A memory in the mist of time, I woke up at dawn and stepped out into a new life. I emerged into the Chinese sunrise. I was in the water kingdom, the city of Yangshuo in Guanxi province, the scene of countless watercolour paintings by Chinese artists who looked out upon the River Li, with the mountainous karst rock formations rising up high out of the blue into a soft, golden mist. All was silence here at dawn, the city asleep, and only a solitary street sweeper stood as a silhouette against the line of purplish-tinted buildings, where my mind was lost among the light of houses on the glowing horizon.
Silent waters, flowing east. The misty blue expanse was waiting for me. Vapours in the sunbeams, the diffusion of the mist into the sunlight gently beginning to emerge, a glimpse of its power shimmering behind the line of mountains, beckoning.
I walked on, alone into the lost horizon. I found the river and following it east, emerged onto a riverside path, where there was no-one at the gate. I pushed aside the door, looked above and started to climb. The Buddhist pagoda high above was my goal, a vantage point over the blue, mountainous river, the Tao of a new life, the way of the dawn mist.
Here at the top, I stood high above the world, the pagoda to my left, the green leaves of the trees to my right framing the scene, forming a permanent imprint in me. I stood at the edge and looked down at the world below. The lightness of the blue was the lightness in my mind. The river stretched out below all around, the mountainous karst rising up high on the horizon. I looked down at the misty blue, into the soft light of dawn. Suddenly, a boat appeared in the distance, a silhouette of an unknowable life, drifting gently into the horizon beyond.
Record of a floating life. This scene will live on forever.
As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote, “the longest journey begins with a single step”.
Most of us believe that we understand the world. We see things, but we do not really see them. But when we look deeper, we see just how deep this runs. And it is a vast mystery, the nature of reality. Open up to what is all around, and you will see how vast, how limitless is the beauty of the world. “To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities” wrote Virginia Woolf, and it is a truly humbling experience. Looking harder, looking deeper and finding that there are no answers, only vast and beautiful mysteries. Perhaps that is the greatest discovery. Every step counts - but you have to begin with a single step, as you journey into the vast unknown.
And just like that, the mystery disappeared. I met again with the other travellers I was with, as we journeyed through China together. Young people with dreams, most us now wanting to get into the heart of the night here in Yangshuo. The noise was deafening, the crowds were intense, pressed all around were thousands of Chinese holiday makers, racing and pushing in a scramble for nothing. We did not see a single western face in the crowd. The loud, ingratiating beat of Chinese techno music, thudding and repeating, with meaningless, vacuous lyrics discordant against the techno beat. It was like any other mass gathering, although it could not be described around a focal point, but a movement of souls into a vibrating robot-nightmare vibe tornado, reverberating insistently, and I was compelled to get away. Yes, excitement was here in the steamy night, but we did not know each other yet, my beautiful Chinese story and I, waiting to be written, waiting be alive.
In Yangshuo, photography was framed in scenes of life, when stopping to turn and look through a shop window. Tastefully designed stores with shining wood and elegant calligraphy, red lanterns glowing in the night, illuminating a stone dragon fountain, gushing water into the darkness. Spacious, free and harmonious, these stores were at odds with the thudding noise outside. Stepping into one of these shops one could see the lives of the family inside. Some penetrating glares were captured when I was caught invading the peaceful scene, forming direct contact between the subject and the viewer of the photograph, and highlighting the distance between them, as well as the challenge of understanding the subject’s thoughts and feelings, a precursor to building empathy.
Wasted years, in the long now, many of these shopkeepers were bored, staring at their mobile phones, drifting by with lethargic detachment, indifferent to the tourists outside. Business was slow, souvenirs for tourists at low value. Red lanterns were everywhere, but under these red lanterns framing scenes of the tale of Yangshuo, they showed peaceful lives drifting on the tide, gazing indifferently into the distance, wishing they were someone else, instead of engaging with the beauty all around. Or so I surmised, but the night was full of an outside tumult of noise tourists, in deep conflict with the quiet harmony of the lives inside.
My head buzzing, I returned to the hotel. I lay on the bed and floated away in every direction. I do not sleep, I simply dream while awake, and as I drift into the temporary disconnect of an untroubled mind, I am tugged back into the dawn and re-engage with reality, as the focus once again begins to concentrate on the world around.
The dreamer wakes - and once again sets off towards the River Li. There is an ancient Chinese proverb, which states: “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”. Every day is the opportunity to begin again - and live in the present moment. You will never remember the things that you did not do.
I headed west along the river. Guanxi province is one of the cradles of the oldest living civilisation in the world. Here, cormorant fishermen still go about their old traditions. Cormorant fishing was a method first used by the ancient Japanese, and was first described in the official history of the Sui Dynasty of China, “The Book of Sui”, written in 636AD. The fisherman ties a snare around the base of the cormorant’s throat, and as the cormorant dives underwater to catch the fish, the larger fish it catches cannot be swallowed and come sliding out as they are spat out slithering onto the boat, upon the emergence of the cormorant from the shallow depths.
At twilight, as darkness is about to fall, the lone fisherman sets out into the journey of the beginning of darkness, and lets go of his cormorant in the moonlight. In the gently bobbing boat, against the soft, slow undulations of the river, the cormorant dives into the water below, the only sound the quiet lapping of the waves.
A Chinese Oddysey, my journey along the river found me face to face with an old man, a cormorant fisherman from Guanxi, the weathered lines on his face telling a thousand stories of lives and loves gone by. I captured his portrait under a waterfall, holding his two cormorants on a horizontal bamboo rod on his shoulder. Darker, richer tones reflected back, his dark blue chángpáo (long robe) and conical bamboo hat, the dǒulì, with a dark red tip, the waterfall cascading down from above from the heart of the water kingdom.
At night on the Lijiang river, from the edge of the boat, I saw the silhouette of a mother holding the hand of her child, under the light of the moon. Together in the twilight, they watched the darkness fall, as day descended into night, and I remembered all the love and kindness of the world that could never disappear with the dying light of the day.
A new day arose, like a new life reborn. Here in Guanxi province, we picked up our bicycles and began a long passage through the misty karst.
Cycling in China, I felt free. Dark green fields stretched out for miles. Everywhere one looked, the mountains rose up in the distance, the soft glow of the haze enveloping the workers in the fields. These paddy fields, with their verdant emerald green grasses swept by, miles of untouched beauty in rural China’s heart.
We rolled along on our bicycles, gently pedalling into the lazy summer day. Through the dark green fields surrounding the banks of the river, we cycled on, and some hours later, we stopped. I dismounted from the bicycle and began to walk into the paddy field. The tall grass surrounded my body and I went in deep into the field, wading in through the grass.
Dreamlands. Emerald green around the ambience of water, silence and peace. Yet I was surprised by the lack of labourers in the fields, as most had migrated to the bigger cities of the developing industrial China.
As I continued to wade deep into the long grass, suddenly a scene arose before me. A figure of a female worker tilling the field arose in the distance. Wearing a traditional conical hat, she stood out against the karst in the landscape of these harvest fields. She embodied the ideals of my early photography - a lone silhouette against a large landscape backdrop, it accentuated the scale of the photograph, portrayed the integrated relationship of the human being and the environment in the modern industrial age, and was a philosophical statement of the human being as a very small part in the vast fabric of the natural world. We climbed back onto our bicycles and cycled on through the steamy moistness of the heavy summer air.
The new dawn arrived, as the dream of the red chamber opened up a new horizon, and soon we were on our way to Yunnan province, to an ancient world, south of the clouds.
