UMW Regional GeogBlog

Sihanoukville, March 2010

The iconic image of Cambodia is that of Angkor Wat, the largest and one of the best-preserved temples in the huge complex that made up the city of Angkor. From the 9^th to the 14^th century, this was the capital of a Khmer Kingdom that included not only modern-day Cambodia, but also most of Laos and Thailand and a good part of southern Vietnam.

Angkor may have marked the heyday of the Khmer Empire, but it certainly was not its beginning. According to historian David Chandler, Cambodian history goes back at least two thousand years, and a lot more than that if we take into account archaeological evidence of Khmer-like people living in the area around 1500 BCE.

Against the backdrop of this long and illustrious history, the city of Sihanoukville is an oddity: a city less than six decades old. At the time of the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 all that existed here were a few small fishing villages. It was the end of French colonialism in Southeast Asia, though, that led to the establishment of Sihanoukville.

One of Sihanoukville's beaches, this one popular with foreign tourists

During the colonial era modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia comprised the territory of French Indochina. Access to Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh as well as to the country’s hinterland was primarily along the Mekong, the premier river of Southeast Asia (access to Laos was essentially non-existent.) With the coming of independence, though, Cambodia needed unfettered access to its own seaport.  With its sheltered location on the Gulf of Thailand, about 180 km from Phnom Penh, Kompong Som (“agreeable port”) was chosen as the site of Cambodia’s newest city. Construction on the port began in 1955, and the town was renamed Sihanoukville, after then-King Norodom Sihanouk.

I did not realize it when I made my plans, but my visit to Sihanoukville coincided with a holiday weekend. The Phnom Penh bus station where I began my journey was crowded, mostly with Cambodians heading home for the weekend, but there were also a few foreigners like myself heading out of the city.

A inter-city bus journey of 180 km would take two hours on a US interstate or a Chinese highway. But Cambodia’s Route 4 is not a US or Chinese road. It is two lanes wide, mostly shoulderless, its surface corrugated and pitted by the heavy trucks carrying cargo between the capital and the port.  Not surprisingly, this road is known as Cambodia’s most dangerous (a tourist brochure in my Sihanoukville hotel warned that although it is possible to make the journey from Phnom Penh by car or on a motorcycle, visitors need to be aware that accidents are frequent and emergency services unavailable on Highway 4.) My bus journey to Sihanoukville took four and a half hours, the journey back nearly six.

The trip began on the crowded and chaotic streets of central Phnom, and continued on to the crowded and chaotic streets of suburban Phnom Penh. On the outskirts of the city stores and apartments gave way to low-roofed factories, many of them housing clothing manufacturers drawn to the country by the availability of very cheap labor (My Cambodian traveling companion informed me that workers in these factories earn about $60 a month of six day weeks, and amount they might be able to double with overtime pay.)

Smoke rises from a forested area close to the Phnom Pehn - Sihanoukville road.

After the factories came flat expanses of dirt baked hard by the sun; this is the dry season, and in a few months time this area will be transformed into rice paddies. Another hour into the journey and the terrain became hilly, with slopes in the distance covered with forest. This is the wettest area of Cambodia; monsoon winds blowing off sea and up the mountainsides drop more than 3,000 mm of rainfall here each year, and the dry season in this area is short. The Cardamom Mountains and Elephant Ranges of southwest Cambodia are home to some of the most species-rich habitats in mainland Southeast Asia. Luckily for the local environment, much of the area is difficult to reach (other parts are still made hazardous by the presence of 1970s-era landmines.)  Large tracts of this area have been designated as national parks, but parks are poorly staffed and enforcement of protections is so that the World Wildlife Fund has described these as “paper parks.” Logging and the trade in endangered wildlife are threatening more and more of this area.

I saw some evidence of the destruction of forests through my bus window. As we approached the mountains, the sky became hazy, and I could see plumes of smoke on the horizon. These were probably signs of illegal logging; large sacks of charcoal for sale on the roadside provided further evidence.  Close to the road, forest had been cleared to make way for small farms and large plantations of that ubiquitous tropical Southeast Asian crop – oil palm.

The gleaming new entrance to the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone. If I had been here just 24 hours later I would have been able to witness the official inauguration ceremony of this gate, attended by luminaries from the Sihanoukville Provincial government and the Chinese embassy.

Tracts of recently cleared and leveled land dotted with brand new single story factories were the first signs that the bus was approaching Sihanoukville.  A tall and modern-looking structure marked the entrance to the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone, a joint economic project between Cambodia and China, inaugurated in early 2008. The project’s developers claim that by 2015 the Zone will house some 300 companies, provide 80,000 jobs, and generate $2 billion worth of exports.

The developer’s projections may be wildly optimistic, but there is no doubt that Sihanoukville is a booming town. Nowhere outside of China have I seen so many construction projects underway in such a small area: shopping centers, office parks, industrial buildings and, near the beach, guest houses and hotels.

Guest houses and hotels are evidence of another large industry in Sihanoukville: tourism. The is Cambodia’s main beach resort, and attracts both locals and foreigners (Though, for the most part, they go to separate beaches. I saw Cambodians relaxing under cover and out of the sun, many of them swimming clothed. Foreigners – mainly European and Australian – lay in the sun or under umbrellas, wearing speedos and bikinis.)

Entrance to Sihanoukville port

Despite its calm sea, sandy beaches, magnificent offshore islands, and low prices, Sihanoukville has not yet become a major destination for visitors to Southeast Asia (the backpackers’ bible, Lonely Planet, includes it in a “Roads Less Travelled Cambodia itinerary.”) But I suspect that this is going to change, and soon. The new and luxurious Sokha Beach Resort has rooms starting at $160 a night, and additional rooms are under construction (a far cry from my $35 a night accommodation.) There is talk of direct flights from Siem Reap (near Angkor, currently the only Cambodian stop for most visitors to the country); this would allow upmarket visitors to avoid the bone rattling and nerve wracking journey along Cambodia’s Most Dangerous Highway.  I would hazard a guess that Sihanoukville – now blissfully free of fast food vendors, souvenir shops, and t-shirt sellers – will be a very different place five years from now.

Sunset at Sihanoukville

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to visit Sihanoukville’s port. Like ports worldwide, this one is very picky about who is allowed to enter the premises. Geographers with cameras, I learned, don’t make the cut. So I had to gaze from afar at the port and the two ships docked there (a cargo vessel and an aging passenger ship apparently abandoned when its owners went bankrupt.)

Shut out of the port, I had no choice but to return to my hotel, don a swimsuit, and head to the beach to sip on a locally manufactured product, share a $10 local meal (grilled whole snapper, squid, and prawns) with a friend, and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Thailand.

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In writing this review, I drew on David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (Westview Press, 1966.)

In most parts of the world, traffic laws are fairly similar. Stop for red lights, stay on your side of the road except in passing zones, only pass when it’s safe to do so, obey the speed limit, and so on.

What differs from country to country is driver behavior and, more generally, road culture.  In my travels, I have reached the conclusion that road culture is every bit as important as religion, economics, politics, or food when it comes to understanding what makes a place and its people tick.

I pondered this as I stood for twenty minutes or more just watching the traffic at an intersection near my hotel in Phnom Penh. What I saw was a distinctly Cambodian scene.  Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

I find two things most striking about what I witnessed at this intersection. First, despite its superficial chaos, whatever is happening here seems to work. Second, nobody gets mad.

There are some lessons here for drivers all around the world to learn. Australians might notice, for example, that the functionality of this intersection does not depend on rigid adherence to traffic laws by all drivers (I have never come across drivers – or pedestrians – as law-abiding as those in Australia.)

Israelis might note that nobody is shouting, swearing, or waving fists at anybody else in this scene (The US State Department has gone so far as to issue a warning to visitors to Israel that drivers are dangerous and don’t obey traffic laws.)

Americans likewise might take heed at the fact that there is no evidence in this Phnom Penh scene of road rage, or even road irritation. (It is also noteworthy that despite someone being cut off virtually every second in this scene, nobody gets shot.)

I have never driven in Cambodia, and I don’t think I am likely to do so. I am not laid back enough behind the wheel.  A near miss on the road shakes me up. If somebody cuts in front of me I take it personally. I lack the gumption to push in front of another vehicle. And I don’t have the courage to drive on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic.

But above all, I am unsuited to driving in Cambodia because I lack what seems to be the essential prerequisite for driving in this country: faith.  Cambodian drivers, it seems, just know that they will get to the other side of the intersection, even though other traffic may be converging on them from all directions. They believe that other drivers will avoid hitting them, just as they will avoid hitting others. They have the serenity to accept that that the conduct of other drivers is something they cannot change. They understand the difference between cutting off and cutting in, and appreciate that the latter is not motivated by any aggressive or personal intent whereas the former is (and is therefore to be avoided.). They have the utmost faith that despite the laws of physics and the immutability of statistical probability that they will get to their destinations today, just as they did yesterday.

And, on most days in this city, most people do.*

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*But not everybody does. Update March 5, 2010: According to an article in the Phnom Penh Post today, the Minister of Public Works and Transportation (who also heads the National Road Safety Commission) the road fatality rate in Cambodia is 12.6 per 100,000 population. The US rate is 14,2, the UK rate is 5.4,  Japan’s is 5.7.  Considering that very few Cambodians drive vehicles, though, Cambodia’s road fatality rate might suggest that faith alone isn’t enough to protect the country’s drivers.

Cruise ship at Labadee, Haiti (AP photo from The Guardian)

“Sixty miles from Haiti’s devastated earthquake zone, luxury liners dock at private beaches where passengers enjoy jetski rides, parasailing and rum cocktails delivered to their hammocks.”
The Guardian, January 17, 2010 (Five days after the Haiti earthquake.)
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NPR interviewer: And what do people do when they go ashore at Labadee? [Royal Caribbean’s custom-built resort for cruise ship passengers in Haiti]

Adam Goldstein: [CEO, Royal Caribbean International]: They have fun and they enjoy themselves… We’ve just invested $50 million into the property. I think Royal Caribbean is Haiti’s largest foreign direct investor in any industry. We actually have a pier there now. We also have put in some fairly significant attractions, like a long zip line over the water and an alpine-style coaster on the hill, as well as cabanas and restaurants. So it’s a very full day, and now our guests understand in coming there that they are proximate to the affected area.”
National Public Radio, January 19, 2010
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“Monies that are coming in as part of tourism are going to trickle down throughout the local economy at a time when the local people need it the most,” said Brian Mullis, president of Sustainable Travel International, a nonprofit organization that promotes responsible travel. Because visitors can have a positive effect during their stay, tourism should still be taking place in Haiti, even at this terrible time, Mullis said.”
CNN, January 21, 2010
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I can understand the economic reasoning, and I accept the argument that Haiti needs those tourist dollars now more than ever. But at the same time I find the thought of tourists frolicking on the beaches of Haiti less than a week after the earthquake disturbing. What do you think?

