman army has fired the imagination of generations of desert travellers. Born in 1888, exactly a hundred years before I was born, the early life of Lawrence prior to his Arabia experience was something I feel I can relate to.

We both went to strict schools where young Englishmen were being brought up to run the country; and we were both indifferent to the hierarchy and conventional discipline designed to be indoctrinated into us. Whereas this would earn me a hard time at school, it would facilitate Lawrence in fitting into the almost classless Bedouin tribal society later. Coincidentally, we are both fascinated by medieval history, and especially in the military aspect of medieval warfare.
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A photo of Lawrence in his iconic Arab robes (1919)

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[Caucasus - Pt. 1] Prelude: Through the Gates of Alexander

5/8/2017

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'He turned his back on his native borders
And flew off to a far-away land,
Alongside the merry ghost of freedom.'
          - 'Captive of the Caucasus' (1822), by Alexander Pushkin
​When I first started toying with the idea of crossing the North Caucasus, my Georgian colleague was keen to remind me that it is a region of violence, inhabited by the gortsy (the Russian word for 'highlanders' - but usually with a pejorative sting of the uncivilised and barbaric mountain natives). Since then I have been reading the various travelogues written on the region throughout the centuries.

​One aspect was consistent in these accounts: travellers were always surprised to find how little have changed since the time of their predecessors. An 18th century traveller in the Caucasus once wrote that 'the mountains are much in the same state as they were in the time of Herodotus or Strabo'.
 Similarly, journalists covering the 1990s Chechen War were surprised by how easily they could make connections with the past.
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The world knows Alexandre Dumas for his 'Three Musketeers' or 'the Count of Monte Cristo'. Few remember his travelogue, 'Tales of the Caucasus' which was based on his 1858-9 journey across both north and south Caucasus.
In the 1740s the Georgian prince Vakhusht wrote in his description geographique that the civilised Georgians 'know nothing beyond reading and writing, sing and dancing' whereas 'those who live in the mountains have something of the character of wild animals.' Perhaps by fate - 300 years later my Georgian colleague was still suggesting the same reality. 'If there is a dispute there,' he would tell me, 'remember that they [North Caucasians] always prefer to draw blood first, and think later.' 

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His warning might have almost exactly the opposite effect on me as he had intended. I am starting to think if it was this timelessness of the North Caucasus that makes it so intriguing: it offers modern travellers the opportunity to relate to previous explorers and to experience the local way of life from the forgotten times. 

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[Caucasus Pt 2.] North Ossetia: Russian Conquest of the Caucasus

28/11/2016

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'The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress: Marvelously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison.
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Only thoughtless men would attempt to escalade such a stronghold.
A wise commander would [...] advance by sap and mine, and so master the place.'
         - Alexi Velyaminov, 19th century Russian general
The end of the 18th century signalled the start of an era in which Russia and other European powers would race to conquer and colonise previously unknown territories. Coinciding with this was the collapse of the Nogais Horde, a regional power by the descendants of the Mongols which traditionally act as the buffer between the Russians in the north and the Caucasians in the south. Both events would serve as the catalysts behind which the two great people were destined to meet.
The Russians were hoping that they could pacify the Caucasians through the use of ruthless Cossack settlers along their border. The ‘Cossack Line’ was therefore established. It was a series of garrisoned settlements built along the frontier between Russia and the North Caucasus - a barrier between the empire and the unruly natives of the Caucasus.
'The gradual occupation by means of forts and Cossack settlement would, of itself, little by little, bring about the exhaustion of the mountaineers.'
- Alexei Velyaminov 
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A 1783 Russian map of the Caucasus showing a series of new Cossack settlement towns along the Empire-Caucasus border.
These garrisons would gradually evolve into the major cities of the North Caucasus today, and they all bear names that explain the intention of their founding: Neotstupny Stan (meaning 'No Retreat'), Burnaya (meaning 'Stormy'), and the most well-known of them all is perhaps Grozny (meaning 'menacing' or 'Terrible'), the capital of Chechnya today. Ossetia's capital Vladikavkaz, its name meaning 'the master of the Caucasus', was one of them too. 

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    About me

    I like to travel, and I like to find out about things so I have created this blog to share what I saw on my journeys.

    I am particularly fascinated by the people, geopolitics and the history and culture of the the Middle East, post-Soviet states, breakaway regions and all those places along the old Silk Road, of which many I have been to throughout the years.


    In 2009 I was living in Sierra Leone in west Africa, and between 2015 to 2016 I was working in Georgia where I was stationed in the capital Tbilisi and at Zugdidi, the border town between Georgia proper and the rebel controlled Abkhazia.

    When I am not travelling, by default I am reading about other places and finding out what lies beneath our feet in the subterranean world.


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