Lijiang dreaming. This city is one of the most beautiful that I have ever seen in my life. Ancient, cobbled alleys, and historic side streets, winding around narrow canals of water gushing gently by. Red lanterns were all around. Calligraphy, light, detail.
Here, all of life is on display, as people live their lives in public. Every shop front is open to the passer-by, and peering inside one can immediately see a scene framed and a story told. Thousands of stories unfurl, and one day reveals endless possibilities. Life was everywhere, colour, excitement, intense concentrations of crowds, people of all varieties.
Energy, movement, and a massive concentration of diverging impulses. My excitement when I first arrived was impossible to control, in a fit of manic energy, I walked for hours on end, peering into every nook and cranny, talking to strangers, photographing the heart of the world. I was on red alert for the endless possibilities to be experienced. Focused on the detail, I rode on the lightning of pure wanderlust.
My photography moved in a different direction, away from the beautiful landscapes of rural China but now focused on people and their stories, directly engaging with the subject. I developed darker, richer tones, with an increase in the saturation of colour, an increased contrast and a lower level of exposure. Under these red lanterns, I framed each scene within a natural frame, such as ornately decorated windows and doorways forming a structure around the character living out their story within.
City of a thousand stories, each one waiting to unfurl into the limitless horizons of the future. But I considered that we are all the same within, and I imagined that the life of one character might become the life of another in a different period of time. I imagined all ofthese different lives, together as one story, the Tale of Lijiang.
Once upon a time in China, a boy with one arm stood in an alley with rows of red Chinese lanterns hanging high above him, like the weight of expectation for the future of Chinese youth. In these back alleys of Lijiang, he played with a little girl. He did not know then that he was in love. They had known each other forever, since they were children, running screaming with joy down the steep hills of the city streets.
Nearby was the family home, where the boy’s father, a butcher, taught the boy shūfǎ, the art of calligraphy, hoping that one day the boy would give beauty to the words that he wrote. In later years, they were married, the boy and the girl. A walk to remember, together they would walk through the streets of Lijiang, under the same umbrella in the pouring rain.
The little girl smiled in her early portrait, the light inside. But as she grew older, she would sit outside her family’s shop in a back alley on the other side of the city. She sat with her chin in her hand, gazing dreamily into the distance, and she imagined a world.
She did not feel for the boy. She could not explain why, because it was something that was simply an instinct. It did not matter whether the boy would actually be a good father. She was in love with another man. The reason, which she could not explain, was that her instinct told her that the new man’s face was attractive to her. She went by his looks, and nothing else. When she tried to look beneath the surface, she could not see the boy.
First love cuts the deepest. The boy was distraught, the knife in his heart causing an unbearable pain. He could not understand the injustice of the whims of the woman he loved. She was fickle, and did not care, treating so lightly something that to him was the most important thing that he had ever experienced.
The new man was a fool, and obviously did not care about the girl. He made jokes about her love of t’ai-chi and took no interest in her life. He was a soldier, and then worked for the government, driving rickshaws to the nearest hospital and helping those wounded in war. At night he played mahjong with his old soldier friends and came home drunk.
One night, the girl ran away, in a journey to the west. She sat on the railway train with her new lover, where he would take up a post in Xinjiang province, a vast territory in the west, settled by Uighur Muslims, Turkmen, Mongols, Buddhists and Han Chinese.
There the girl lived with her new husband, but again she grew bored, wanting a new man, once she had realised the disappointment that her new lover had brought. She would gossip with her new friends in Xinjiang about which man in the town was the best looking. They cared about nothing else.
As the girl grew older and her beauty faded along with her youth, she never understood what that moment had meant, their walk together in the summer rain. She did not understand what she had missed, and what she could have had. That love is the main thing that they could achieve in the brief glow of life’s candle in the dark, before it flickered out.
But the boy never forgot the girl, and the butterflies in his gut when he saw her face, an imprint of the beauty that she gave him, that no-one could take away. There was nothing in this life that was more painful than love.
It was still not too late for the girl, to change her mind and to come back to the boy, now a man, who still loved her. But to do this, she needed to tell him one thing that is not normally done socially. She needed to approach him directly and tell him how she really feels, or he would be gone forever.
But the girl did nothing. She expected new men to approach her and tell her that they loved her, but they never did. Her new husband died in a drunken brawl at a banquet in Urumchi. The girl grew into an old woman, and died alone.
The boy, now a man, became a famous writer. He wrote about the girl and the beauty that she gave him. He recalled how he would have walked to Xanadu, just to find her, if only he had known where she was.
He remembered that he would tell her how much he loved her, but she surmised that he was too keen and turned away. But he was too keen, because he genuinely loved her, and would have done anything for her, or for the child they may have had. But he could not show this to the girl. She was so beautiful that at first he could not even speak to her. Instead he ignored her, and locked up the love in his heart behind a wall of silence.
At times the boy felt that he had lost all self-respect. But he felt that his quiet dignity had begun to return and that he had grown strong. He travelled around the Chinese kingdom, and he began to write. In Hangzhou, as he stood on the bridge over the West Lake, he painted a scene of first love. Alone on the bridge as night falls is a boy and a girl. The boy loves the girl and is walking towards her. But the girl is looking away.
The boy had now grown handsome in his older years. Women approached him all the time. But he simply ignored them. He had to ignore them, because it hurt. He wanted a deep love, and in the face of the pain that he might once again feel, he had to preserve his dignity and walk with his head held high.
His disdain towards all the women that wanted his hand made him even more attractive to them. But he did not know how he could talk to them and when he wanted to talk to a woman he liked, there was always something in the way. He was too shy to approach them, but they could not see it. If only one of these girls had been more direct, and simply told him how she feels - it would have melted his frozen exterior and he would have been forever lost. But they did not. They played their games, but none of the signals they gave meant anything to him any more.
He could not stop thinking about the first girl that he had loved, and how he blamed himself for what he did not say. One day, in the family chamber of his home while looking after his ill mother, he wrote her a long letter:
“I thought of you again. About how you just slipped through my fingers. If only you knew how I feel. The way I love you. It is something you’ll never understand. You do not know how beautiful you are. You do not know what power you have. How could you ever be afraid of me? I would give you everything I have, everything I have ever had and everything I will ever have. It hurts that those in your life do not care about you. You love me, you love me not. But it hurts that you do not love yourself. Do not assume things about me that you do not know. Look at me. I am here.”
The boy went about his life. He never married. He lived out his best years alone, stung by the memories of his lost girl.
As time passes by, the young boy of Lijiang would turn into an old man, leaning against the wall of the same alley, under the same lanterns as he did when he was a boy. Contemplating the ashes of time, and understanding that here in the heart of the world, he was lucky to be alive, having survived against all the odds. The sorrows of the forbidden city were the sorrows of history, and he engaged with the reality of the new Chinese future.
In the Lijiang Story, there was to be no new chapter. He concluded his book with the words - “Give me beauty... or give me death!”
A prisoner of his own ideals, he died in the city of glass, alone in Lijiang.
I emerged from the reverie of the floating world. Was I once here? My eyelids were like anchors, and night had fallen outside. The Tao of another life. Did I even know what was real? Where was my love, the ghost in the clockwork of my memory?
I started to walk into the night.
As I walked, the streets of Lijiang were illuminated in the pitch black by glowing Chinese lanterns. Hours in the night, walking alone. I turned around and retraced my steps. I was lost in time.
The streets took me around in a maze, like a Chinese puzzle. I did not know where I was going in the dark. The moon touches your shoulder, and I turn around to look.