Updated January 14, 6 am.

I am writing these words less than 24 hours after the disastrous January 12 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince in Haiti.  I have CNN on in front of me, and it seems to that despite the non-stop coverage of the disaster, nobody really knows what is going on, how many people have lost their lives, or how many have been injured. But what is clear is that this is a disaster of epic proportions, and that its human impact will be at least as severe as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and possibly even as profound as that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

In order to understand the impact of this earthquake, though, we need to go beyond the live reports and graphic photographs, and ask why this  earthquake in this place has been so devastating. It was a powerful quake, to be sure, but other quakes as or even more more powerful than this have done less damage and killed fewer people. The answer to this question lies in the physical and human geography of Haiti.

The Physical Geography of the Earthquake

To understand the Haiti earthquake and its consequences, we first need to ask why the earthquake (and its powerful aftershocks) occurred here rather than anywhere else. The answer to this question can be found by examining the structure of the earth, and in particular the geographic configuration of the earth’s tectonic plates.

The earth's tectonic plates (from U.S. Geological Survey. Click to enlarge the image)

Most earthquakes are caused by movement along the boundaries of the massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. Yesterday’s Haiti earthquake was caused by movement at the boundary of the Caribbean and North American plates. In this area, the Caribbean plate is moving eastward with respect to the north American plate at an average speed of about 20 mm per year. This movement doesn’t take place smoothly, but rather in a series of jolts, which can produce earthquakes of varying sizes. In the area where yesterday’s quake occurred, there had been little movement for 250 years, according to a British geologist. “It’s been gathering stress all that time as the plates move past each other, and it was really just a matter of time before it released all that energy. The question was going to be whether it would release it all at once or in a series of smaller earthquakes,” he told the BBC.

Yesterday’s quake had a magnitude of 7.0 (this is a measure of the amount of energy released by the quake,) and was followed by numerous aftershocks, many of them with magnitudes of over 5.0.

The location and intensity of the earthquake, and the location of aftershocks. (Source: Washington Post)

Earthquakes can take place at various depths below the surface, and be caused by either vertical or horizontal movement of rock (or a combination of both.) The Haiti quake was caused by horizontal movement, and took place at a depth of about 10km below the surface. This is a relatively shallow earthquake, and its shallowness contruibuted to its devastating power (earthquakes that take place deep below the surface tend to cause less damage, since the rock between the quake and the surface acts as a buffer, absorbing some of the quake’s energy.)

The topography of the area affected by the quake appears also to have contributed to the devastation. Many of the of  Port-au-Prince’s residential area have been built on hillsides surrounding the city, and early photographs of the damage show that many homes appear to have tumbled down the slopes under the force of the quake (see below.)

Physical geography has been unkind to Haiti not just in terms of seismic activity. The country also lies in the path of North Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms. In 2008, four such storms hit the country, causing widespread damage and the loss of several hundred lives. early a tenth of the country’s population needed humanitarian assistance as a result of the storms.The effect of storms in Haiti is exacerbated by the fact that most of the country’s trees have been cut down to make charcoal, which is used, particularly in the poorest households,  for cooking. Today, only 3 percent of the country’s original forests remain.  Deforestation, by removing the natural ’sponge’ that absorbs rainfall, means that storms would otherwise have done little harm now cause floods and landslides.

The Human Geography of Haiti

Population Geography. Not all earthquakes cause disasters. In fact, not even all powerful earthquakes cause disasters. If a quake takes place in an unpopulated area it may cause little or no damage. Earthquakes are fairly common in parts of Siberia, for example, but seldom make the news because the hardly anybody lives there.

The Haiti earthquake, however, struck a densely populated part of a densely populated country. Haiti’s population of 9.2 million people live in a country about the size of Maryland (making it the second most densely populated country in the Americas, after El Salvador.) The epicenter of the quake was just south of Port-au-Prince, the country’s  largest city and most densely populated area. Had the epicenter of the quake been a rural part of the country, the damage would have been considerably less severe.

Economic geography also plays a role in determining the extent of damage and loss of life in earthquakes. Wealthy countries like the United States, Japan and New Zealand are located near tectonic plate boundaries, and are also periodically struck by earthquakes. But these countries can afford  geologists to assess where quakes are most likely,  and engineers and architects to design earthquake resistant roads and buildings. When earthquakes occur, they have the expertise and resources to mount effective search and rescue campaigns, hospitals and medical personnel to treat the injured, and funds to rebuild in the quake’s aftermath.

In 1995, a shallow earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 struck near Kobe, a Japanese city larger and more densely populated than Port-au-Prince. Many buildings were damaged, a highway collapsed, and 5,100 people lost their lives. This was a terrible disaster, to be sure, but even at this early stage it seems certain that far most people in Haiti will lose their lives or their homes. The reason: Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and Haiti is one of the poorest. And, as Nicholas Kristof observes in his blog “Frequently what kills people in … disasters isn’t just nature but its interconnection with poverty.”

Every year United Nations Development Program ranks the countries in the world on the basis of their Human Development Index, essentially a measure of human material wellbeing. In 2009, Haiti was came 149th out of 182 countries ranked by the UNDP. Its ranking was ahead of that of most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but far behind other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Average life expectancy in Haiti is 61 years, and four out of ten Haitians are illiterate. According to the World Bank, the country’s Gross National Income per capita was $560, and more than half the population lives on less than one dollar a day and 78% on less that two. Not everybody in Haiti is poor, though. One percent of the country’s population controls nearly half of Haiti’s wealth.

Shantytown at Canapé Vert in 2004 (Photo from AFP.)

In this earthquake, it appears that  the worst hit areas of  Port-au-Prince are also its poorest areas, where tens of thousands of people live in densely packed shantytowns. Like shantytowns anywhere, Haiti’s shantytown are usually on the least desirable land. The Canapé Vert area of Port-au-Prince is such a place; steep hillslopes make the land useless for most purposes, so poor people have moved in and built their homes here. The photograph on the left shows Canapé Vert in 2004. Residents of shantytowns usually build their homes themselves, with whatever they can afford and whatever is available nearby: wood, mud, cheap concrete or bricks. This means that the homes are often not very sturdily constructed. In an earthquake-prone area like Haiti, this means that the poorest and most densely populated areas are often also the most vulnerable to damage. The photograph below shows part of Canapé Vert after the earthquake (it is impossible to tell, though, whether this is the same area pictured in the photograph above.)

Collapsed buildings on a hillslope in the Canapé Vert area of Port-au-Prince.

But it is not only the poorer areas of Port-au-Prince where buldings are poorly constructed. According to American architects and engineers who have worked in Haiti, “most if not all of the buildings have major engineering flaws.” Because of large scale deforestation, wood is scarce and expensive, so most buildings are made of poured concrete or block. But concrete is imported and therefore expensive, so it is frequently diluted by adding sand to the mix. Steel reinforcing is also expensive, so builders often skimp on it too. It is hardly any wonder that so many buildings succumbed during the earthquake.

Political Geography. Haiti is not only the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it has historically also been one of the most unstable politically. The country managed to throw off French colonial control – and slavery – in the early 19th century, making it the first country in the Caribbean to attain its independence. But for much of its subsequent history, the country has been wracked by conflict between its small French-speaking minority and its poor, Creole speaking black majority (decendants of slaves brought to the country under French rule.)

During the late 20th century, the country was forced to endure near three decades of dictatorship under Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc.” Their rule was brutal, and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The election of a civilian leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1990 gave many hope, but he was soon overthrown in a military coup. Backed by US military intervention, Aristide was restored to power in 1994, but in the following decade years of his rule, the situation in Haiti did not improve much. He was eventually ousted in 2004, and a UN stabilization force was sent to the country to help end widespread clashes between gangs and political groups. But widespread violence continued to plague the country, and the human rights situation remained bleak.

A Natural Disaster?

There is no such thing as a purely natural disaster. When the earth shakes, a volcano erupts, or a hurricane strikes, we measure its impact mainly by the toll it exacts on human beings and the infrastructure that sustains them. This impact is partly a consequence of the intensity of the natural event, but that impact is either exacerbated or mitigated by the various geographies of the disaster. How many people live there? Where, exactly, do they live – on hillslopes, in valleys, on flat land, or along the ocean? How wealthy are they? How well are there homes built? What building regulations exist in the area, and how well are they enforced? How extensive is the  transportation and communication infrastructure in the area? How well developed is the medical infrastructure of the area?

Yesterday’s earthquake was not only powerful, but it also struck just about the worst possible place at the worst possible time. It struck the most populated part of one of the world’s poorest countries less than a year after a series of damaging storms. It struck a place where a history of political instability and ineffectual government meant that infrastructure was meager, urban planning was poor non-existent, and building codes were weak or weakly enforced. Rescuing quake survivors will obviously be very difficult, as will treating their wounds and tending to the needs of survivors. Finally, reconstruction will require far more resources than Haiti has or is ever likely to have.

What it already clear is that Haiti will need all the help it can get in terms of material resources, human expertise, and political support. The devastation will be severe no matter what happens, but each one of us can help Haiti, albeit in small ways. For a start, we can share our resources with those in need (I have listed below some worthy organizations that are now accepting donations to help the residents of Haiti.) Second, we can make sure that we educate ourselves about this tragedy, and what makes ‘natural’ disasters so disastrous. That way we will be in position to foresee them, and help others do likewise. And third, we can make sure that we, and our political leaders, don’t forget Haiti after the camera crews and reporters leave.

Update: For a persuasive response to the pernicious argument that there is no point in sending assistance to Haiti, take a loook at this column by Nicholas Kristof.

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For more information, see…

Country profile: Haiti, from BBC News.

Information on the Haiti earthquake from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics (USGS)

And also look at Google Earth’s images and information from Haiti.

To help. consider making a donation to…

Partners in Health “At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone.”

Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders)

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

World Food Programme.

Save the Children.

Note: I am not an expert on Haiti, or on earthquakes. If anyone reading this post spots any errors or significant omissions, I encourage you to contact me or post a comment here.

Donald N Rallis

Tra in Phnom Penh, January 2010

Note: This post was updated on March 6, 2010.

Tra was born in 1982 in Cambodia’s Takeo Province, a predominantly rural area two hour’s bus ride south of Phnom Penh. His parents were – and are – farmers, living in a small village, and raising rice on about 3 hectares of land surrounding their home.

I visited Tra’s family in March 2010, and spent a night with them in their home. Theirs is a typical Cambodian rural farmstead: a small house, sitting on 3 meter high stilts, with a sheltered area beneath that is used as a living and cooking area, and also for keeping some livestock. Water comes from a well behind the house, operated with a handpump. Alongside the pump is a large urn of water, used for bathing. The home has no electricity, and no sanitation facilities. (I have posted photographs from my visit here.)

