1224 YAQUT AL-HAMAWI
Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229) was an Arab geographer born in Constantinople who travelled widely in the Middle East and Central Asia as the slave of a Baghdad trader. His Mu’jam ul-Buldān (Geographical Encyclopaedia) also covers the history and ethnography of the regions he visited. He was one of the last to describe Baghdad before its destruction by the Mongols in 1258.
The city of Baghdad forms two vast semicircles on the right and left banks of the Tigris, twelve miles in diameter. The numerous suburbs, covered with parks, gardens, villas and beautiful promenades, and plentifully supplied with rich bazaars and finely built mosques and baths, stretch for a considerable distance on both sides of the river. In the days of its prosperity the population of Baghdad and its suburbs amounted to over two million. The palace of the caliph stands in the midst of a vast park several hours in circumference which beside a menagerie and aviary comprises an enclosure for wild animals reserved for the chase. The palace grounds are laid out with gardens, and adorned with exquisite taste with plants, flowers and trees, reservoirs and fountains, surrounded by sculptured figures. On this side of the river stands the palaces of the great nobles. Immense streets, none less than forty cubits wide, traverse the city from one end to the other, dividing it into blocks or quarters, each under the control of an overseer, who looks after the cleanliness, sanitation and the comfort of the inhabitants.
The water exits both on the north and the south are like the city gates, guarded night and day by relays of soldiers stationed on the watch towers on both sides of the river. Every household is plentifully supplied with water at all seasons by the many aqueducts which intersect the town; and the streets, gardens and parks are regularly swept and watered, and no refuse is allowed to remain within the walls. An immense square in front of the imperial palace is used for reviews, military inspections, tournaments and races; at night the square and the streets are lighted by lamps.
There is also a vast open space where the troops whose barracks lie on the left bank of the river parade daily. The great platforms at the different gates of the city are used by the citizens for gossip and recreation or for watching the flow of travellers and country folk into the capital. The different nationalities in the capital have each an officer to represent their interests with the government, and to whom the stranger can appeal for counsel or help.
Baghdad is a veritable city of palaces, not made of stucco and mortar, but of marble. The buildings are usually of several storeys. The palaces and mansions are lavishly gilded and decorated, and hung with beautiful tapestry and hangings of brocade or silk. The rooms are lightly and tastefully furnished with luxurious divans, costly tables, unique Chinese vases and gold and silver ornaments.
Both sides of the river are for miles fronted by the palaces, kiosks, gardens and parks of the grandees and nobles, marble steps lead down to the water’s edge, and the scene on the river is animated by thousands of gondolas, decked with little flags, dancing like sunbeams on the water and carrying the pleasure-seeking Baghdad citizens from one part of the city to the other. Along the wide-stretching quays lie whole fleets at anchor, sea and river craft of all kinds, from the Chinese junk to the old Assyrian raft resting on inflated skins.
The city’s mosques are at once vast and remarkably beautiful. There are also in Baghdad numerous colleges of learning, hospitals, infirmaries for both sexes and lunatic asylums.
1928 FREYA STARK
The British writer and photographer Freya Stark (1893–1993) travelled widely in Turkey, Arabia and the Middle East after the First World War and wherever possible sought to encounter directly the life and people of the regions she visited, and to maintain her independence from officialdom. The early 20th-century Baghdad she visited was renowned for its cultural diversity.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it. For this reason your customary thoughts, all except the rarest of your friends, even most of your luggage – everything, in fact, which belongs to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance. The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.
For this reason I sent off only one of my letters of introduction – and that was to the friend of the Damascus tanner – and wandered out the morning after my arrival in Baghdad to find a house.
What you first see of the caliphs’ city is a most sordid aspect: the long low straight street, a dingy hybrid between East and West, with the unattractiveness of both. The crowd looks unhealthy and sallow, the children are pitiful, the shops are ineffective and compromises with Europe; and the dust is wicked, for it turns to blood-poisoning at the slightest opportunity and bears out the old Babylonian idea of an atmosphere inhabited by demons.
But you can soon leave the main street and walk into the long bazaars and their twilight; or you can turn to the right among the narrow ways and lattice-work balconies of the Jewish and Moslem quarters; or better still, you can cross the old bridge of boats to Karkh, which was the southern suburb of the Round City built by Mansur, where the produce of the land, once coming in great boats down the ‘Isa canal, had to unload into barges at the port near the ruin of Aqqar Kuf where now is desert, since the masts of the ships could not pass under the many stone bridges of the town.
The glory has departed, but the life is unchanged.
White-turbaned Indians, Jewish and Armenian merchants, are still here, though their silks and spices, their indigo and pepper, the sugar and velvets of Khuzistan no longer take the Aleppo road. Persian pilgrims or their descendants still walk with silent bare feet and long fanatic faces through the shadows of the dark and airless ways; and the sons of the Prophet in green turbans, with flowing gowns and brown rosary, still pass in grave abstraction, able no doubt to split hairs in Tradition or Grammar, though the Mustanseriya, the great college, is filled with the bales of the custom houses, and the old disputes which rent the lives of men, the Creation of the Quran or its Eternal Existence, have now given place to the cheerful badinage of Kurdish porters under those carved arcades.