There on the side of the pitch-black street, is a scene of a beautiful Chinese lady, re-arranging flowers in her shop. There is no-one around, and I am the only person witnessing the scene. Like a painting by Caravaggio, the chiaroscuro of the glowing ember light illuminates her face as she lifts up her arm to re-arrange the flowers. The golden glow of the light comes out of the black frame. Truly beautiful scenes like this are rarely seen apart from in dreams. Le rêve de la nuit, the dream of the night.
City of lanterns, there I walked for hours in the night, and nowhere-light guided me by the glow of street lamps back to my room.
Nightwish in my mind, I re-awoke by the time the dawn had brought the first rays of the sun.
After the last few days of rain, once again it was a return to the traveller’s meeting point in the hostel lobby, people sharing stories of their time in Lijiang. A brighter summer day beckoned. Here in Yunnan province, the government had prohibited all travel to the Tiger Leaping Gorge, where we were to spend two days hiking along the tallest precipice of the wild cascade of the Yangtze river below. Instead, we set out to explore the mountains on the outskirts of Lijiang.
We got back on our bikes and continued to cycle. Our destination was to be at the foot of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Here in the heart of Yunnan province, we arrived at Baisha village. Here, one could observe a slower pace of life. The area around Lijiang is inhabited by the Naxi people. The Naxi people, with their own culture, way of dress and completely different Sino-Tibetan language from the Han Chinese majorities, live a peaceful way of life and greet visitors with warmth, friendliness and an amiable reception.
Among the mountains of Yunnan province, I visited the Baisha Embroidery School of the Mu family. On display were artworks of the most exquisite skill and harmonious beauty. Master artists worked here, with complete dedication to their craft. It takes a master artist years to weave the artwork, and here I purchased a beautiful design of red flowers on a white background with Chinese calligraphy, which is now in my home. The primary purpose of the embroidery school is to develop skills among the local population and to give the locals a source of income, and I would thoroughly recommend and support their cause against the tide of vacuous capitalism sweeping the large cities of China into a uniformity where the hopes, dreams and hearts of master artists are sometimes swept aside. Making a living as an artist is the ultimate challenge for those who support themselves with their ideals, involving the most rigorous self-sacrifice, in order to be able to express the dream within.
Much of the slow pace of life in Baisha village centred on the sale of bric-a-brac trinkets for tourists, but unlike Lijiang, this was a quiet place. The dying world of the indigenous Naxi people was captured in my photograph of an elderly lady and her clothing shop, entitled Culture for Sale.
It is important to the many varieties of ethnically different peoples in China to preserve the ideals of their culture, such as the Buddhists of Tibet. In a frequently tumultuous world, it is a joyful liberation to focus on the nature of reality and directly engage with what is seen, what is touched, what is heard, and what is perceived by the senses. In so doing I came across a man walking under the cluster of red lanterns hanging above him.
Listen to the Lotus Flower. These words were written on the red lanterns and were written into the scene. It is ironic that western readers would be unable to read their message. I write about Buddhism in a later chapter, while travelling in Cambodia, but it was a poignant reminder of the liberating joy of travel itself as a form of mindful engagement with the reality of the world.
Here in Baisha village, I created one of my most successful portraits of the series, Childhood in Yunnan. The octagonal shape of his yellow umbrella creates a natural frame for the whole scene, as the boy is looking directly at the viewer.
The next day, we climbed the mountain. In the dark green ferny emerald of forest surrounding the misty peak, we began the sweaty climb to the top. It was cold here, having rained, and the sprightly guide picked wild mushrooms which he twirled around in his fingers with a mischievous smile. At least ten years older than myself, he was able to smoke a cheroot and then scurry up the incline like an energetic mountain-goat.
At the top of the ascent, we came to a lake, clear water still in the cool, thin air. Against the line of the mountains on the horizon, a silhouette stood etched upon the scene. A black horse, grazing by the lake in front of the mountains beyond, the sunlight shimmering, reflecting off his mane. The awe of beautiful things witnessed in the remotest places.
We returned to Lijiang. Leaving behind the ancient city, I wandered east. This was the most beautiful area of all, red lanterns swaying in quiet back alleys, idyllic street scenes of rural life. A bicycle is left leaning on the side against the wall, as I stand alone gazing at the sublime tint of the colours beyond.
That day I walked for eight hours, searching for something that I could not define, but I knew awaited, an unexpected event. Suddenly I stopped. And there and then I came across a boy playing with the sweetest little puppy. The love between the boy and his puppy was abundant with gentle tenderness, and it melted my heart. I asked the father if I could take the portrait of the sweetest scene I had seen in Lijiang, and the compassion shone through, overflowing with joyful warmth.
The next day was to follow the waterway canal to its source. We walked north to the origin of the stream, under the mountains around Lijiang. Here at the bottom was a beautiful green lake in an area called Moon Hill. A serene pagoda rose up out of the water and a picturesque stone bridge ran across the lake.
While exploring the area, the skies opened up with a torrent of rain, and we ducked into a Buddhist temple for shelter, while the rain fell down hard on the world. Here I got to know the other travellers better, and we climbed the mountain together, each step a vigorous challenge of panting self-discipline, until barely breathing at the top, I was able to look down like a flying bird over the city, stretching momentously into the distance. Lijiang offered so much, as I emerged from beneath the shadow of the soul mountain, and returned to the ancient city.
In the centre of Lijiang I stood and closed my eyes. I remembered waking from my dream of the red chamber and how I had set out on the China road. Journey to the west, the distance had stretched for almost 1,000 miles, just as Lo Tzu had written. I continued to walk along the path.
At the end of the road, I came to a quiet place. I stood in front of a canal, behind unoccupied houses. Red lanterns were hanging above, swaying gently from side to side in the wind, reflected on the silent water. An ancient Chinese proverb once said, “starlight shines far”. Many things in this universe are interrelated, no matter from how far away they have travelled. And I understood that the same elements in this water, in this light, in these red lanterns, in this gentle wind are the same elements as the elements in me. Energy travels far, and is in all things. I was here, and I felt a profound inner peace.
That same day I had stepped into a quiet courtyard in Lijiang. The bamboo wood panels revealed a spacious room with a green pool inside it, with only two pots of flowers carefully arranged in harmony in this tranquil scene. Undisturbed, I sat down in the halcyon days of a Chinese summer. Perhaps this is what death was like, as religious ideas throughout history in the west imagined. But this scene was in life itself, as I came to regenerate by this green pool with an awareness of the beauty of reality.
But in every ending is a new beginning. Once more we set off along the road.
These were hard days, the grind of the road to Dali and beyond, the relentless drudgery, the muddy river of loneliness. Some of us fell ill, unable to cope with the food, pale ghosts of themselves. People were hard to talk to, and did not truly open up. To travel through China, sometimes one had to have a heart of steel.
Other travellers with me might report of a different person. They might describe an over-confident individual, talking too much, too much energy and too little concern for the dullness of those I was with, lecturing others about America and its system of free-market capitalism, individualistic competition and cultural poverty, in a strident and vocal way. The ironies of President Trump as a reflection of the flaws of the system of democracy, where individual freedoms give people just as much right to oppress others as they do to protect people from being oppressed. This got me into conflict with an American traveller, who claimed not that he disagreed with this, but that “I thought I knew everything”.