Tra is the second oldest of four siblings. For most of his childhood he lived with his parents and his maternal grandmother. He grew up with the legacy of two recent conflicts, the Vietnam War, and the genocide that took place during the four year rule of the Khmer Rouge.

To call the conflict in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s the ‘Vietnam War’ is to do a grave injustice to Cambodians like Tra’s family. The war wasn’t restricted to Vietnam; in the 1970s it was expanded by the US to include the widespread bombing of parts of Cambodia and Laos, in particularly the Vietcong resupply route known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Tra's family home in Takeo Province. One of the advantages of having a house on stilts is that the design provides a cool and protected living below. Upstairs is the family's sleeping area.

Tra was born nearly a decade after the American bombing ended, but he grew up with its legacy. He and his siblings used to swim in craters left by US bombs, now filled with water. Some, he recalls, were up to three meters deep. More ominously, his two younger brothers had a close call when playing in the forest near their home. There they came across a round object they thought was some kind of fruit. The younger brother wanted to cut it open with a knife to get to the fruit inside. The older boy, more suspicious than his sibling, instead took it and threw it into the undergrowth, where it exploded, showering them with dirt and mud. Miraculously, they escaped injury. Numerous other Cambodians and Laotians have not been so lucky, losing limbs, eyes, or lives to UXOs, unexploded ordinance.

Pol Pot’s murderous rule, from 1975 – 1979, had a more lethal impact on Tra’s family than did the Vietnam war. Tra’s grandfather died of starvation, the most common cause of death among Cambodians during this time. Some of his more educated relatives – including a great uncle who was a lawyer, and a great aunt who was a professor – fell victim to the campaign by the Khmer Rouge to rid the country of its intellectuals and wealthier classes. They were arrested and presumably killed. I met Tra’s 87 year old great uncle during my visit to Takeo Province: he told me that he lost all nine of his children under the Pol Pot regime.

As a child, Tra worked on his parents' farm, replanting rice shoots in a paddy like this.

Another relative, severely beaten by Khmer Rouge soldiers, somehow managed to survive, her baby in her arms, and made it across the border into Thailand. There her fractured skull was treated by members of a humanitarian group, which also helped her to gain asylum in the US. She made a home for herself in southern California, selling cakes to the local Cambodian community and working in a local factory to earn money to support herself and her young son. Life was a struggle, but she and her son worked hard, and today that son has a Ph.D. and a good job in the U.S.

Tra owes a particular debt to another aunt – I’ll call her Ra – his mother’s younger sister. After completing high school, Ra moved to Phnom Penh and found a job working in the post office, then obtained a government scholarship to study in Moscow. Upon her return – now proficient in Russian, French, English and Cambodian – she obtained a job in the Ministry of Agriculture. Then, thanks to the sponsorship of a relative who worked at the Cambodian embassy in Canberra, she managed to apply for a visa to emigrate to Australia.  Her application was successful, and today works as a social worker with drug addicts and homeless people in Sydney.  She has told Tra that she doesn’t need much money or a fancy home. Instead, she prefers to help other members of her family gain the kind of education that will allow them to escape poverty and succeed in life.

Part of the living area underneath Tra's family home.

Tra lived with another aunt for several years when he was a child, since his parents lacked the resources to support their four children. But it was Ra who took a particular interest in Tra; she thinks of him, he says, as her son. Ra made sure that Tra finished high school, and encouraged him to continue his studies at a university.  But more pressing concerns intervened: Tra’s sister had been diagnosed with a mental illness, and the money sent by his aunt for his education had to be used instead for her treatment. So it was three years after his high school graduation that Tra eventually began his studies at university in Phnom Penh. Without Ra’s help, he says, he would never have been able to afford the $382 annual tuition costs for the first two years (rising to $500 for the third and fourth years.)

University was a struggle for Tra.  He had always done well in school, was a diligent worker, and was intellectually more than competent to cope with university work.  But there were challenges, among them the fact that he had never before used a computer (Neither his childhood home nor the nearby village had electricity, let alone internet connections.) When a class assignment required him to use a word processor, he was at a loss. When required to do some internet-based research, he had no idea what to do. So he went to an internet café and asked for help.

Academically, he did fine, but economically and socially he faced significant challenges.  First, he had to work at a full time job; his aunt was paying his tuition, but he needed to find money for his living expenses. He found a job with a relative: in exchange for working in her small restaurant for six hours a day, she provided him with accommodation on an open balcony, plus a salary of $5 a month. For several years he lived on that balcony, studying at night by candlelight, rising early to work in the restaurant, then heading to campus on his bicycle at noon.

As a student, Tra was something of a recluse. Although his classmates invited him to socialize with them, he felt that he couldn’t do so because of his financial circumstances.  If they invited him to join them for lunch, he had to make up an excuse, since he didn’t have money to buy lunch. After school, he would wait until his classmates had all left campus on their motorcycles before pedaling home on his bicycle. But he managed to graduate in four years, and set about looking for a job in Phnom Penh.

Finding a job wasn’t easy. His first job was as a cleaner in a café; after being dismissed from that job he was unemployed for a year, before finding employment as a bartender at a local hotel.

Tra found his current job in 2008; it is an office job with a shipping company, and he works on arranging the shipping of goods in and out of Cambodia. He works 5½ days a week, and earns a monthly salary of $170.

He could make a lot more money, Tra says, in government service. The customs service is particularly lucrative; he knows of people making up to $4,000 a month. Their salaries are not much different from his, but their incomes come from the opportunities that positions of power and authority provide in Cambodia. For a person who wants to make a living honestly in this country, it appears that opportunities are limited. (Even Phnom Penh public school teachers, Tra tells me, supplement their income by selling stationery and supplies to students, levying a 100 riehl (about 3c) daily fee on each student, and accepting payments for increased grades. He didn’t encounter this kind of corruption in his rural school; students simply wouldn’t have been able to afford the payments, and would have dropped out of school if forced to pay.)

Today Tra lives in a room he rents for $100 a month in a building not far from his place of work. Cheaper rooms are available on the city’s outskirts, but since he still has to rely on his bicycle to get around, he has to live here. The room is about 20 square meters (200 square feet) in size, and has a small cold-water bathroom. Water and electricity cost about $30 a month.

Tra could not afford a place like this on his salary alone, and so shares the room with his sister and a 22-year-old cousin. His sister and cousin sleep on beds, he on a mat on the floor. His sister suffers from mental illness, and cannot work, so she takes care of the room, does the laundry, and buys food (he gives her $2.50 a day to shop for the three of them. He provides another $20 per month for her medications.) The cousin is a current beneficiary of the Aunt Ra’s largesse; she is paying for his college tuition. Tra worries about him, though, and has taken him to task several times for not devoting enough time and effort to his studies. “You are here to study,” he tells his cousin, “Not to hang around with friends.”

As I listened to Tra’s story, I reflected on my own background. My primary and secondary education at one of South Africa’s best private schools, undergraduate work at the country’s top university (free because my father was a faculty member there.) What I thought of as a poorly paid teaching assistantships saw me through my Masters and doctoral studies in the U.S. (In the 1980s, I was earning three times as much for my part-time assistantship as Tra earns tweny five years later for his 45 hour-a week job.) I thought back on the “struggles” I had during those years, and how much I had bemoaned my impecunious circumstances as a graduate student and young faculty member, and about how much I complain now about the poor pay of a US college professor.

I felt humbled as I realized that my accomplishments pale by comparison with those of a person like Tra (and there are millions of Tras around the world.) I had to work for my successes to be sure, but they came relatively easily, my path having being smoothed by the accidents of my birth, geography, and circumstance, by the efforts of my parents, and by the various networks I had access to. Although my parents were not particularly well-off, and I am today far from wealthy by American standards, I have never had to worry about whether I could afford a meal, whether I had enough money to make the journey to school or work, or whether I could pay for a place to live.

I learned Tra’s story over the course of a few days, in conversations over meals and as he showed me around Phnom Penh.  He related the facts of his life in a matter-of-fact way, without a hint of complaint or self-pity. I was awed by his determination to get an education and his resilience in overcoming the enormous obstacles that faced him during his childhood and youth, and that face him now as he tries to fashion a career for himself in 21^st century Cambodia.

I told Tra of my respect and admiration for him and his achievements, and I asked him whether I might write about him for this blog. “Why?” he answered, “I’m just a normal guy.”

Donald N. Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
January 5, 2010

Update: When I visited Cambodia again in March 2010, Tra invited me to visit his family’s home in Takeo Province, and to attend the wedding of a relative. I spent two days with the family, and got to see the farm and meet members of Tra’s family. I have posted photographs from this visit on my Picasa site.

Updated (again) on January 8, 2010.

This is my fourth visit to Phnom Penh, and I have been here for three days. For reasons I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint, I really like this city. Among the many sights, sounds, and experiences that have made an impression on me so far on this visit are…

• Meeting a person intimately affected by the Cambodian Genocide within minutes of leaving the airport. My taxi driver, after asking me about my family, tells me that he lost both of his parents under the Khmer Rouge. He was a child of seven when the Khmer Rouge seized power.

• “It’s the Ministry of Corruption.” The same taxi driver’s answer to my question about a modern and lavish looking building on the road from the airport into the city.
• A designer label seems to be attached to just about every item that might reasonably display one. To visit a Phnom Penh market is to be assailed by logos of Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Louis Vuitton. And all at bargain prices! Polo shirts for $10 a piece (less if you bargain hard.) If everyone knows that these items are fakes, though, why do they want the designer labels? (I don’t know why people want designer labels when they are genuine, either, but that’s another matter.)
• Honesty in retail is alive and well in some sectors. The mobile phone dealer on the sidewalk outside the Central Market shows me the latest model Nokia phone/camera/whatever. Price: $170. Then she pulls out an identical looking item, and tells me it is a Chinese copy of the Nokia. Price: $80. Take your pick.
• 

  Download guy installing music on a customer's mobile phone.

  Another intellectual property item: A young man sits on a plastic chair under an umbrella outside one of Phnom Penh’s electronics malls. In front of him is a computer. His business: downloads. For a few dollars, he will install a few hundred songs on your new iPod, MP3 player, or mobile phone. Videos also available.

• And another: The recently released movie Invictus is available for a dollar or so in Phnom Penh’s Russian market. It hasn’t been released on DVD in the US yet. Also available at the same store: Rosetta Stone language DVDs, Apple and Microsoft software, and video games. All for the price of a blank DVD plus a few dollars at most.
• 

  Picking a mobile phone number. "Better" numbers command higher prices. I chose a cheap - and therefore inauspicious and easily forgettable - number

  Photo  yesterday’s Phnom Penh Gazette: A road roller crushing thousands of illicit DVDs confiscated from local retailers. The accompanying report explains that the government has promised to get tough on music and video piracy.

Fireworks and a full moon as 2010 begins.

