Sweden has Good Archives; Xinjiang has Good Fruit

I have had the good fortune to spend these past two weeks, with two more to go, on a research trip to a series of archival collections in Lund and Stockholm, Sweden. (With thanks to the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which generously awarded me the grant!) The trip has been successful in the extreme: I've not only found a range of materials previously unknown to me and unused in scholarship, but also met some great people who do very good work.

As East Turkestan aficionados are well aware, Lund is home to both the Gunnar Jarring Collection and to a host of texts printed at the Swedish Mission Press in Kashgar. The Collection is made up of a variety of texts, ranging from an attractive volume of Nava'i, which might keep Nick up all night, to dozens of contracts, notes, and ephemera, which are really more my thing.

All of that aside, I was determined, upon my arrival in Lund, to get a look at a rare piece of travel writing, H. I. Harding's Diary of a journey from Srinagar to Kashmir via Gilgit, printed at the Mission Press in 1922. Harding himself requested a posting as the Vice-Consul at Kashgar, where he served from 1 August 1922 to 31 July 1923, apparently out of a sense of adventure. There are a few interesting scraps of information in the Diary, but it was disappointing as a source.

Harding's work is redeemed, however, by its value as literature. It is wonderfully artful fluff, full of unlikely couplings of images and meditative reflections on both the stately and the minute. He breaks up the travelogue with "intermezzos," as he calls them. In one, Harding speaks with the voice of the Karakorum, telling the story of its coming into being. In another, he thinks about some future citizen of the Republic of Pamiria, what flag he might salute and what he might miss when far from home.

Harding ends his book in the garden of the house he has rented in Kashgar, where he sits and ponders a peach:

I have, of course, several kinds of peaches in my garden, ripening at different seasons, but the peach I will tell you about is the one I now hold in my hand; just now, this minute, ripe and perfect beyond compare. Her complexion is of a pale and dainty yellow, deepening on one cheek to the most enchanting of pink blushes. Her skin is so soft, so titillatory that I have to control my hand which would otherwise crush her delicate form in a spasm of extasy. Her odor is so exquisite that my lips quiver with delight and that sickly feeling of overpowering love gives me a feeling of weakness in the whole region from the neck to the abdomen. I struggle against the desire to make myself one with her, struggle and fail. By a touch of the finger I ask her skin to remove itself; it does so, and in two mouthfuls the nuptial ceremony is completed. Never shall the memory of that dear moment fade; even death shall us not part.

Oh, my.

It is unfortunate, and perhaps a product of the time in which I live, that I cannot help but read sexual overtones into much of what Harding writes. I have searched for information on him and found effectively nothing, so I am left with his ambiguous relationship with the children he meets along the route of his journey. Today, the specter of colonialism and all that it implies about race, gender, and power leans over my shoulder and makes inappropriate comments whenever I read a travel narrative. Furthermore, I came of age in the 90s and, thus, hear The Presidents of the United States of America in my head whenever peaches come up in conversation. So, I can't help but wonder: When Harding "makes insidious love" to a child when his parents are out of the room, is he just a starry-eyed dilettante travel cooing over an adorable kid? Or is he making the relationship between colonizer and colonized manifest by raping a child?

I'm inclined to think that Harding was just enjoying his journey and taking delight in the strangeness and newness of every little thing. His books is over-the-top, to be sure, but in a way that is charmingly ridiculous and quite unlike the almost venomous prose of a Przhevalskii. I heartily recommend the book and welcome other responses to it.