Such a person would never have read this book, where in the last chapter I write about science - neuropsychology and consciousness, the selfish gene and evolution, quantum physics, the humility and insufficiency of human knowledge in the uncertainty of quantum science and the questions posed by quantum mechanics, the philosophy of value and finally the course of future human history and co-operation. The implicit message of the last chapter is that it is important to understand the systems that are un-cooperative in an increasingly communal and globalised world, in order to be able to change them, which is the goal of most who wish to live a peaceful, happy life, though by no means is ethics something that “should” or “ought” to be done. A highly developed ethical system of a homogenised interrelation of people is something that is just happening. For the scientific justification, it is set out in the last chapter of this book.
Still, one thing that invokes my social provocation of others is when they make assumptions about me, based on their own fears or prejudices. When thinking about this American, who on the whole appeared very friendly and peaceful in his approach to travel, it seemed to me that he was happy to simply brush confrontational issues under the carpet, and was afraid of my over-enthusiastic and talkative nature in social company, which he seemed to feel had somehow infringed his personal space or enjoyment of the scene of Lijiang. We parted ways. But this does not matter to me any more - that is why I am unafraid to talk to anyone and say anything that I believe is true, and I am always ready to change my mind, given the evidence.
“Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see”.
Lines written by the Persian poet Rumi, which speak to me in every chapter of this book, and here I tried to see myself through the minds of others who I usually meet, who to me appear to be unable to look beneath the surface.
But no one can look inside the mind of another and see through their eyes, or walk a mile in their shoes. So we will simply have to accept the distance between us all, and walk together side by side.
So who am I? I am all that I have seen, felt and experienced and all of the potentially infinite things that I could imagine myself to become.
As William Blake once wrote, “everything possible to be believed is an image of truth”, and the imagination is a multitude of worlds in itself. Emerging out of reality, it is a vast and beautiful expanse of limitless possibility, and the door is open to all who walk through the doors of perception and go against the grain of the social norms.
Often I have been critical of sedentary lifestyles of the western world, not because I think that they should be different, but because they are not adapted to the ideals of the systems from which they arise. They are illogical and self-serving, and in evolutionary terms non-cooperation is not adaptive. America preaches freedom, and yet there is a large amount of interference with the freedom of everyday people’s lives, through people’s time being taken away in subservience to others for commercial prerogatives, through the pressure to compete in an environment that is a world away from the peaceful living found in Asia in the east.
But these are general rules, and there are always exceptions, for there are many similarities between the eastern world and the western world, no matter if the eastern world seems to be co-operative, socially focussed and adaptive, giving citizens more time to pursue cultural, scientific and artistic capacities and the western world seems to be selfish, individualistic and manipulative for financial self-enrichment and therefore gives citizens less time to do so.
An ancient Chinese proverb states: “An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but an inch of gold may not buy an inch of time”. The wisdom of the east is as old as the hills.
More than anything, the differences are due to the systems and institutions of these two contrasting cultures, and are less to do with the nature and quality of ordinary people living in the west and in the east. People must fight to create freedom, to free their time, which will allow them to fulfil their capacity in any field they choose, and freedom is the ultimate gift. This is the subject of the book “Creating Freedom: Power, Control and the Fight for our Future” by Raul Martinez, which highlights that the constraints of systems such as capitalism or organised warfare through nationhood fundamentally restrict the freedom of individuals in every way.
Notwithstanding this, my own observations are that in the western world, people tend to live their lives in private, indoor houses in suburbs hiding their lives and securing their property ownership from others due to their fears and self-motivations for more. And the observation is that in China, and elsewhere in Asia, people live their lives more in public, with doors and windows open, people intermingling more freely and easily, and giving the impression of politeness, tolerance and hospitality, more rarely found during my life and travel in the western world.
This is the Chinese philosophy, which stemmed from Confucianism, an often bureaucratic system, but one that practices social moderation, the organised structure of workers into a whole, with a concern for right behaviour and social cohesion. This can still be seen in all aspects of Chinese life, and China works.
China has often been the world’s fastest-developing economy in recent times and the power of the dragon will be limitless when it begins to breathe fire. In “When China Rules The World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order”, Martin Jacques argues that the Chinese economy will soon come to dominate trade in the entire world and shift focus away from the American led west. It is clear that this is often due to China’s communal approach to improving the lives of its citizens, having learned techniques from the west about business exchange and competition driving improvements in the standard of living, yet maintaining social cohesion through centrally administered government institutions such as schools and hospitals, to give its citizens happier, more balanced lives.
The Chinese approach to trade and culture is a pragmatic one, and the general insistence in countries such as Britain and America on upholding the “values” of democracy surprisingly often appears to be a dogmatic doctrine. Rarely are these values flexible or self-moderating, and in the west it is seen as important to respect the views of others, even when such views are deeply harmful to many. It is often met with cries about the dangers of censorship, yet it is the unconstrained system of individual freedoms itself that does not engender the social cohesion that encourages individuals to censor themselves, and moderate their behaviour to others by making a conscious decision to support political and social systems that limit their own power for the good of others in their community as a whole.
China’s system has been described as one-party state capitalism. It has clearly moved away from mere re-distribution of wealth and impositional prerogatives of agricultural production that blighted its history, such as the Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao. Unlike the protectionist policies of America, in the book “The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order”, Bruno Macaes shows that China is a highly co-operative international partner and is investing heavily in infrastructure that will once again link the trade of the ancient silk road and stimulate co-operation and exchange of goods and ideas between Europe and Asia, resulting in greater freedom and quality of life for ordinary citizens. One such project is the Belt and Road Initiative announced by Xi Jinping, which aims to establish rail and road links between China, Kazakhstan and ultimately with Europe, as well as the sea routes of trade, and the infrastructure is hoped through trade to link the whole world. One day we may be able to take a network of trains all the way from Beijing to Paris.
In “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World”, Peter Frankopan examines the course of history and sets out the brilliant argument that the Renaissance in Europe was driven chiefly by trade and co-operation along the silk road with the east, driven by the exchange of goods and ideas from Venice to Istanbul, all the way along the Silk Road to China. While medieval Europeans were fighting brutal, bloody and destructive wars over religion, civilisations such as the Arabs kept the learning of classical scholars alive, such as Plato and Aristotle, and the re-emergence of these ideals of civilisation were brought back through trade with the east. That is why the Renaissance allowed the western European world to flourish and dramatically improve the standard of living for its citizens.
What the western world did with that power is a shameful indictment of the very worst of a barbarous civilisation. Driven by greed, they wanted more. The British were the main instigators of the barbarous cruelty. The British sought to invade China and impose trade on it, one example of which is the Opium Wars. The British imported opium, an original form of heroin, and sold it en masse to addicted Chinese peasants, whose lives were ruined or taken by this drug abuse, which put money in the pockets of the country estate owners of Britain. When the Chinese government banned the use of opium, the British attacked China and killed many more innocent people in a bloodthirsty war, so that they could continue to sell drugs and abuse the Chinese public.
The most shameful thing is that the British have never come to terms with or acknowledged their barbarous and bloodthirsty past. And sadly, this is just one example of the havoc and destruction of cultures and civilisations that they have wreaked upon the eastern world, with their guns, germs and steel. The German schoolchildren are taught about the horrors of their Nazi past. It is a rare school where a British child can learn about the horrors of what his nation did to the world, let alone one day come to visit the world, that he is taught almost nothing about. Arguably as a general rule, the economic drives of Britain and America remain greedy, but this is a matter of scientific analysis that I explain further in the last chapter of the book, “The Science of Life”.