• The sight of thousands of Phnom Penh citizens gathered in a park in the center of the city under a clear sky to listen to live music and celebrate the coming of 2010. The obvious boredom and impatience of the crowd as the city’s mayor takes to the stage and drones on interminably as the clock approaches midnight.  He apparently exhausts his list of people to thank and city accomplishments to trumpet just in time, and surrenders the microphone to an MC who counts down the seconds to midnight.  The brief but spectacular fireworks, exploding against the backdrop of a full moon.
• A news story in the Phnom Penh Gazette reporting on the winner of this year’s “Miss Landmine” competition, an attracting young woman with one leg. Her prize: $1000 in cash and a new prosthetic limb. (The contest had to be undertaken surreptitiously after being banned by the Cambodian government.)
• Another story in the Gazette reporting on the controversy over how to commemorate 31st anniversary, on January 7th, of the overthrow the Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge by invading Vietnamese forces. The political opposition in Cambodia claims that it is the anniversary of an invasion and the beginning of the “malevolent presence of Vietnamese forces” (who remained in the country until 1989.) Prime Minister Hun Sen (a Khmer Rouge defector who fought alongside the Vietnamese and who assumed office during their presence) maintains that the day marks “a victory for all Cambodian people.” Those who oppose the January 7th celebration, he says, are “sinful,” they are “not human. They are animals.”

• My pleasant but unremarkable Thursday night dinner of Cambodian food at a sidewalk restaurant on the Mekong riverfront. $11 for two people, including a large bottle of Angkor beer.  The patrons of the restaurant all appear to be foreigners.

• My Friday lunch of Cambodian noodles, served as I sit on a plastic chair at a metal table in a small restaurant near Phnom Penh’s central market. My Cambodian dining companion suggests that I may not want to eat the large gelatinous red cube sitting atop the noodles; it is apparently blood. He is right. He takes the blood, and I consume the chicken and noodles. They are delicious. The bill is $2 for both of us. I am apparently the only non-Cambodian in the restaurant.  After lunch we purchase a delicious dessert from a roadside seller; it consists of a banana nestling inside a cocoon of sticky rice and coconut, wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked over a fire. I formulate a hypothesis that the quality of restaurant food served in Phnom Penh is inversely proportional to both the number of foreigners eating at the restaurant and the price of the meal. (I test the hypothesis at lunch on Saturday with a dish of chicken fried with ginger at a foreigner-free restaurant. It seems to hold up.)

• The sight of barefoot street children, plastic baskets of books hanging from their necks like food vendors at an old-style movie show, hawking their wares to diners at sidewalk restaurants along the riverfront.  The oldest of the vendors, a boy of 18, tells me he has been doing this work for ten years. He now attends school in the morning and sells books at night to pay for his high school studies.

• A gentle tapping on my arm. I turn, and see the wizened face of an apparently very old woman, raggedly dressed, cupped hands outstretched, asking for money. Then an old man. Then a child. Then a man with one leg and a crutch. Then a man with no legs and one arm, in a wheelchair. I don’t think I have seen so many people begging on the streets anywhere else.

• 

  These are some of the Lexus SUVs I saw in the space of half an hour near Phnom Penh's Central Market.

  Lexus SUVS. Dozens of them. Big ones. They almost outnumber the beggars on the streets of Phnom Penh. They come in two colors, black and tan-brown. Some have the word LEXUS emblazoned on their sides in very large lettering, presumably lest someone mistake them for mere Landcruisers. Many have official government tags displayed on the dashboard, and these apparently bestow immunity from traffic regulations on their drivers. I see one LEXUS with not only a government identification tag, but alongside it a card reading “VIP” in large purple letters. The vehicle pulls up outside a clothing store, a man and a woman alight and go into the store, leaving the LEXUS double parked and blocking traffic.
  
  Update, from an article in the Cambodia Daily on March 5, 2010.

  Sok Vanny drives a behemoth Lexus LX 570, the largest and most luxurious of the Japanese brand’s SUVs, which she imported from the US for more than $100,000. She says it makes her proud.
  “We had been living with empty hands for four to 10 years since the collapse of the Pol Pot regime,” the 53-year-old explained at her automobile spare parts shop in Phom Penh…”We have to buy something that makes us feel proud.”

  
  

• 

  Outside a tailor's shop in Phnom Penh.

  Large numbers of Phnom Penh’s citizens either resting, waiting, or quietly engaged in some  stressless activity I am unable to discern. Some stand on the sidewalk, others sit on park benches. Store owners sit on plastic stools outside their businesses. Tuk-tuk drivers sit with feet up in the back of their vehicles.  To my untrained foreign eye, this all looks to me like guilt-free idleness, and it is an attitude I both admire and envy.

• My encounter with US Embassy security personnel. I am strolling around the park that surrounds Wat Phnom, a shrine a top a small hillock (“phnom”) from which the city takes part of its name.  Standing in the park, I raise my camera to take a photograph of a tuk-tuk (a motorcycle-drawn open taxi) on the street in front of me. Behind the tuk-tuk is the US Embassy, where man in a very official looking uniform starts gesticulating wildly and shouting at me. His colleague comes out of a guard booth, and motions to me to come across the street to him. In the course of my various travels, I have learned that it is generally wise to obey the instructions of people in uniform, so I cross the street. Guard #1 informs me that I am not allowed to take photographs of the embassy, and appears unmoved by my insistence that I was photographing the tuk-tuk. I hand him a copy of my business card and my Virginia drivers license, even though he has not asked for identification from me. He tells me to delete the picture. I ask him whether he works for the US embassy or the Cambodian police. He tells me works for the US embassy. I am irked by the notion that a US government employee should claim authority to decide who may take a picture from a Cambodian public park of a Cambodian vehicle on a Cambodian street. I tell him I will not delete the picture. He talks into his radio, which crackles in response. He tells me to wait. As I wait, I realize that nothing good will come of my sole display of passive resistance, so I delete the picture. When a more senior security officer emerges from the embassy, I tell him that the photograph no longer exists, and offer to let him peruse the 400 pictures on my camera. He demurs, but does invite me to take a photograph of the US flag flying outside the building. I decline, and return to my room on the fourth floor of a large hotel directly across the road from the embassy. I take three pictures of the view from my window, confess it here, and await the arrival of US government contractors at my door.

The view from my fourth floor hotel window in Phnom Penh. The tall building on the right is, I think, a bank. As to the building in the foreground with flag outside... I don't know what it is.

• The strains of “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” still tinkling over the plane’s public address system as I board at Phnom Penh International Airport, temperature 31 degrees Celsius. Over the past three weeks I have been in a Muslim country (Malaysia), a Hindu enclave (Bali) in another Muslim country, and now two Buddhist countries (Thailand and Cambodia.) None of them provided any refuge from the onslaught of Christmas carols (or Christmas displays in stores.) Clearly the mid-winter festival that Christians purloined from pagans has now been re-appropriated by the heathen disciples of the dollar (or Ringgit, Rupiyah, and Baht)

Donald N . Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
January 2010

A collage of scenes from Kuta, Bali.

In 2007, the magazine Travel + Leisure published a ranking of the world’s “Top Ten Islands.” At the top of the list was the Indonesian island of Bali, which, according to the magazine,  ‘stands alone in its lushness and incomparable beauty.’ Among its attractions are ‘long sugary beaches,’ ‘hillside terraces with jewel-green rice paddies,’ and ‘forests dotted with ancient temples.’ Then there are the Balinese people, mostly Hindus whose ‘daily routines are punctuated by prayer, blessings, and rituals.’ Bali, Travel + Leisure concludes, is a ‘compelling, authentic, and utterly singular destination.’

But wait! Is this the same island whose prime tourist centers of Nusa Dua and Kuta were described by the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations as representing ‘the ugly face of crass commercialism?’ The place that specializes in providing young Australians with ‘a cheap, close destination that offers the chance to sample booze, sex, sun and surf before they knuckle down for a university or city job’ (Geographical Magazine.) Is this the place that, according to author Michel Picard, is ‘rife with air and water pollution, beach erosion and reef destruction, water and electricity shortages, saturation of solid waste disposal, not to mention endless traffic jams on the main thoroughfares?’

Pura Ulun Danau Bratan temple, surrounded by the waters of Lake Bratan in Bali's Bendugul region. The temple was built in 1633.

Yes, that is Bali. As I discovered during my visits, it is all of these things. It is an island that attracts tourists with images of picturesque mountainside rice paddies, and then gobbles up agricultural land to make way for more hotels, resorts, restaurants, and souvenir shops to cater to them. A place that invites visitors to experience its forests, mountains, and coral reefs, then accommodates and transports these tourists in pollution- and energy-intensive ways that threaten the same natural environment that they have come to see.

Another contradiction is to be found in Bali’s policy of promoting ‘Cultural Tourism,’ which aims to use Balinese culture as a tourist attraction, thus generating revenue that can be used to foster that same culture, ostensibly without debasing it. Balinese culture is indeed distinctive and interesting: this is a society that was first exposed to Hinduism nearly two millennia ago, and has remained resolutely Hindu despite the fact that it is now part of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country.  The island’s cultural landscape is unmistakably Hindu: temples abound, and it is hard to find a hotel, shop, or home without a small shrine.

Sunset, as seen from a Bali hotel

Although the tourism authorities don’t say so explicitly, it is clear that Bali’s relatively tolerant social environment creates a space where alcohol-swilling bikini-clad tourists tourists can be separated from their dollars without causing undue affront to Indonesia’s relatively conservative Muslim majority. And, for Westerners, Bali is an unthreatening part of this large and perhaps somewhat alien country. (Perhaps I’m being ungenerous, but I suspect that many visitors to Bali probably think that Bali is a country and don’t know that they are in Indonesia. Their Balinese hosts certainly do little to disabuse their visitors of this notion. Among the thousands of souvenirs and clothing items I saw on display in Bali not a single one contained the word ‘Indonesia.’ All of the t-shirt vendors I asked sold dozens of t-shirts with the name of the island emblazoned on them, but none could find any that confessed the name of the country. )

A consequence of ‘Cultural Tourism,’ though, is that Balinese culture has inevitably mutated. As Michel Picard notes,

‘the very decision to promote ‘cultural’ tourism has rendered the Balinese self-conscious about a thing they possess called culture. It is as though, thanks to tourism, the Balinese have discovered that they ‘have a culture’–something at once precious and perishable, which they ought to preserve as well as promote.’

For sale on the sidewalk, Kuta. Presumably there is a market for this stuff.

It is difficult to imagine, though, how it is possible to ‘preserve’ culture while at the same time marketing it as a commodity. As Leo Howe, another student of tourism in Bali, has observed

Tourists may not know much about the host society, but for tourism to be
successful the hosts must educate themselves about the tourists in order to present themselves and their society as attractive tourist objects.

