Book Review: The Emperor Far Away

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of Chinaby David EimerBloomsbury, 2014 The hustling man, an energetic rather than stylish writer and a sharp-eyed observer, leaves the wide roads of the known world, hires rickety transportation, and plunges into the far provinces of China in order to bring back strange and colorful stories, flashing vignettes perfectly chosen to illustrate just enough human commonality to warm the reader's heart while retaining enough exotic strangeness to sell piles of books in the bookshops to armchair voyagers who secretly (or not so secretly) want their aliens good and properly alien. Our far-flung correspondent knows this trick well - it's his livelihood, after all - and he's slickly adept at telling stories that are just one or two little details sideways of the things they do back home:

Now that I've described the city, I'll tell you something that's noteworthy. What you should know is that all the townsfolk of this city - and everybody else as well - have the following custom. Each one has written on the door of his house his own name and his wife's and those of his sons and their wives and his slaves and everybody in the house, and also how many horses he owns. If one of them dies, the master has the name struck out, and if somebody's born, that name is added to the list. It's in this way that the governor of the city is kept informed about all the people who live in it. They do this all throughout the province.

It's just such a book that Bloomsbury now brings out from David Eimer, the Beijing correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, although he never gets around to the home-inventories posted on doorways; that bit was written by Marco Polo around 720 years ago, when China was governed under the iron sway of Kubliai Khan and thus presented to the curious West the image of a woeful, autocratically-crushed mysterious land. Eimer's account of his travels, The Emperor Far Away, has no Khans - great or otherwise - but it still traffics in iron sways and autocratically-crushed mysterious lands. In page after page of smoothly entertaining hack prose, Eimer takes his readers up and down the most remote byways of the immense country far away, as his title suggests, from the central bureaucracy of Beijing.He has marvels to relate, naturally enough (this kind of book has never been attempted without them and probably never will be), like when he talks with a Tibetan friend about that young man's burning desire to leave Tibet and cross the mountains into China:

But he brushed off the difficulties, making crossing the Himalayas sound like a stroll in Barkhor Square, as if traversing 7,000-metre passes, where in the winter you can sink up to your waists in snow, and sleeping on mountainsides for weeks was easy. Maybe it is for Tibetans, because nuns and schoolgirls manage the trip. I read of one crippled monk who crawled most of the way to Dharamsala. Put it down to growing up on the roof of the world, but Tenzin's story was a reminder of just how tough Tibetans are.

(No alternative explanation is offered for these super-Tibetans, but it's still a kind of progress - Marco Polo's sometimes fly)Eimer excels at painting evocative pictures of the colorful places he visits as he chain-smokes his way around the far parameters of China. There's no local sight or ceremony he's unwilling to experience first-hand, and his readers get to enjoy it all as if they were getting his emails straight from the nearest ratty cyber-cafe:

Every inch of the pavements around the bazaar was occupied by someone selling something. Piles of vegetables and fruit, clothes hurled on to carts which the women customers stood three deep in front of as they rooted through them, and everywhere mobile food stalls. There were giant vats of polo, baby chickens turning slowly brown in primitive rotisseries, kebabs and lamb on the bone, as well as the sticky walnut cake beloved by the sweet-toothed Uighurs.

Events and festivals, bazaars and markets are all well-evoked, but Eimer, the long-time reporter, is even better at capturing the people he meets along the way. He can be reductive about these people (super-hardy Tibetans, sweet-toothed Uighurs, and so on), but that's less a failing than it is a characteristic of this type of book; travel-chronicles like these must barter in the mildly weird and the mostly recognizable. No matter how far Eimer wanders from the hotel bar of the nearest Hilton, it's important, periodically, that he find himself in the hotel bar of the nearest Hilton - even if it's in Wild West Jinghong:

At one of Jinghong's most popular restaurants, visitors can listen to a band while teenage girls in traditional costumes showing off their bare midriffs go from table to table singing. Then they sit on the laps of the male customers and make them drink a glass of beer over their shoulders. It is a ritual from the wedding ceremony of the Akha people, appropriated now by the tourist trade to cater to Han fantasies of licentious minorities living in paradise.

China is prominent in the news of the 21st century as a rising world power and economy, and that builds in an interested reading public for books like The Emperor Far Away, which walk a tightrope between humanizing the place just enough to feel good about it and inhumanizing the place just enough to facilitate a comfortable xenophobia. Another writer following in Eimer's exact footprints would come back with a completely different book, but the one Eimer himself writes is a mighty entertaining affair just the same.