Voltaire once wrote that “with great power comes great responsibility”. It has been hard to find in the conquering western empires of history. Social moderation is practiced in all cultures, but is rarely practiced in the international geopolitical arena. It is much the same as national codes of communities that all prohibit murder, yet permit killing on the international stage on a mass scale during war. With China’s example as the future leader on the economic scale, as it has entered the geopolitical international arena as a major player on the world’s stage, it can demonstrate the social and structural limitation on the unchecked power of individualism found in its Confucian historical roots, the readiness of its citizens to do so in the wider interest, and the world can learn once more the benefits of social cohesion and the interest of humanity as a whole beyond the constraints of specific nationhood.
The priorities of material self-advancement of individuals as a way to improve the quality of ordinary citizens’ lives by western nations such as Britain and America may seem like primitive priorities when compared with the Chinese model, which shares the same values, but has structural and systematic provisions for social moderation, cohesion, the possibility of scientific and cultural advancement, limitations on the power of individuals in the political arena, and an understanding that when citizens already have financial comfort and material prosperity, that social order and harmony and the pleasurable benefits of exchange with others in the community is the added factor that gives an ordinary life extra value. It is no longer a question of re-distribution of wealth into equality, but a system where an exchange of goods and ideas can take place where individuals have due regard to the needs and values of others.
Scientists are now beginning to understand the genetic underpinnings of the differences between the neurology of those in the "west" and those in the "east", as clearly evidenced by pioneering Harvard professor Joseph Henrich in his seminal book "The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous". It shows that we can gain much from an understanding of the context-driven and lower-risk interpersonal behaviour of the eastern world's psychology, and implement its utility into our own systems of thought in order to complement the growth and understanding of our own social systems as a whole.
I snapped out of my intellectual reverie. My concern in life is not politics, it is the beauty of the world, it is the art, the culture, the sensation of all that is wonderful in this beautiful planet.
As I sat there on the journey, thinking about the world, I realised that we had almost arrived in Dali.
Dali is a whitewashed city in Yunnan province. It is home to the Bai people, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognised by the People’s Republic of China. Speaking their own language and preserving their own culture is important to the Bai, and everywhere one turns it is possible to see their preference for the colour white. The old city is everywhere white, but the whiteness is permeated with the dull, fading glow of grey. The architecture of Dali is a traditional Chinese style of angularly curved tiled roofs and bricks, plaster, or white-washed walls, starting from the Bai kingdom of Nanzhao in the 8th and 9th Centuries, then the Kingdom of Dali, before being conquered by the Yuan dynasty and eventually organised during the Ming Dynasty by the Hongwu Emperor.
Shadow journey, the dark imaginings of the fading city took me round these streets. It is said that Dali is quieter than Lijiang, with less of an influx of tourism, but this is misleading, as there appeared to be more tourists per square metre than almost anywhere I had seen. I did not like this place, its tumultuous noise, its uniform streets branching off in a familiar gridded pattern. Beautiful sights were a rare commodity here, though the buzzing noisy throng outside suggested the opposite was true. I was bound to fall ill here, with the air permeated by unknown viruses in the stifling humidity.
The next day, I set off toward Erhai Lake, having chosen to walk there on foot along the highway. The lake was a beautiful, expansive sight, but mainly inaccessible due to the industrial development of concrete along its shores. Yet I walked on for hours, and eventually came to a beautiful sight, at the edge of nowhere - two Chinese youngsters by the edge of the lake, looking out upon the landscape of mossy water and painting the scene. My photograph, Painters by the Lake, is a painterly photograph of painters painting reality, and as such poses a metaphysical question about how and by whom reality is interpreted - you as the viewer, the photographer, or the painters on the lake? Or perhaps, the interconnectedness of all three. By making my subject interpret the scene, as the photographer I completely remove myself from the equation. It is then an artwork on its own terms.
The time had passed, and struggling with a heavy cough, swimming head and streaming nose, I carried on through the journey to Sichuan. We arrived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. This was a huge city of the industrialised China, a sea of grey concrete. Chengdu was like some kind of dystopian nightmare, straight out of the pages of George Orwell’s “1984”. Massive concrete high-rise building blocks arose all around huge motorways circling in a cluster all around the city, but the high-rises were boxy and gray, and everywhere was concrete as the huge motorways dominated the city. I saw no greenery, only gray, forbidding concrete, rising up everywhere I looked.
The famous Sichuanese humidity was stifling and the heavy, pregnant air did not mix well with the fumes and pollution given off by the menacing cars inching along slowly in crowded traffic. Everywhere was a strange, sickly, gray colour that seemed to taint this urban dysfunction. It is not that the city was not clean, as it was often kept immaculately tidy, but the grey pollution had taken its toll. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Chengdu was dull.
I knew immediately that I had to get away, and this was not how I wanted to experience my life in the middle kingdom. The beauty seemed non-existent as I explored the ancient city district, another gridded design, a shopping area so crowded with pressing Sichuanese masses that it was sometimes impossible to move. I spent a couple of hours in a Starbucks, escaping with a hot chocolate that I had to argue with the woman at the counter to serve, since she had thrown away the order I had paid for and started to make the drinks for the Chinese who had pushed into the queue, wagging her finger, shouting at all the customers like a bawdy maternal aunt.
Pandas once lived in Sichuan, but have today been cruelly endangered. Yet Chengdu is home to the Research Base of Giant Panda breeding. I had always wanted to come face to face with a giant panda, as I pushed back the leaves of the bamboo forest and came upon a scene in lush, humid greenery to see a giant black and white panda in front of my own eyes. And now was my chance.
The panda sanctuary was truly chaotic. Other travellers report having travelled to countries with the densest concentrations of massive crowds pressing around them, India, Indonesia, Phillipines, but that it was nothing like this. It seemed as if a million people had come to this humid nature reserve, and one could not move. The Chinese are hysterical about the few pandas that remain after they have driven them to extinction, and now there were baby pandas born here in the sanctuary. When there is something rare and beautiful in this world, it comes at a high premium and fierce demand, as the aggressive crowds come flooding through the gates.
The air was humid in the bamboo jungle and loud megaphones blared with Chinese dialects, in a deafening noise. The heavy crowds pressed hard into my back, and several minutes later I could inch slowly along. Then stop. Muscling along through the crowd I was finally able to come face to face with my prize - a portrait of the giant panda, eating bamboo in the green foliage of the forest. He was a magnificent creature, black and white, round and fluffy, playfully sticking out his tongue at me. I loved him there and then, but I felt sorry for the pandas, at once deeply flattered by the millions that had come to see such a few, but their lives were invaded by millions of humans watching intrusively their every move. No wonder they could not breed.
Among the pressing crowds, along the narrow path, I was shunted along in one direction, with no possibility of escape back from where I had come. In front of the crowd was an indoor tunnel, yet it seemed impossibly narrow for these blaring masses to fit through. We entered the indoor tunnel, but it was hard to breathe and there was no escape. Chinese elbows dug into my back. Everywhere I turned, people screaming in Chinese dialects that I could not understand. I was at a stand-still and could not move, the heavy crowds weighing around me like gravity weighs heavy on the earth, in the confinement of a claustrophobic nightmare.
I did not want to die like this. An ignominious end, crushed to death in an indoor tunnel in Sichuan. Luckily for me I am taller and stronger than nearly any Chinese (and most Europeans). I held my ground, and held off anyone pushing hard, but being in that tunnel seemed like a claustrophobic eternity, and I did not feel secure. In the end, I emerged from the indoor tunnel into another pressing multitude of the crowd in a narrow walkway, throughout the most stifling heat and humidity, my body having sweated out all the water it could. An hour later, I escaped from the panda sanctuary, with a troubled mind.