What constitutes an attractive tourist object depends on the nature of the tourist. I am certain that whatever the advocates of ‘Cultural Tourism’ envisaged, it was not the kind of tourism that has engulfed the town of Kuta. This is the destination of choice for those young visitors on limited budgets, largely from Australia, looking for ‘booze, sex, sun and surf.’ Most are here because it’s tropical, it’s cheap, and it’s the closest ‘exotic’ destination to home. This has produced what is without doubt the tackiest and most tasteless place I have ever visited. I offer as evidence some of the photographs on this page (with apologies to readers of a delicate disposition.)

Traditional Balinese craftwork?

The result of all of this is that, for better or worse, Bali’s economy is now dependent on tourism for 40 percent of its jobs and more than half of its income, and these figures are increasing.  In 2008, nearly two million visitors came to the island, and despite the international recession, tourist arrivals in the first part of 2009 broke previous records. A cruise ship terminal is now under construction, and a new airport terminal, due to be completed in 2012, will have a capacity of 16 million passengers a year (the current airport can handle 3.5 million.) With all of these changes, Bali has moved from being one of Indonesia’s poorer areas to be one of its more prosperous.

Memorial to the victims of the Bali nightclub bombings, October 2002.

Tourism, though, is a very volatile industry, as Bali discovered in 2002. On October 12 of that year, two bombs were detonated in or near nightclubs in the town of Kuta, an area particularly popular with young visitors on limited budgets. 202 people were killed, 88 of them Australian, and all but 38 foreigners. Members of a group called Jemaah Islamiyah claimed responsibility for the blasts; the group deliberately targeted an area popular with Australians, apparently in response to Australia’s support for the US so-called “War on Terror,” as well as that country’s support for the independence of East Timor. Within three weeks, hotel occupancy rates in Bali declined from 70 to 15 percent, and tourist revenues plummeted. They started to rise gradually in 2003, only to be hit again by the SARS epidemic (which was particularly severe East and Southeast Asia.) Then, in December 2004, came the Indian Ocean tsunami, making foreigners jittery again about visiting the region.  And, since Indonesia is the most tectonically active populated area in the world, it is not unlikely that earthquakes or volcanic eruptions will have an impact on tourism in the future.

Planting rice in the Bendugul region of central Bali

I left Bali confused. Confused about the impact and desirability of tourism for places like Bali, confused about my role as tourist, observer, and polluter, and confused about notions of culture and history.  Then I remembered something I frequently tell my students: that the realization of how little we know is a sign that we are learning something. In the complicated real world, confusion can be an important part of understanding.

I guess this means that I will just have to go back to Bali some time to learn some more, and perhaps become a little more confused.

_______

In addition to the sources I have linked to above, I relied on the following for much of the information in this blog. I took the photographs on this page in December 2009 and July 2006. (For more photographs, see my Bali album on Faceboook. You don’t need to be a Facebook member to see it.)

Brace, Matthew. 2003. ‘The Road back to Bali.” Geographical Magazine (UK.) 26-34.

Hanna, Willard A. 2004.  Bali Chronicles: A Lively account of the island’s history from early times to the 1970s. Periplus. (First published under a different title in 1976.)

Howe, L. 2005. The changing world of Bali: religion, society and tourism, Routledge, New York.

Picard, Michel. 2003. ‘Tourism and Balinization in a Time of Reformasi.’ Indonesia and the Malay World. Vol. 31, No. 89. 108-118.

Wilms, Heinz. 2008. ‘Some reflections on tourism in Bali.’ Contours. 8-10.

Donald N. Rallis
Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia
December 2009

“Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton.”
Eric Hobsbawm, British historian.

Manchester, July 2009.

And, Hosbawn might have added, whoever says cotton says Manchester. For it was in this city in the English midlands that the modern cotton industry began, and with it the Industrial Revolution that would be pivotal in shaping not only the history but also the geography of the modern world.

By spurring a demand for raw materials to feed its burgeoning industries, the Industrial Revolution shaped 18^th and 19^th century colonialism, as Europe’s industrial powers sough to secure sources of essential materials from around the globe.

By drawing people together to work in factories rather than on farms or in artisan’s workshops, the Industrial Revolution transformed population geography and gave rise to modern cities, and, for the first time in human history, to sizeable states where city dwellers outnumbered farmers or hunters and gatherers.

To transport raw materials to factories and to take finished products to market demanded more that the foot-power of human beings and draft animals (on land), or a reliance on the oceans, waterways and winds provided by Nature. So with the Industrial Revolution came a transportation revolution, first in the form of canal building and new sailing technologies, in improved means of navigation, and steam power to drive ships and trains.  All of this led to more trade, locally, nationally, and globally, and ultimately facilitated process we know today as globalization.

And, of course, the Industrial Revolution was fundamental to the rise of capitalism, the economic system that continues to be the driving force of the world economy (and, many would argue, of global inequality.)

But why did this all begin in the English city of Manchester? In an effort to answer this question, and to learn something about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, I decided to make a stop in the city during my recent summer travels.

Why Manchester?

It was raining on the July day when I arrived in Manchester.  It rained the following day as well.  In fact it rained every day for the entire week I spent in the city.  I spent the week – rain jacket clad, umbrella in hand – riding city buses, wandering the damp streets, and visiting some of the city’s excellent museums, looking for the answer to my question.

19th century buildings of the Museum of Science and Industry, and the 21st century Beetham Hilton Tower

A good place to start, I decided, was Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI). So, on my first day in the city, I hopped on a bus and headed for the old railroad station, near the corner of Liverpool and Water Roads, which today houses the Museum.

MOSI’s address, it turned out, together with the rain that drenched me on my way to the museum, were the first clues to the complex answer to my question. Water and the nearby port of Liverpool, it seems, were two of the array of factors that combined to allow Manchester to develop the industry that launched a revolution.

Why Cotton?

Cotton has been used to make fabric for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians wore clothes made of the cotton that grew in their sub-tropical climates. The process of converting the dirty and seed-filled bolls of raw cotton into thread, and the thread into fabric, was cumbersome and labor intensive, and the finished product was therefore expensive.  In cooler climates, wool, flax, and hemp were used to make textiles; imported cotton fabrics were outside the price range of all but the wealthiest members of society.

By 1600 or so, a fabric called fustian was being made in England; it consisted of a linen warp (lengthwise fibers) and a cotton weft (crosswise.)  Fustian makers soon settled on the Lancashire region (including Manchester) as a good place to ply their trade, largely because of the very same damp climate that plagued my visit. Humid air, it turns out, helps thin fibers of cotton stick together as they are spun into thread. It was around this nascent local cotton industry that large-scale cotton production grew up later.

One of Manchester's early canals

In England, during the 17^th century, cotton fabric became less expensive with the rise of cotton textile production in India, where cotton grew and labor was cheap.

English textile makers couldn’t possibly compete with India; their labor costs were simply too high. One way out of this dilemma was to try to reduce local costs; another was to protect local textile makes by laws, regulations, and tariffs.

Some of the protectionist measures enacted by the English government were ingenious. The Burial in Wool Acts of the 1660s, for example, decreed that ‘No corps should be buried in anything other than what is made of sheep’s wool only.’ But clothing regulations for the departed weren’t enough. More effective were the tariffs and prohibitions on the importation of foreign cotton textiles, enacted in the early years of the 18^th century.

But tariffs alone proved insufficient too. Another way to counter the threat of cheaper Indian cotton textiles was to figure out a way to make them more economically at home.  Since there was no way that local labor could ever be had as cheaply as that in India, the only way to reduce costs was by reducing the amount of labor needed to produce cotton textiles. In other words, the solution was mechanization.

Whether by luck, ingenuity, or otherwise, England in the late 1700s was home to several capable inventors who were equal to the task.  In 1738, two inventors in Birmingham patented a rudimentary spinning jenny; a machine to speed up the painstaking task of spinning cotton fiber. More important was Richard Arkwright’s 1769 patent for his breakthrough ‘water frame,’ a machine which drew out and spun threads of cotton strong enough to be used as the warp – the long thread – in weaving cloth.

An early cotton spinning machine, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Arkwright’s machine was powered by the only reliable non-animate source of kinetic energy available in his day: running water. In the damp climes of Lancashire, where Arkwright lived, there was no shortage surface water, running down the slopes of nearby Pennines toward the Irish Sea. So it was that Arkwright’s first factory was set up in his home village of Chorley, near Manchester.  Other factories, utilizing the same locational advantages, quickly grew up nearby.

Just as quickly, a spate of new inventions followed, many of them preserved and in display at MOSI.  In 1779, Samuel Crompton built his first ‘mule,’ a hybrid (hence its name) of a spinning jenny and a water frame, which spun such fine yarns that British weavers were able to match in quality the muslins made in India.

This early mechanization led to the very rapid expansion of the British textile industry; between 1780 and 1800, exports grew at an average of more than 10 percent per annum. Much of this production was for the export market: during the same period, textile exports grew at an annual rate of 14 percent.

With the rise of export markets, Manchester was able to capitalize on another geographic advantage, its access to the nearby port of Liverpool via the River Irwell (with the help of some small canals built in the 1730s.) Through Liverpool, textiles were shipped across the world, and in return came raw materials (notably raw cotton) and an increasing array of other products necessary to sustain a growing industrial town and its rapidly increasing population.

But soon textile production began to bump up against its limits technological limits, particularly where access to energy was concerned. Water power was better than animal power, but insufficient for the needs of modern industry.  At this point, the genius of a Scottish inventor, James Watt, came to the rescue.  Watt’s signal creation was a commercially viable steam engine, a device that converted heat (from burning coal) into kinetic energy (the motion of a piston and wheel.) Now it was possible for a textile factory to power numerous spinning and weaving machines via a system of belts and wheels all connected to a (relatively) reliable steam engine, running on coal.

Once again, Manchester was at an advantage. Nearby, in central and northern England, lay deposits of easily accessible coal, ample to supply the growing needs of the textile industry.  Also locally available was iron ore, a critical raw material in the manufacture of steam engines and other machinery.

It didn’t take long for other local inventors to recognize the potential of Watt’s steam engine as a power source for motorized transportation. By the 1820s, not far from Manchester in the coal-mining town of Newcastle, the Robert Stephenson was at work on designing and building his trailblazing steam locomotive, the Rocket. At the same time, Robert’s father George was overseeing the building of the world’s first inter-city passenger railway, between Liverpool and Manchester.

In 1830s, amidst great fanfare, a train drawn by Stephenson’s Rocket pulled into Liverpool Road station (the station is today part of the Museum of Science and Industry.) A crowd of eminent persons including the Prime Minister was there to greet this, the world’s first passenger train.  In his exuberance at the occasion, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, one William Huskisson, failed to get out of the way of the oncoming train, and became the world’s first railroad fatality.