I did not, of course, find all this out that very morning.
In fact I soon got lost in a labyrinth of ways so narrow that donkeys with panniers filled them from side to side. I was just thinking of enquiring the road home when I saw an empty house.
It was a tumbledown-looking place, with brick walls and grated windows evidently looking on to a small yard, and there was an Arabic notice to say that it was empty and for sale. But what attracted me was the house next door.
There, in a little garden court sitting under a shed on rows of matting, were twenty or thirty children learning their lessons from an old Mulla who sat cross-legged among them. They had only about ten books between them, so they sat in groups, three or four round each volume, and chanted the words in their childish voices. Now and then a newcomer would pass me at the gate, slip off his shoes and find an empty place and a corner of a book to read from. Now and then some of them got bored, strolled away among the plants and flowers, and returned after a while with renewed energy. The Mulla had a white turban and red hennaed beard, and a kind old face; his scholars evidently had no fear of him. It was such a pleasant sight, and I thought it would be delightful to live next door to it, that I accepted the unnecessary assistance of five passers-by to decipher the address of the owner of the house and made my way back to the depressing atmosphere of my hotel with a feeling of wonderful elation….
True happiness, we consider, is incompatible with an inefficient drainage system. It is one of those points on which we differ most fundam
entally from the East, where happiness and sanitation are not held to have any particular connection.
In spite of many efforts, Baghdad still remains triumphantly Eastern in this respect. It lies so low and in so flat a land that there is no possibility of draining anything anywhere. This is what makes it so depressing for Officers of Health and so amusing for people who like to study microbes.
Every house is built around a paved yard, large or small: in the middle of the yard is a trap-door, which does not usually fit extremely well: under that is a cistern where all the refuse waters go. The Sumerians used to bury their relatives under the dining-room floor close by, a thing which is no longer done.
My little court as time wore on seemed to smell more and more like a Sumerian ancestor. I used to lie awake and wonder about it at night and admire the malignity of a smell which could lie dormant all day when one might escape it by going out, and leapt upon one as soon as one was safely imprisoned in one’s bedroom. There was something of the Babylonian fiend about it. Indeed I believe it was an affliction called up by the Mulla next door, who did not like infidels in his quarter. What could be more easy to one who knows the ropes than to call up a smell from the Baghdad underworld? The only difficulty would be to choose which, for there is a great variety. This was a particularly wily one. It never appeared by day so I was unable to prove its existence to my friends and neighbours; it never troubled Marie, who slept with her head in the very midst of it over our diminutive cistern-court; but it curled through or under my closed door, crept to the corner where I lay trying to breathe the comparatively innocent air of the street, and had me at its mercy for the rest of the night. It left me with a sore throat every morning.
1933 ROBERT BYRON
British writer Robert Byron (1905–1941) created a classic of travel writing in The Road to Oxiana (1937), in which he related a trip to Persia and Afghanistan, combining an acute sensitivity to Islamic architecture with a strong sense of absurdity and the daily practical challenges of travelling in remote regions. The Iraq he visited was a recent creation as an independent state; Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) had been instrumental in having Faisal (r. 1921–33) placed on the throne.
It is little solace to recall that Mesopotamia was once so rich, so fertile of art and invention, so hospitable to the Sumerians, the Seleucids and the Sasanids. The prime fact of Mesopotamian history is that in the 13th century Hulagu destroyed the irrigation system; and that from that day to this Mesopotamia has remained a land of mud deprived of mud’s only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain, so flat that a single heron, reposing on one leg beside some rare trickle of water in a ditch, looks as tall as a wireless aerial. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie. Baghdad is the capital one would expect of this divinely favoured land. It lurks in a mud fog; when the temperature drops below 110, the residents complain of the chill and get out their furs. For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar….
The hotel is run by Assyrians, pathetic, pugnacious little people with affectionate ways, who are still half in terror of their lives. There is only one I would consign to the Baghdadis, a snappy youth called Daood (David), who has put up the prices of all cars to Teheran and referred to the arch of Ctesiphon as ‘Fine show, sir, high show.’
This arch rises 121½ feet from the ground and has a span of 82. It also is of mud; but has nevertheless lasted fourteen centuries. Photographs exist which show two sides instead of one, and the front of the arch as well. In mass, the ill-fired bricks are a beautiful colour, whitish buff against a sky which is blue again, now that we are out of Baghdad. The base has lately been repaired; probably for the first time since it was built.
The museum here is guarded, not so that the treasures of Ur may be safe, but lest visitors should defile the brass of the showcases by leaning on them. Since none of the exhibits is bigger than a thimble, it was thus impossible to see the treasures of Ur. On the wall outside, King Feisal has erected a memorial tablet to Gertrude Bell. Presuming the inscription was meant by King Feisal to be read, I stepped up to read it. At which four policemen set up a shout and dragged me away. I asked the director of the museum why this was. ‘If you have short sight, you can get special leave,’ he snapped. So much, again, for Arab charm.