In a science-fiction world, how would a human feel if their baby was raised in an artificial enclosure where millions of artificially intelligent robots came to observe their every move, controlled the human baby’s food and sexual intercourse, influenced the human baby to breed, the artificially-intelligent robots pressed in their millions to compute calculations and record observations of the human during the human’s every waking hour? To know that your human baby could never escape from the hell of the robotic crowds in order to be free? Is this in some way like the modern world, in the city of Chengdu?
That is why I was pleased to escape and to be back on the road, to continue the journey on. While drifting along on the bumpy motorway coach, I closed my eyes and re-lived a beautiful life.
Kaleidoscoping into forgotten dreams. Hangzhou in the twilight.
Here in Hangzhou, the blue pagoda at twilight shone out from the twinkling lights, flickering in the enveloping darkness.
To this day, having travelled to over 80 countries, Hangzhou is the most beautiful city I have ever seen. It is the capital of Zhejiang province, an area rarely visited by foreigners. It is enormous, vast in scale and incredibly beautiful. The city is based around the West Lake. The stillness of the peaceful water, abundant with its radiant beauty, a watercolour painting in real life. It is an enormous area to explore, which I really cannot emphasise enough, and it took me around five hours simply to walk around the outskirts of the lake itself, a journey that I performed several times as the sunlight fell.
The sunset over the West Lake was one of the most beautiful scenes that I have ever experienced - the softness of the light that fell on the still waters of West Lake in the setting sun.
I chose the resulting landscape as one of the photographs for exhibition in France. In another photograph from the lake, red flowers dominate the river scene, with a boatman sailing past in the background. Where the wild flowers grew, I left my story behind.
One morning I came across a silhouette by the lake. It was still night. I had not slept that night, woke up before dawn and walked down the causeway across the lake, and came across a lone figure etched onto the scene, looking out from the willows against the lavender haze. The sun a glowing pink dot, a promise in the distance against the black imprint of the leaves all around.
Here I watched the dawn arise, the golden glow of the sun’s rays slowly beginning to illuminate the water’s stillness.
The wind in the reeds. The flowers floating serenely on the silent waters of the lake. A drift-shot of a boatman floating by. Jamais-vu, beauty that was never seen.
In Against the Grain, on the West Lake, on a bridge over the silent water, once again I saw the approaching of night. The photograph that arose is deeply important to me. On the left is a march of a mass of people, and on the right, a solitary boy is holding out his hand against the oncoming crowd, and defiantly standing up for what he believes in. Both personally and in the case of what is seen as progress, uniformity and the relentless drudgery of the masses marching towards you in the wrong direction, it takes bravery to stand up against the crowd. It takes being a child, seeing for the first time the beauty of the world.
Longjing Tea Village, in the mountains around Hangzhou, formed one of the most beautiful memories of all my travels. I hiked all the way out here on foot. As I speak no Cantonese whatsoever, no taxi driver wanted to pick me up. This was one of my crazy ideas, to walk there on foot, but I reached my destination in the end, somehow, as the map proved less than helpful many hours later. I climbed up to this mountain valley. The view was breath-taking - green tea leaves surrounding everywhere you looked. Tea pickers going about their traditional work that they have carried out for generations in the green hills all around.
At the end of the day as twilight was approaching, I came across a Chinese farmer selling home-grown strawberries. I bought some from him and ate them as I walked back out of the Dragon Well tea plantation. I can honestly say that they were the sweetest, most succulent strawberries I have ever tasted and that memory stays with me forever.
The Painted Veil was the name of my landscape photograph of the sunset. It was named after the novel by W. Somerset Maugham set in the heart of China, and was also a beautiful film that when I was younger, made me cry. Ederlezi was named after a beautiful song that I first heard in Bosnia when I was a 6 year old boy. It is still important to me, and I took it with me into the dawn of a Chinese sunrise.
And above Lingying temple, high up in the hills I hiked alone way off the beaten track. I was a long, long way from home. These dreamlands of memory emerged from the haze of nostalgia.
Everwake, I could not travel to the future in dreams alone. Awareness also had to have rest. I knew the change that was coming. I had to live in the moment.
I snapped back to awareness with the sudden brake of the coach. Another roadblock on the journey of life. But I was ready for a new experience, the journey to Shaanxi province, to the ancient city of Xi’an.
Xi’an is the historic centre of the world. It was once the terminus of the Silk Road. The silk, horses, spices and other goods would flow from here, caravanserai travelling west on camels past the Taklamakan desert to the furthest outpoint of the empire, Kashgar. Many routes diverged west from Xi’an along the Gansu corridor, through Turfan, known for its succulent grapes, the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang and onto Urumchi, the road to the north through Kazakhstan and then across Europe, as far as Hungary. Travellers travelled west through the Sogdian lands of present-day Uzbekistan, trading fine specimens of horses from the Fergana valley, seeking protection from invaders such as the Mongol hordes. Buddhist pilgrims also travelled south, passing places such as Khotan, and emerged into the mountains of Kashmir, trading silk, spices and the knowledge of a peaceful life on the road at one with reality and the harsh desert climate of the world all around.
Xi’an was a wonderful city to explore, and I strolled through the grubby alleys of the Muslim quarter, the men in skullcaps and beards conducting lively discussions in front of their kebab stalls, waving their arms around, laughing, clapping their friends on the back.
And in a turning down a back alley in the noisy, thronging maze, I suddenly emerged into a peaceful enclosure of green serenity. The Great Mosque of Xi’an arose in the centre of the large courtyard, the first piece of Islamic architecture I had seen in a Chinese style, a three-tiered erection with curving, angular tiles painted in turquoise blue, with a central white banner of Chinese calligraphy. I waited here, gathering my breath in this quiet spot, and suddenly a silhouette of a man wearing a white shirt and skullcap emerged and walked through the grounds into the mosque itself.
The heart of Xi’an was a beautiful place, but I wanted to see it beating. Therefore I set out to walk the circumference of the city walls. It is possible to do this in around four hours, and I was intrigued by the surprisingly compact nature of the city. It is enclosed by a square grid of ancient city walls, but within is a very modern urban metropolis, shopping centres and Hagen-Dasz cream parlours. It does not feel like the industrialised centre is at odds with the historical heart of Xi’an, since the city walls have always preserved the city within and it has merely changed and adapted from the inside. I found a quiet cafe and went inside. Here I read for a while and considered an important question about the divide between the western and the eastern world. The typical western individual knows almost nothing about China. Why this is so is a complex question. If I was to ask a single person in Europe to name one Chinese emperor in history they are extremely unlikely to be able to do so. In the majestic “A History of China”, John Keay puts forward the argument that this is down to the nature of the language and the extreme difficulty of being able to translate between the languages of the two cultures and therefore the lack of interchange of ideas between the two. But in the end it may not come down to much more than the fact that the European culture is simply different, as radically different from the Chinese culture as anywhere in the world. Often the Chinese did not need European ideas, and the Chinese invented paper, the compass and gunpowder, the latter of which would ironically come to be the instrument by which Europeans attempted to colonise the world.
In the western mind, the concept of China is as a general thing, a large country, uniform in its ideals with people simply being “Chinese”. Yet they have no idea of the detail. That in China there are huge numbers of diverse and different ethnicities and types of people. Many different languages, many different worlds, from Muslims in the desert landscapes of the camel caravanserai, to the Buddhist monks on the Tibetan mountain plains, to the cold snowy northern frontiers of Hebei province near Russia, to rural bamboo and green paddy fields that I have talked of, through to glitzy neon-lit cities of dazzling noise.