Manchester Town Hall

During the nineteenth century, England’s textile industry boomed, and by the 1830s cotton textiles had become the country’s most valuable export.  As the industry boomed, so too did Manchester, which came to be known as ‘Cottonopolis.’ The were some hiccups along the way, though. The American Civil War disrupted the supply of raw cotton, hitting the Manchester economy hard.  But when the war ended, the city soon recovered, and the cotton boom resumed.

As I walked around central Manchester, evidence of this boom was plain to see in the city’s magnificent collection of grand and unmistakably expensive Victorian-era buildings. Among the most striking of these is the opulent and imposing Gothic revival Town Hall (see photograph), with its spires, carvings, and grand windows.

Manchester Ship Canal, 2009.

Another hiccup in Manchester’s boom came in the late 19^th century, when levies imposed by the port of Liverpool started to constrain Manchester’s economy. A solution to was to make Manchester into a sea port, reachable by the largest vessels of the day.  A massive building project was undertaken – the biggest building project ever undertaken in England up until then –  and the result was the 58 km long Manchester Ship Canal. The canal was opened in 1894 by Queen Victoria, and its opening was marked by the arrival of a convoy of 71 ships.

One J. Archer Morton summed up the exuberance and the jingoism of the day in a poem which reads, in part

To cross no mighty ocean, to seek no foreign shore,
The merchant ships of England their anchors weigh once more.
To-day they sail our Ship Canal, to celebrate the worth
Of British pluck and energy, this triumph of the North…

And Manchester and Liverpool their merchant fleets combin’d,
New markets may discover, fresh benefits bring mankind.
Long may their commerce prosper, their full sails ne’er be unfurled,
Not till old England’s sun be set, the death-knell of the world.

Manchester had truly arrived.

( A Google search reveals no further entries for Morton, from which one might optimistically conclude that this was his last foray into the composition of poetry.)

Why no longer Manchester?

The Manchester I visited in 2009 was certainly not the booming industrial city of the 1894.  In fact, it was hardly an industrial city at all.  An economic fact sheet issued by the City in January 2009 reveals that the more Mancunians are employed in ‘real estate, renting and business activities,’ than in any other sector. Sales and education rank second and third, and manufacturing doesn’t make it into the top seven categories of employment.  In fact, industrial employment in Manchester is lower today than the UK national average.

The story of Manchester in the late twentieth century is, of course, the story of Pittsburgh or Chicago: manufacturing cities which have lost their major industries to the lower wage environments of the developing world.

Trendy and hip Canal Street, in Manchester's 'gay village.'

The textile industry, which propelled England into the Industrial Revolution, has virtually disappeared.   Hardly any of the advantages that served Cottonopolis so well still exist today. Production, transportation, and communication technologies has eliminated most of the initial advantages enjoyed by Manchester. Ironically, the most important influence shaping the global map of textile production today one of the same influences that led to the mechanization of production in Manchester two and a half centuries ago: cheap labor in the developing world. Today’s leading textile producers are China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Central America, and, yes, India.

What I saw very clearly during my visit, though, is that Manchester has certainly survived, even without its earlier industrial base. It is today a city known for its vibrant educational, arts, and health care sectors, and it prides itself on its music scene.  And today, there can be little doubt the city’s most recognizable brand is one that it quintessentially a product of cultural and economic globalization: the Manchester United soccer team.

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I have posted some more of my photographs of Manchester here.

There is no shortage of books, papers, articles, and websites on the history of Manchester. I drew heavily here on exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry, in addition to the links in above, as well as the following:

Aspin, Chris. 2004. The Cotton Industry. Risborough: Shire Press.

Broadberry, Stephen N. and Gupta, Bishnupriya. 2005. Cotton textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitve Advantage, 1600-1850. University of Warwick Discussion Paper No. 5183.

Marks, Robert B. 2007. The Origins of the Modern World: a Global and Economic Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty First Century. Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

Donald N. Rallis
October 19, 2010

Location of the earthquake epicenter and Samoa. This map is based on the Google Map 'Samoa Earthquake zone.' Click above to see the source map.

Two powerful and damaging earthquakes have taken place over the past day along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a very active belt of tectonic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean. The first set of quakes took place yesterday 18 km below the ocean floor, about 200km southwest of the islands of Samoa. The second struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, its magnitude was 7.9. Initial reports indicate that both events caused considerable damage and loss of life. In Indonesia, the damage came from the earthquake itself. In Samoa, however, most of the devastation was caused by a tsunami generated by the undersea quake.

As I write this, information on the Indonesian quake is still scarce (it took place only a few hours ago.) So I will focus on the Samoa quake here, since quite a lot of information about it is now available.

Most earthquakes are caused by movement along the boundaries of the massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. Yesterday’s Samoa earthquake was caused by movement at the boundary of the Australian and Pacific plates. Here, the Pacific plate, moving westward at about 86 mm per year, is being forced downward (or subducted) beneath the Australian plate. This movement doesn’t take place smoothly, but rather in a series of jolts, which produce earthquakes. Yesterday’s was a particularly large jolt, with a magnitude of 8.0 (a measure of the amount of energy the earthquake releases.)

This map shows the deep Tonga Trench, which marks the subduction zone where the Australia plate (to the west) and the Pacific Plate meet. The epicenter of the quake is shown in red. Apia is the capital of Samoa, Pago Pago is the capital of American Samoa. The map comes from the USGS website. Click on the map to see the source.

Earthquakes can take place at various depths below the surface, and be caused by either vertical or horizontal movement of rock (or a combination of both.) If an earthquake takes place underneath the ocean, at a relatively shallow depth, and if it involves a significant vertical movement, it can rapidly lift or lower the ocean floor. This either lifts or lowers the ocean above the quake epicenter, producing a tsunami, usually a low but long wave that can cross the ocean at the speed of a jetliner (Geologists estimate that the Samoa quake lifted one side of the active fault up to seven meters higher than the other side.) On the open ocean, a tsunami would be barely noticeable, but as it enters shallower coastal waters, the front of the wave is slowed by the ocean floor, but the back of the wave speeds on, piling up water and producing a large wave of the kind that inundated Samoa yesterday. (Frequently tsunamis involve more than one wave; four separate waves struck Samoa yesterday. The largest seems to have been at least 4 meters in height. A person hit by a wave half a meter high would not be able to keep standing.)

Not all tsunamis, however, generate disasters. The impact a tsunami has depends not only on the size of the tsunami itself, but also on the shape of the ocean floor, and the nature of the coastline (a tsunami striking a cliff wouldn’t do much damage, whereas if the same wave hit a gently sloping coastline it might inundate large areas of land.) Whether the tsunami causes a disaster or not depends on the population geography, the topography, and the degree of preparedness of the communities in the affected area.

At this early stage it appears that the greatest loss of life and damage to property took place along the southern coastlines of the Samoan islands. A Google map of the damaged areas shows that the worst hit areas were on relatively flat land close to the ocean. Safe higher land was nearby, but in villages and resorts in these area, people probably would have had little warning of the coming tsunami, and insufficient time to get into the higher interior of the island. In the Samoan capital of Apia, on the north side of the island, early reports indicate that many people did receive warning of the tsunami, and were able to take refuge on nearby Mt Vaea.

All of the countries of the Pacific are vulnerable to tsunamis generated along the Pacific Ring of Fire. In the larger islands (such as the islands of New Zealand, and Fiji’s main island) people would be able to seek refuge from the waters inland or on high ground (assuming they receive warning in time to do so.) Small volcanic islands (such as those of Samoa) have mountains close to the coast where coastal populations might flee. But many of the islands of the region are atolls: flat, low lying islands which offer their populations little prospect of escaping a tsunami, even if they receive advance warning. The country of Kiribati, for example, consists of 33 coral atolls, most of them close to sea level; the highest point in the entire country of Tuvalu is only five meters above sea level.

To make matters even worse, all of the Pacific islands have to deal, even in the best of times, with the challenges posed by their remoteness. Most are very far away – from the world’s major landmasses and population centers, from each other, and in some cases one part of a country may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from other islands in the same country (Kiribati’s Kiritimati Island is 3,200 km from Tarawa, the national capital.) In the event of a tsunami or other natural disaster, such distances could make it very difficult to provide assistance to afflicted areas. (The country of Tonga was also affected, though not not very badly, by yesterday’s tsunami. Outsiders have had difficult reaching the country’s main island, though, because of rocks thrown onto the airport runway by the tsunami.)

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A little more about the Samoan islands…

The areas worst hit by yesterday’s tsunami were the country of  Samoa, and the territory of American Samoa.

The Independent State of Samoa (its official name) consists of nine volcanic islands, two of which are home to the vast majority of the country’s 190,000 people. Formerly controlled by New Zealand under League of Nations and United Nations mandates, Samoa attained independence in 1962.

Samoa seldom makes it into the news, but it did so  a few weeks ago, before the tsunami struck. At 6 am on September 7th, new traffic rules came into effect requiring Samoan motorists to drive on the left side of the road rather than the right. The reason for this was mainly economic: the government hoped that the change would enable Samoans to rely on used vehicles imported from Australia and New Zealand (or brought home by Samoans working there) rather than having to rely on more expensive American left-hand drive vehicles.

American Samoa lies to the southeast of Samoa, and consists of five volcanic islands other comprising an area a little larger than the District of Columbia. It is officially designated as an “unincorporated and unorganized territory of the US,” and is administered by the US Office of Insular Affairs, part of the Department of the Interior. Residents of American Samoa have a non-voting representative in the US House of Representatives, and they may vote in primary elections for President and Vice President. They cannot vote in presidential elections, though, and they have no representation in the US Senate.

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A great deal of good and interesting information is already available on the earthquake, the tsunami, and the damage it has caused in the region.  Google Maps has posted a map of the region, showing the location of the earthquake, and pinpointing the parts of Samoa and American Samoa that have been affected by the tsunami. Because of their (relative) proximity to Samoa, and their strong economic and historic links, Australian and New Zealand news sources have  the most comprehensive coverage of the tsunami.   BBC News has a number of good reports on the disaster, including photographs and video footage of the affected areas. The US Geological Survey posts up-to-date information about most earthquakes, and has already posted several maps of the affected area, together with an explanation of the cause of the earthquake.

For more information on tsunamis and what causes them, I recommend the excelled PBS Nova documentary Wave that Shook the World, which explains the causes and consequences of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (the companion website includes an animated section showing the genesis of the tsunami, and its progress across the Indian Ocean.) For an excellent explanation of plate tectonics, including lots of good maps and diagrams, see the USGS online publication This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics.

I have posted some of my own photographs of the aftermath of ‘natural’ disasters here; I have also written about the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake..

The neighborhood of Silwan is adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem.

