The Book That Took Me 13 Years to Read
The puzzling thing is, no matter how much I rack my brain, wading through the mists of time, I can’t seem to recall how it was that I first came across this book — William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu: A Quest.
And one hell of a quest it is.
Dalrymple, just 20 at the time, on summer break from Cambridge, rambled 12,000 miles, tracing (more or less) the path of Marco Polo’s Silk Road — from Jerusalem to Xanadu, north of The Great Wall. Xanadu is the site of the long-ago summer palace of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, which would become the largest contiguous land empire in history.
As I pondered the question, I thought, perhaps, that I’d first learned about the book by way of a history class I’d taken in my penultimate semester at NYU — “Problems in Contemporary China.” These “problems” were so compelling and prescient (Hello recently shot-down spy balloon!), that briefly, I, the aspiring historian, had resolved to become a China expert. The U.S. vs. China was the next big showdown in history, I reasoned, and I could study it in real-time.
I even signed up for a Mandarin class at the China Institute, which, at the time, was located in a beautiful brick townhouse on the Upper East Side. The 12,000-square-foot mansion was once listed (although never sold) for $38 million. My Mandarin aspirations were dashed irreparably when a friend, who actually spoke the language told me I sounded like an intellectually disabled child (his exact phrasing was less diplomatic).
But this explanation feels unsatisfactory. While Dalrymple’s destination is in China, or, more specifically, Inner Mongolia — an autonomous region of the People’s Republic — the world’s most populous country is hardly the focus of the book. Dalrymple doesn’t even get there until the final 20 pages. So, it seems unlikely that this course on China would have been my introduction to the author.
Dalrymple’s expertise lies further west. Born in Scotland and now based in Delhi, Dalrymple is perhaps most famous for being the foremost expert on the East India Company. Far from being some inconsequential relic of a forgotten time on the other side of the world, the East India Company — “the original corporate raiders” — as Dalrymple once put it in a newspaper column, is highly salient in today’s world of sprawling multinational corporations that dominate economies and countries. Beginning in 1757, this company effectively ruled India for a century.
“It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history,” Dalrymple wrote in the epilogue of The Anarchy.
The year before my Mandarin misadventure, I’d taken a class called “Empire & Globalization” in which the East India Company featured prominently. It’s entirely possible I first encountered Dalrymple on that course’s reading list. But my quest seems unlikely ever to reach a definitive resolution.
Thanks to the power of Amazon, I can pinpoint the exact day I bought the book — May 12, 2010, the day I graduated at Yankee Stadium and the day I turned 22. I paid 98 cents, plus $3.99 to ship it — a small gift to myself.
I carried it with me from apartment to apartment, but never managed to crack it open. Or, if I did, never made it past the first few pages. I knew it was about some young historian, like myself, off on a great adventure, which was exactly what I wanted to do. But I never got far in following Dalrymple’s footsteps. I looked up flights to China but never bought them. I even turned down a Peace Corps posting in Central Asia. The memory is so hazy that I can’t even remember the exact country where they wanted to send me, but it sounded, well, terrifying. For more than a decade, the book was mostly forgotten.
The inspiration to finally read it was part of a larger trend. For the past couple of years, I’ve spent large swaths of my time traveling, exploring and learning the history of all sorts of places — and writing all about the interplay of those topics. Plus, there was the delight I’d found in finally finishing Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. Eric W. Sanderson’s enormous volume combines maps, history, science and computer visualizations to allow the reader to see what the ponds, streams and stunningly green forests of Manhattan Island would have looked like in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would later bear his name. Like In Xandau, I had been lugging around Mannahatta since my NYU days.
One evening not that long ago, 13 years after I’d originally purchased the book, I plucked it off the top of one of the many towers of books scattered around my apartment. Finally, belatedly, I began to read.
Starting in the pre-dawn darkness in Jerusalem, Dalrymple travels through Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and China. Along the way, he unspools a remarkable, staggering amount of history. I had always considered myself an impressive, well-read undergrad in the history department. But, in comparison to Dalrymple, my peer (at least in terms of age), I was embarrassed by how little I knew, how much his knowledge dwarfed mine. As I read on, Dalrymple was eternally sending me off on my own side quests to do my own digging when he’d inevitably mention some obscure Ottoman sultan I’d never even heard of.
Early on in the journey, I decided to do some research to see what Dalrymple had been up to since publishing his book in 1989. A lot, it turns out. He’s a veritable star with 1.1 million Twitter followers. Aside from being a renowned historian and journalist, Dalrymple is a podcaster (his show “Empire” with the superb Anita Anand is masterful — and hilarious), the co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival and a goat herder. He lives on a farm outside Delhi, naturally. Oh, and he “writes the occasional book,” as he quips in his Twitter bio. At last count, he was up to 10.
Simply put, Dalrymple is who I want to be when I grow up. And who knows? Maybe there’s still time.
In the thrilling final pages, public safety guards finally catch up with Dalrymple — who doesn’t have the right paperwork — and confiscate his passport. He’s been hosed, five miles from his destination. It’s over. The guards pile Dalrymple and his traveling companion, his ex-girlfriend who had dumped him just before the trip, into a jeep with a communist party official.
“‘Fuck,’ I said, quietly and to no one in particular. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’”
It feels like you’re right there with them in the backseat. But they aren’t being deported. Rather, they’re being chauffeured to (and aggressively chaperoned at) the ruins of the palace — Xanadu, which is now a World Heritage Site.
I wasn’t sad to have finished the book because I enjoyed it so much. And I know there are many more of his books to read. But, as I turned the final pages, I did have a strong desire to go on my own rambling expedition, my own adventure.