In the Water Kingdom, Phillip Ball recounts the history of ancient China. The history of a Kingdom shaped by water, the Yangtze and the Yellow river, and all of the rivers of the mainland, the impact they have had on Chinese history and how they gave birth to the cradle of eastern civilisation. And indeed, recent discoveries by researchers in Zhejiang have now also revealed an ancient civilisation thought to be at least 5,000 years old; called Liangzhou, the city contained an elaborate system of canals and waterways, its sophisticated systems of hydraulic engineering easily rivalling any of the other achievements of the earliest ancient civilisations, such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
With its magnificent history, the Chinese civilisation has been there all along here in the east, before westerners had even heard of it. China is the oldest living civilisation in the world, and has never been conquered. This is the world that European ships came to explore, fascinated by the voyage of discovery:
Miranda: “O brave new world, that has such people in’t”
Prospero: “Tis new to thee”
Generations before Shakespeare wrote these lines, many generations of Chinese had been living in peace with a mindful awareness of the natural world, no matter which dynastic wars for empire have raged around them. As Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.
People sometimes ask me, is China dangerous? Of course it is not, it is as safe as anywhere in the world, and safer than so-called free countries, where children are free to bring guns to schools and murder in cold blood their colleagues and teachers in places supposed to uphold the values of education. Such an incident in modern or ancient China is simply unheard of. Yet Americans, whose media manipulates the education of citizens for self-serving commercial ends will tell me how the Chinese are subject to political misinformation.
Be that as it may, I witnessed no unrest or incivility while travelling through China. I make no comment on the recent riots in the capitalist city of Hong Kong, a former British colony. I travelled through Hong Kong during the period of the riots and it did not affect my life in any form. Hong Kong was grey, polluted and curiously empty, given the dense concentration of people that live and set up business there. I was not able to come away with any photography whatsoever of that which is beautiful, aesthetic or culturally significant. In the heart of the ancient middle kingdom of rural and central China however, my photography came alive. I encountered no unrest, simply what was all things considered, a relatively peaceful, quiet way of life.
Like any other culture, people of different ethnicities started out in conflict, and then life became more co-operative and peaceful as history followed its course to the present day. This is clearly evidenced by Steven Pinker’s majestic work “The Better Angels of our Nature”, supported by scientifically verified statistical evidence and the scientific basis for this is set out in the last chapter of my book. China is no different. The writer Peter Fleming in his excellent book “News From Tartary”, in 1939 recounts an epic 3,500 mile journey he and his party undertook from Beijing, all the way through the vast expanse of the western Xinjiang province, on the way to Kashmir, India. Back then, the journey was dangerous, passports were confiscated and he was in danger being caught in open warfare, the Tangut rebellion, or any number of dangers that faced a traveller then. Today, China is much more integrated and no matter how hard my own journey, travel connecting the vast Chinese continent is now possible, and reveals many harmonious and peaceful communities. Many would complain of the forced resettlement of Muslims in the Uyghur regions of Xinjiang, however notwithstanding specific current political conflicts I talk of holistic concepts of history, moving towards an integrated future. China is now resurrecting the Silk Road, that once connected the trade of the world. It is important to study history and the rise and fall of civilisations that have shaped the modern world, so that we may learn from the things that enhanced our lives in times gone by.
So why did the Silk Road fall into disuse, and lack of knowledge in the west? In the magnificent “Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present”, Christopher Beckwith notes that overland trade routes across the continent from Asia to Europe became replaced by littoral trade routes, i.e. routes by sea trading with ships around the continent of Asia, such as those mainly sailing away from the east. Western capitalist countries such as Britain waged wars in Asia and came to dominate trade and there and in Europe constant warfare gave a scenario of continuous revolution and instability. The communist systems of China and Russia closed off both countries and the countries of the silk road in between, such as the Turkestan area in western China fell into poverty, diminution of trade and lack of knowledge by the outside world.
In particular, a striking passage by Beckwith explains the impact this history has had on the arts. In pages 313 to 319, Beckwith argues that a permanent state of political revolution led to Modernism in the arts as being a continual form, i.e. each movement of art had to replace the one before, having rejected the old one as being unfashionable and out of touch. Then a new one would replace the one before, having rejected the last movement, and so on, Modernism being the prevailing form of all art, and lacking any real structure. In essence, all meaning was lost as to what is beautiful in the arts and that is why modern art, which usually has the motive to shock and reject what has been done before, therefore has produced nothing of value that is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing.
Beckwith argues that “the very definition of (art), and the ability to redefine them, has been lost: graphic artists cannot define art, poets cannot define poetry, composers cannot define music - nor can the army of critics who feed off the status quo. In other words, the professionals cannot explain what art, music, or poetry is to or for them. Modernism’s rejection not only of all previous artistic forms but even of artistic Reason - the acceptance of the ordering principles of Nature, or at least the idea that such principles exist - has inevitably led to the destruction of the traditional arts as methods for producing genuine art.”
It is clear that this modernism in art has often arisen out of political instability, and in Central Asia and China this is down to not only dictatorial communism, but, crucially, capitalism, which persists to this day. In the west, the capitalism takes a democratic form, but it usually engenders representative leaders who do not represent the interests of ordinary people and perpetuate conflict in the world, with the main drive being economic capital - to make as much money as possible, with minimal restraint. The knock-on effect on the arts is strangulation.
Beckwith argues that new forms of arts that have arisen as a result of technological innovations, such as photography, music forms and the cinema, are the great hope for creating a harmonious form of beauty, that is not in a discord of permanent flux and low quality. High art must have regard to the beauty of the natural world and existing traditions.
“The hope for the arts now lies in the largely untutored popular new arts developed in the absence of guidance from the professionally trained, academicized, avant-garde elite, who have continued to be mesmerised by Modernism and its mutations. It is necessary to recognise and understand the still primitive new arts and begin to develop them from the inside, to create new art with them without destroying the Art in them”.
I completely agree with these sentiments. Through the new art form of photography, I have made sacrifices to devote my time and energy to developing aesthetically beautiful images in accordance with the classical principles of harmony and beauty, as directly reflected by the beauty of the natural world that I have photographed. I have also sought to enhance the perception of the viewer through the development of beautiful lighting, colour and harmonious composition, to give an emotional effect that enhances the value of the work and its positive effect on the viewer’s sensations.
Will the re-understanding of the classical principles of high art happen here in China? I hope so. The classical watercolour painters of the landscapes of Guilin and Hangzhou left behind a legacy of detailed and beautiful landscapes in the soft light of the misty karst and the still waters of the West Lake, that was inspired by the beauty of the natural world found here, and I hope that I have done the same.
It is clear however that the structure of political systems in any culture today is weighed against the benefits that development of these capacities can bring, with social conflict perpetuating a cycle of Modernist art driven not by principles of aesthetic beauty, but by financial competition, where art has become a disposable, throwaway commodity, and not an instrument to enhance an individual’s aesthetic awareness and engagement with the positive aspects of the world.
It is important to explain that in a country where power is concentrated into the hands of a few individuals, such as a monarchy or one-party state, and particularly if the country is large, then so long as an ordinary person does not directly cross the government, the individual mass of citizens have a lot of freedom and a lot of time to develop their capacities in the cultural, scientific, and artistic fields. The concentrated government simply cannot rule over every aspect of people’s lives, particularly in the modern world of internet and communication exchange. However, in a democracy, power is concentrated in many more people. By sheer quantity of numbers, the amount of power wielded by individual citizens, such as owners of business companies and controllers of media output, often exceeds the abuse of power in other systems, and direct engagement and conflict between competitive individuals to spend all their time in making as much money as possible often leaves citizens with even less time than they would ever have to develop cultural, scientific and artistic pursuits.