The neighborhood of Silwan lies southeast of Jerusalem’s Old City, just outside the city walls and in the shadow of the the Al Aqsa Mosque. It is a place of densely packed houses clinging to the sides of a narrow, steep valley. At the end of the valley closest to the Old City is a spring, a rarity in this dry region, and a pool that dates back to biblical times. It’s a pool where a fifty-something year-old Palestinian man I’ll call Samer tells me he used to swim as a child growing up in Silwan Village, part of the Wadi Hilwah (“beautiful valley”) neighborhood.

I met Samer recently during my second visit to Silwan in as many days.  He came up to me as I was looking at some old photographs of the neighborhood, pinned to the side of a tent alongside the narrow road that leads into Silwan from the direction of the Old City. The tent is a project of the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, established by local residents to tell the story of their neighborhood, and to fight for its survival as a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The neighborhood is threatened by an ongoing effort to remove Palestinian residents to make way for Jewish settlers and to establish a controversial “national archaeological park” operated by an Israeli settler group.

Silwan’s Past

To understand the controversy raging over this place, we need to look at its ancient and recent history, and the way these histories are told and retold.  It was in this small valley that, more than 5,000 years ago, King David established his capital, later moved up the hill to the location of what is today the Old City of Jerusalem.  Here, at the same pool in which Samer swam as a child, Jesus is reputed to have restored the sight of a blind man.

Then, as now, water was a critical resource in the area, and the stories of elaborate irrigation projects in the valley are to be found in many historical accounts, including the Old Testament. The best known of these is the Siloam Tunnel, commissioned by Hezekiel in the 8^th century BCE.  The village of Silwan itself is specially mentioned in writings by Arab geographer and Jerusalem resident Al-Muqaddasi in 985 CE.

Since biblical times Silwan, like the rest of Jerusalem, has fallen under the control of numerous groups and imperial powers. It was controlled by Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arab Caliphates, Byzantines, the Ottoman Empire, and, from 1948 to 1967, by Jordan. This area was populated early in its history by Jews, but for most of the time since then other groups have predominated here as in the rest of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. In recent centuries the majority of the population has been Arab (Indeed the Siam family, one of the largest families in the Silwan, claims that it arrived in the village in the 12^th century during the rule of  the days Salah Al-Din).  In Six Day War of 1967 Silwan, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, was captured and very soon afterwards annexed by Israel. Jewish settlers set their sights on Silwan, and began making plans to move in to the area.  That’s when the controversy began.

Silwan. The houses at the bottom of the valley are in the al-Bustan neighborhood, much of which is slated for demolition to make way for an expanded "City of David archaeological park.".

Changing the Geography of Silwan

The dispute over Silwan isn’t just about political control. It’s also about demography, religion, and also about who gets to tell the history of this place and to name it. It’s a controversy with international dimensions, and it’s probably no exaggeration to say that what happens in Silwan has the potential to help move the so-called ‘Peace Process’ in the Middle East forward, or to stall it in its tracks.  That’s why I wanted to visit this place, and learn something about it.

On my first visit to Silwan, my two guides were from the Israeli group Ir-Amim (“City of Peoples” or “City of Nations,”) a research and advocacy organization that does excellent work focused specifically on the city of Jerusalem. My tour focused on the way that the geography of East Jerusalem is deliberately being changed by Israel in an attempt to consolidate its hold over the area.

The first change was in the political geography of the area. Just seventeen days after the end of the Six Day War of 1967, Israel unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, incorporating some 70 square kilometers of West Bank territory captured from Jordan in the war. This territory included not only the previously Jordanian part of the city of Jerusalem, but also 28 additional Palestinian villages in surrounding areas (No country other than Israel recognizes the legality of this annexation.) The new boundaries drawn by Israel had three main goals: to control areas of military importance around Jerusalem, to include as much territory as possible around the city, and to include as few Palestinians as possible in the within the new ‘greater’ Jerusalem.

Following the annexation of East Jerusalem and its environs, Israel began the process of changing the area’s population geography

The goal here has been to consolidate Israeli control by changing the population balance, in other words by making Jews a majority, particularly in those parts of preominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem they regard and most significant.  Silwan’s location (adjacent to the Old City,) and its importance in early Jewish history (the original site of King David’s Jerusalem) make it a prime target for the engineers of demographic change. This process involves an exceedingly complex array of different actors: the Israeli state, municipal authorities, settler organizations, foreign financiers and, in the case of Silwan, archaeologists and historians.

A Palestinian woman walks along a street in Silwan as an Israeli flag flies above a settler home in the background.

As I walked down the hill into Silwan, it wasn’t difficult to see evidence of what is happening here.  One of the first houses on my left had an inscription in Arabic above its gate; outside the house next door were three women in Muslim dress, talking in the yard. But above the next house down the street was a large blue and white Israeli flag, on the roof of the house opposite was small guard post, complete with armed guard, another Israeli flag flying overhead.  Settlers are not only moving in, they are also announcing their presence in no uncertain terms.

At the bottom of the valley is a small neighborhood called al-Bustan. It is an area of small homes, tightly packed together, the minaret of a mosque standing out alongside (this satellite image shows the al-Bustan and surrounding areas.) Al-Bustan is an area that, if the Israeli authorities are true to their word, will soon cease to exist. When I visited the area in late July, 88 households in al-Bustan, all of them Palestinian, had been served with official notices informing them that their homes are to be demolished, displacing some 3,600 people (Since then, demolition notices have been served on at least five more households.) According to a July 2009 report by Ir-Amim, the area is to be turned into an “archaeological park.” Municipal authorities maintain that they have no ulterior motive, and are simply planning to demolish illegally built houses. Residents claim that what is underway here is “ethnic cleansing,” part of the ongoing effort to purge this part of East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants.

Sign at a protest tent in Silwan.

“Archaeology as a tool of dispossession.”

The largest and most obvious sign of Israel’s attempt to refashion Silwan is to be found at the entrance to the neighborhood, the part closest to the Old City.  Here, partly completed and already open to the public, is a place its creators have called “The City of David.” This ambitious creation is part theme park, part museum, part archaeological site; all dedicated to the objective of telling a history of Silwan that emphasizes the role of Jews in the area’s history and the role of the area in Jewish history.  By 2008, the “City of David” was one of Israel’s top give tourist attractions, with 350,000 visitors passing through its gates.

The aim and effect of the propagation of the “City of David” version of history is, of course, to legitimize Jewish claims to the area, while minimizing those of Palestinians.

The “City of David” and its associated archaeological diggings have already claimed large tracts of Silwan (see satellite image.) Alongside Silwan’s main road is an area that has been cleared of houses; only the minaret of a mosque remains. A few cars were parked here when I walked by, alongside was a tented area where archaeologists were at work on a dig.  Underground, additional excavations are taking place, to the consternation of Palestinians living above who fear that their homes’ foundations are being undermined.

Archaeological work under way in Silwan under the auspices of an Israeli settler group.

But the archaeologists at work here are no ordinary archaeologists, and their dig is far from the archaeological norm. Unlike most archaeological excavations in Israel, this operation, in one of the most historically important areas of the country, is not being sponsored by an academic institution or museum. It is instead under the control of a group called Elad, an organization of right wing settlers, funded largely by foreign (mainly American) donors. Nowhere else in Israel has responsibility for such critical archaeological work been handed over to militant political organization.

Eilad not only controls archeology here, it also controls the content of tours of the “City of David” site, and maintains an elaborate website, telling its particular version of the history of the area.  Archaeologist Yonatan Mizrahi has noted:

“After three hours on an Elad tour, you are convinced that you are at a site that is solely Jewish.  Canaanite, Byzantine, Muslim and of course Palestinian findings are shunted aside.  Jerusalem has 4,000 years of history, and they concentrate on the glorious stories of Solomon, David and Hezekiah, for whom there are no archeological findings linking them to the site.  When you present the story this way to hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world, it is a tool with a great deal of political power and a way of justifying the act of settling the area.”

But Elad control of the archaeology has not only shaped the way the history of Silwan it told, there is also evidence that the organization may bolstering its version of history by ignoring or even suppressing evidence of non-Jewish settlement in the area. In 2008, for example, the Israeli news organization Ha’aretz reported that dozens of skeletons dating to the 8^th or 9^th century C.E. (two centuries after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem) were discovered at a Silwan site. In a violation of Israeli law, the skeletons were removed without reporting them to the Israeli Ministry of Religious Services.

I found this story all too familiar. As a child growing up in South Africa, I was taught the apartheid version of South African history.  Prior to the 17^th century, I learned, South Africa was devoid of human inhabitants. Then, in about 1652, just as white settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa, black Africans crossed the Limpopo River moving south. As whites moved north into the central parts of South Africa, blacks settled along the fringes of the country, producing a “natural” geography of settlement and segregation that the policies of apartheid, I was told, recognized and respected.  My school syllabus didn’t include any mention of places like Mapungubwe, an archaeological site in northern South Africa where evidence had been found of a thriving African kingdom a millennium earlier. Artifacts from the site, including an impressive collection of gold objects, were closeted away in a safe at the University of Pretoria. Like the Muslim skeletons of Silwan, their existence would have undermined the settlers’ historical narrative.

Post at a protest tent in Silwan.

Resistance in Silwan

Not surprisingly, the Palestinian residents of Silwan are doing their utmost to make sure that their version of history is also told. Over a small cup of strong coffee at the makeshift protest tent,  Samer and a local imam tell me their stories, and show me historic photographs of the area.  They tell me about Al-Bustan, and show me some of the  demolition orders displayed on a poster. Stickers proclaim “solidarity with Silwan,” and  a visitors’ book is evidence that this place has been on the itineraries of various foreign luminaries (including a Vice President of the European Parliament and a South African diplomatic representative.)

Numerous NGOs, Israeli and Palestinian, local and international, have taken up the cause of Silwan.  My hosts from Ir-Amim have just published a report on the area.  Alternative archaeological tours are offered by local archaeologists and residents, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has taken up the area’s cause. A Google search produces numerous news stories, reports,  and organizations focusing on Silwan and the plight of its residents.

Wall around a construction site at the "City of David." (Click on the picture for an article on the rather bizarre murals.)

But here, on the ground, it looks to me as though the residents of Silwan and their supporters are waging a losing battle.  During the half hour or so I spent at the protest tent, I was the only visitor. Meanwhile, up the hill, a steady stream of visitors passes through the gates of the “City of David.” Within a few days of my visit, I read that more demolition orders have been issued to residents of Al-Bustan. And, despite the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to stop the building of new settlements, as I leave Silwan to return to my hotel, I pass a construction site where workers are hard at work on the building of a new apartment building – for Jews.

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Note 1. I owe  great debt of thanks to Sarah Kreimer and Ela Greenberg of Ir-Amim for taking several hours from their busy schedules to show me around East Jerusalem, and for introducing me to Silwan. Thanks too to those friendly residents of Silwan who welcomed me as I walked around their neighborhood during my second visit (including the shopkeeper who came out of his store and handed me a peach as a walked by, and “Samer” and the imam who gave me coffee and told me their version of Silwan’s story) I’m glad that I ignored the advice of the Israeli taxi driver who refused to take me to Silwan. “It’s too dangerous to go there,” he told me.