BEIJING
(PEKING)
The site of modern Beijing has been an important political centre at least since the 5th century BC, when the kingdom of Yan had its capital, named Ji, on the site. Though Ji was destroyed by the first emperor in the 3rd century BC, the city, now called Yan, was rebuilt during the Han era (206 BC–AD 220), becoming a key military centre for defending the northern frontier of the now-unified China. During the Tang dynasty (618–907) it was rebuilt again as Youzhou; in the 12th century it was rebuilt as Zhongdu. The Mongol invaders who conquered northern China in 1215 made their own capital on the same site; in 1271 Kublai Khan (r. 1260–94) rebuilt it as Dadu, making it capital of his Yuan dynasty.
After the Mongol Yuan dynasty was replaced by the native Ming in 1368, Dadu was renamed Beiping, and rebuilt again as Beijing (‘Northern Capital’; formerly transliterated as Peking) in 1403 at a time of dispute with a branch of the dynasty based in Nanjing (‘Southern Capital’). In 1644, Beijing fell to the Manchu invaders, became the capital of their new Qing dynasty and expanded, with the addition of many palaces and temples.
Beijing remained China’s capital after both the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the Communist revolution of 1949. The subsequent forced modernization and homogenization of all aspects of life caused a total rupture with the traditions of the imperial past, most dramatically seen in the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Following the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976, a cautious liberalization was seen, until the 21st century when much of the old city was swept away.
1280s MARCO POLO
Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a Venetian trader who set off in 1271 to travel the Silk Road and spent years in Dadu, or Tatu (‘great capital’ in Mongolian, Khanbaliq or ‘City of the Khan’ in Chinese, sometimes Westernized as Cambaluc) with Kublai Khan. He returned to Venice in 1295, where he was imprisoned until 1299, during which time he wrote Il Milione, the account of his travels, which quickly became a sensation across Europe.
Now there was in old times a great and noble city called Cambaluc, which is to say ‘The city of the Emperor’. But the Great Khan was informed by his astrologers that this city would prove rebellious and raise great disorders against his imperial authority. So he caused the present city to be built close beside the old one, with only a river between them. And he caused the people of the old city to be removed to the new town that he had founded; and this is called Tatu. However, he allowed a portion of the people which he did not suspect to remain in the old city, because the new one could not hold the whole of them, big as it is.
This new city has a compass of 24 miles; each side has a length of 6 miles, and it is four-square. It is walled with walls of earth ten paces thick at bottom, and a height of more than ten paces; but at top they are about three paces thick. And they are provided throughout with loop-holed battlements, which are all whitewashed.
There are twelve gates, and over each is a great and handsome palace, so that there are on each side of the square three gates and five palaces; for there is at each angle also a great and handsome palace. In those palaces are vast halls in which are kept the arms of the city garrison.
The streets are so straight and wide that you can see along them from end to end and from one gate to the other. And up and down the city there are beautiful palaces, and many great and fine hostelries, and fine houses in great numbers.
Moreover, in the middle of the city there is a great clock – a bell – which is struck at n
ight. And after it has struck three times no one must go out in the city, unless it be for the needs of a woman in labour, or of the sick. And those who go about on such errands have to carry lanterns. Moreover, the guard at each gate of the city is 1,000 armed men; not that for fear of any attack, but as a guard of honour for the sovereign and to prevent thieves from doing mischief in the town.
1541 FERNÃO MENDES PINTO
The Portuguese adventurer Fernão Mendes Pinto (c. 1509–1583) travelled through China, Japan and South East Asia between 1537 and 1558. He was shipwrecked off China and imprisoned, then taken prisoner by invading Tatars. Later shipwrecked again off Japan, Pinto claimed to be the first Westerner to visit those islands. His sometimes incredible account of his travels, published in Portugal in 1614, was translated into many languages.
The city is 30 leagues in circuit; and environed with two rows of strong walls, where there are a number of towers and bulwarks after our fashion; but without this circuit, which is of the city itself, there is another far greater…that the Chinese affirm was anciently all inhabited, but at this present there are only some boroughs and villages, as also a many of fair houses, or castles, about it, among which are…the houses of the proctors of the 1,600 cities and most remarkable towns of the 32 kingdoms of this monarchy, who repair unto this city at the general assembly of the estates, which is held every three years for the public good. Without this great enclosure…are 80,000 tombs of the mandarins: little chapels all gilded within, and compassed about with balusters of iron and latten, the entries whereunto are through very rich and sumptuous arches…. It hath also 500 very great palaces, which are called the ‘houses of the son of the sun’, whither all those retire that have been hurt in the wars for the service of the king, as also many other soldiers, who in regard of age or sickness are no longer able to bear arms.… We saw also another long street of low houses, where there were 24,000 oarsmen; and another where 14,000 taverners that followed the court dwelt; as also a third street, where live a great number of light women, exempted from the tribute which they of the city pay, for that they are courtesans, whereof the most part had quitted their husbands for to follow that wretched trade…. In this enclosure do likewise remain all the laundresses…above 100,000. Within this same enclosure…there are 1,300 very sumptuous houses of religious men and women…. We saw also a great many…inns, whither come people of all ages and sexes, as to see comedies, plays, combats, bull-baiting, wrestling and magnificent feasts….
Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Page 5