This is a danger, because, for example, it is scientific pursuits that drive forward the improvement in the quality of life for everyone. If all competing businesses are driven by profit and wish to disengage from the costs of protecting the environment or investing in regulation such as that found in the European Union, then what is threatened are the things that give happiness and value to individual lives of all citizens, not just the few. For those who want more than material comfort, today’s “democratic” world can seem to be a shocking state of affairs.
Philosophers from Plato onwards have continuously argued as to what is the “best” form of government. It is currently thought in the west that democracy is the best form of government, even with all its flaws, such as uneducated masses electing politicians that act against their interests, as they represent them, and therefore behave in exactly the same way as a monarch behaves and often cause them more harm than ever before. It is not that I am advocating that a monarchy is a “better” system of government than democracy. The question and debate is useless. We do not have to ask the question. It is like asking “what is the best kind of cheese”? Well, it depends on the context. It depends, like in quantum physics, on who is doing the observing.
It seems to me to be practically useful to look at a culture that appears to work, and then take the elements from that culture that work and import them into your own. And it is obvious, as explained, that China is working, even with some of the industrial horrors wreaking havoc on the culture and environment, that ought to be rectified.
And what works here in China, is a history of co-operation, social cohesion, regulation and a history of investment into centralised forms of public institutions such as schools and hospitals. Now that may not be the optimal way to make as much money as possible, in fact it could be harmful in many ways to the economic drive, but we will eventually have to moderate the need to make the economy generate as much money as possible, and focus on giving freedom, which gives as much capacity for individuals to develop cultural, scientific and artistic advancements. Because that is what adds happiness and value to many people’s lives, and something has to give.
I do not advocate scrapping the economic drive, but merely to regulate and limit it so that cultural, scientific and artistic prerogatives may be saved, as they are often being strangled with the excess of materialism. Doing so would provide a more balanced, coherent whole in the story of human development.
Limiting the economic drive for financial gain would also protect the wider environment of the natural world, which has been blighted by global warming and environmental destruction, and is not helped by the unregulated capitalism of industrial business, though great strides have been made in the improvement of attitudes towards the environment since the scale of environmental issues was first identified.
Freed from the needs of commerce and the demands employment makes on people’s time, technology will allow ordinary citizens to empower themselves with freedom to explore scientific and cultural pursuits that make their lives worthwhile, even if they are hampered by those in power who can see nothing more than the bottom dollar and the optimal system that allows this. And it is already happening. Do not be surprised when a united China begins to dictate the economic direction of the world. I only hope that in doing so, they will fully advocate the detail, beauty and colourful diversity of the culture found within, so that the world may learn from their records of a floating life.
And that is what I seek to do in my book as a whole, to represent and advocate the aesthetic beauty of the world and show the beneficial effects that art, culture and science can have on an individual’s freedom and well-being. Beyond economic concerns, art, culture and science are important drivers in the world.
Forget about the systems that allow you to make as much money as possible, based on evolutionary fears. The world no longer has limited resources, and is backed up with powerful technology. With people co-operating, in a globalised world such as what is shown by China, we can once more focus on things in life other than money and material comfort. There are broader things to explore. Art, culture, science, just three headings among the limitless possibilities. Do not destroy them. And the internal life has a value all of its own. Do not sacrifice that either
A quote by Peter Fleming came to me, which spoke more than any book on politics ever could. “I know nothing, and care less, about political theory; knavery, oppression and ineptitude, as perpetrated by governments, interest me only in their concrete manifestations, in their impact on mankind: not in their nebulous doctrinal origins”. I would wholly echo his sentiments.
I do not particularly care about the arguments I have advanced. Nor in truth are they even didactic arguments, but a simple warning that science, culture and art are being strangled by the uniformity and single-mindedness of economic progress.
Steven Johnson, in his excellent book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World”, argues that “the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change”.
In other words, art, culture, and mere amusement are powerful drivers for the advancement of human civilisations throughout history, and that is why creative play and amusement has emerged as an evolutionary process. Play is important to most people, as is the appreciation of beauty. Play and creativity has been necessary throughout all history and a sufficient amount of it in modern social systems will have an added impetus on other drivers such as financial and material prosperity and give a more rounded quality of life.
In short, with the relentless march of industrialisation, art, culture and science, which are often deprioritised, can and do seriously suffer. It would be a real shame to lose them. It should not only be done by re-distributing the material gain and re-investing it into the arts, for example, or funding scientific experimental research initiatives. What is required first is a fundamental re-evaluation and understanding of the principles and value of what art is and what it can achieve. And a broad understanding of science is of course necessary in the west to bring to educational systems still confused by superstitious and illogical religious doctrines, or functional and superficial studies by young people of professional subjects solely for the advancement of their financial careers.
It is why I wrote this book. To create a definition and understanding of the terms of art through my photography work, to represent poetic impressions of the beauty of diverse cultures from travel while engaging the senses in beautiful and unknown places around the world, and to highlight the principles of science in the last chapter, my academic thesis “The Science of Life”.
However, it is clear that even in China, the arts are under threat by rapid capitalist industrialisation. In the noisy confusion of life, the principles of beautiful experience are often forgotten.
The book Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen-Fu is an excellent example of a lyrical depiction of life in ancient China during the classical periods, a world which has been all but lost in many places in the east. In the chapter “The Little Pleasures of Life”, Shen-Fu describes his enjoyment of his leisure activities, the joys of his childhood, his adult life cultivating flowers, and the beauty of the experience of composing poems with other scholars. In his childhood, he takes a delight in nature and has a close bond with the natural world. In adulthood, he becomes constrained by worldly possessions, which hamper his aesthetic experiences. And then he begins to travel, discovering its joys. The lyrical depictions of his love for his wife and the passionate love for a concubine are worthy of the classical ideals of the art of the period in which they were set.
Many moons before the ancient Chinese world was under the threat of being buried by a concrete shopping mall, ironically, the phrase "Floating Life" comes from the preface to a poem by the Tang poet Li Bai:
“...The floating life is but as a dream; how much longer can we enjoy our happiness?"
It would be wrong to argue against the scientific and observational evidence that the complex world is becoming more uniform and diverse cultures are giving way to homogenised and simpler forms of the lowest common denominator. It is the subject of the last chapter of my book and is based on scientific research. But to lose the cultural beauty of the world would be a real shame, for me at least. I rested in Xi’an for a while and considered the journey of 17,000 miles I had undertaken since leaving my home. There I had dreamed of this dream. Many excellent books on travel and culture in China enriched my understanding of this modern continent. In China Road, Rob Gifford travelled along the road on Route 312, from Shanghai at the eastern end of China, through to the border with Kazakhstan in the west, interviewing the people he met and the stories he encountered along the way. And in “The Emperor Far Away”, David Eimer wrote an excellent journalistic account of a life on the road, among the furthest outposts at the edges of the Chinese world. I could truly appreciate the scale of this vast continent-state called China once I had travelled here myself and tasted the beauty of freedom in the misty dawn. And I knew that this was not the end. In this beautiful water kingdom, limitless new adventures would await, and I would surely return.
Read on for the next chapter via the link below, as we are about to enter our journey together to - JAPAN......