Note 2. The more I read about Silwan (or Jerusalem, or the Middle East in general), the more I realized how little I know.  I have therefore written this piece as a student rather than an expert on this topic, and I’m sure I have got some things wrong here. So please feel free to post corrections, comments, and arguments here.

Note 3. It took me several weeks to write this blog entry, mainly because I kept finding more and more information on Silwan. I have included links to several good sources in the blog, but I am listing a few more below. If you want to know more, just do an online search for “Silwan” and you will find plenty to keep you going.

The website of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine contains information and links on Silwan, as do the websites of  B’tselem and Ir-Amim (whose recent report on Silwan will be published in English very soon. Also see Ir-Amim’s blog)

Jeffrey Yas:  (Re)designing the City of David: Landscape, Narrative and Archaeology in Silwan

Adina Hoffman: Archaeological Dig Stokes Conflict in Jerusalem.

Meron Rapoport. A Hate-Filled Morning, posted on the blog ePalestine. (Rapoport writes about the hostility of Jewish settlers toward their Palestinian neighbors.)

For a good overview of the process of dispossession in East Jerusalem, see the BBC documentary A Walk in the Park.

Update: Also take a look at this news story from the New York Times, in which the Mayor of Jerusalem is reported as having made an offer to some of Silwan’s residents slated for eviction.

Jerusalem, July 27, 2009 (Updated July 30, 2009)

To say that the map of Israel is complicated would be a gross understatement.  The map below, from a world regional geography text, shows some of this complexity. There’s the area initially delimited as the State of Israel by the United Nations in 1947 (shaded in brown.) Then there’s the area captured by Israel in 1948, and under Israeli control since then (in green.) And then there are the areas captured by Israel from its neighbors in the war of 1967. Shaded in yellow, these are the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.

Map of Israel from a geography text.

And that’s only the beginning of the story. Not shown on this map is the complex political geography the West Bank, a hodgepodge of areas under exclusive Israeli control, areas under partial control of the Palestinian Authority, and areas under complete control of the Palestinian Authority. Except that the areas under the complete control of the Palestinian Authority are not under their complete control, since Palestine is not a sovereign state, and Israel retains a whole array of controls including control of air space, borders, telecommunications, and more.

Confused yet? Well, there’s more. Not shown on the map above is the complex population geography of the West Bank, where some 2.3 million Palestinians live. Since 1967, numerous Jewish settlers have moved into the territory, and their distinctive settlements are scattered around the West Bank, particularly in the area around Jerusalem.

Speaking of Jerusalem: the map of the Jerusalem area itself reveals a complicated story (which I will talk about in more detail in a later blog.) Suffice it to say here that the city was divided between Israel and Jordan between 1948 and 1967. Within weeks of capturing the eastern part of the city in the Six Day War, Israel annexed the eastern part of the city, claiming it as an integral part of the State of Israel (as distinct from the rest of the West Bank, which was occupied but not annexed by Israel.)

The complicated map of Israel and the areas under its control are at heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the conflict is ever resolved, it will be resolved by drawing a new map of the region, acceptable to all parties. If this new map indeed drawn, it is likely to reflect the creation of a Palestinian State in Gaza and most of the West Bank, an Israeli primarily within the pre-1967 borders, and a divided Jerusalem.

But maybe I have it all wrong. Perhaps the map of Israel is really quite simple.

I say this because I am in Israel as I write these words, and spread out in front of me in my hotel room I have some maps. Some of the maps are on postcards and t-shirts I bought in Jerusalem’s Old City, and a refrigerator magnet from my hotel’s souvenir shop. Another is a very professional looking “Road Map of Israel.” All of these items contain maps of Israel. But in none of them is there even a clue of the contentious and contested nature of Israel’s boundaries.

A postcard, purchased in Jerusalem.

Let’s start with the postcard, at the center of which is a relief map encompassing Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Israel. The word “Israel” is emblazoned across the map, but only I and the S lie entirely within the territory that is indisputably Israel.

Israel as depicted on a t-shirt.

The t-shirt shows four camels ambling from southern Jordan to the Sinai Peninsula across Israel, shaded in green.  The major cities of Israel area labeled, as are a few places of religious significance. No Palestinian towns rate a mention, and once again Israel is depicted as including all of the lands from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and it includes the Golan Heights.  The same map is on the refrigerator magnet from the shop in my hotel.

Israel as depicted on a refrigerator magnet.

I suppose that t-shirts and refrigerator magnets aren’t the kind of places one would expect to find accurate cartographic information.  A road map, on the other hand, must be more accurate. After all, if drivers could be heading from Israel proper into the Palestinian territories and back again, they might want to know about it.

Apparently not. My fairly large (1:500 000 scale) road map contains nothing at all to indicate that there is any distinction at all between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank or Golan Heights. The northern part of the West Bank is labeled Samaria, and the southern part Judeah, using the biblical names of the regions, but there is no hint of the political status of these areas.  But wait, there is something. They are both bounded on the east by a thick green line and a dot-dash-dot line than runs from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea and due south to the Gulf of Eilat.  The map key implies that this is an international boundary, and this line is supposedly Israel’s border with Jordan.  A small inset headed the “Near East” at the foot of the map sheet makes this explicit. It shows Israel bounded along its entire eastern border by Jordan. No Palestinian Territory at all.

Part of the Road Map of Israel

Interestingly Gaza is delimited on the road map by a dot-dash-dot line, but no thick green line. There is no corresponding symbol in the map key. Gaza is different, the map appears to be telling us. But it’s not telling us how.

(The map key also includes a symbol for “Armistice Line,” a thin red dotted line. But I couldn’t find the symbol anywhere on the map. It certainly didn’t mark the “Green Line,” or pre-1967 extent of Israeli control.)

The Near East: An inset from the Road Map of Israel

It is worth noting that the boundaries of Israel depicted on my selection of maps is that of so-called “Greater Israel,” territorially the most generous interpretation of the biblical Kingdom of Israel. It is an Israel not officially envisaged by any of Israel’s major political parties or its government, all of which would presumably accept the existence of some kind of Palestinian entity somewhere between the Mediterranean and Jordan. It is the map of an Israel propounded explicitly only by those on the extreme right of Israel’s political spectrum, and a map dependent either on the complete acquiescence of Palestinians or the ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories (‘transfer’ is the preferred euphemism among those who advocate such a solution.)

I can’t claim that my sample of maps is representative; I don’t know enough about popular maps of Israel to be able to make this claim. I can say, though, that based on my observations during two visits to the country over the past year or so, it’s a depiction of Israel that’s very common around here.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there’s any kind of conspiracy going on between Israel’s far right and the makers of maps and souvenirs. But these maps have to come from somewhere. I think that it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they reflect common notion of what Israel is, or should be.  Wittingly or not, they are a political statement, and in particular a statement about the status, role, or perhaps existence of a Palestinian people.

Update. July 30, 2009

I left Israel yesterday, and while I was waiting for my flight at Ben Gurion Airport I stopped by an airport bookstore and browsed through some of the tourist books on display. What I found led me to reconsider a part of what I wrote here three days ago. I wrote then that I couldn’t claim that my selection of maps was in any way representative. My perusal of the books and souvenirs on display at the airport, however, seems to indicate that my earlier selection of maps did indeed provide a representative cross-section, at least of popular publications on Israel.

Of all of the maps of Israel in items I examined at the airport bookstore, only one contained any indication that the Occupied Territories are not part of Israel, and that was a guide to Israel’s parks and nature reserves (see below.)

Below are photographs of some of what I found in the bookstore:

A map from the book 'Hiking in Israel.'

This map includes dotted lines surrounding Gaza and the West Bank (the northern part labeled by the preferred Israeli name of ‘Samaria’ and the south as ‘Judea’) , but no key to indicate what these lines mean. Interestingly, the map includes the Jewish settlement of Ariel, but not the largest Palestinian city, Nablus. It does, however, show the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jenin, and Hebron, but does not show any roads leading to them.

The next map, from a Culture Smart series book on customs and etiquette,  again shows an Israel which seems to include the West Bank (labeled as West Bank, but barely distinguishable from Israel proper.) It does, however, show Gaza, shaded in a different color from Israel. Interestingly, no towns at all are show in the West Bank.

From 'A quick guide to customes and etiquette: Israel.'

Map from 'Places in History: Israel."

The map on the right, from a book entitled Places in History: Israel, shows Greater Israel, including all of the land between the Medieterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. Gaza and the West Bank not labeled or shown as distinct, although some towns in the territories are on the map.

I found perhaps the most egregious (or perhaps fank) mischaracterization of the West Bank in the book Flying High: Israel, a collection of aerial photographs and descriptions of various parts of the country and occupied territories. No mention of the West Bank here; instead, the area is covered in a chapter headed ‘The Settlers’ Land.’

"The Settlers' Land."

Israel: Past and Present begins its discussion of ‘The Physical Setting’ with the words “There are no vast geographical features in the 10,000 square miles that make up the Land of Israel.” But the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics lists the area of Israel as only 8,522 square miles (22,072 square kilometers,) including the annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. So it seems that Israel: Past and Present has taken it upon itself to annex the West Bank and Gaza as well.

From 'Israel: National Parks and Nature Reserves.'

On the left is part of the key to the maps contained in Israel: National Parks and Nature Reserves. Its map includes as “autonomous areas” those parts of the West Bank designated by Israel as Area A (areas under Palestinian control, mainly towns) and Area B (Palestinian civil and Israeli security control.) Interestingly, the map and key don’t include Area C (areas of the Occupied Territories under Israeli control,) thereby giving the impression that Areas A and B consist of an array of cantons, all surrounded by Israel.

In short, in none of the maps I found in popular tourist books, maps, t-shirts, or souvenirs did I find anything approaching an accurate and map even of Israel as depicted in official Israeli government maps. All, without exception, included the annexed territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights (as official maps do,) but none indicated the status – or in many cases even the existence – of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Yet another "Greater Israel" t-shirt.

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Note: I am no expert on the politics, history, or geography of Israel-Palestine. It’s quite possible that I have this all wrong. So if you want to take issue with anything I have written here, I encourage you to do so. Just click on the comment link, and let me know what you think. I’ll post your comments here.

The map at the top of this post comes from Geography; Realms, Realms, Regions, and Concepts, by Harm J. de Blij and Peter Muller (13th edition, published in 2009.) The Road Map of Israel is published by Palphot, Ltd, and printed in Israel, and is undated. I don’t have the slightest idea how to provide a reference for a t-shirt or a refrigerator magnet.

The Prime Meridian, marked by a metal strip in the courtyard of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich

I have been thinking about time recently, and thinking particularly about how we don’t think much about it. Of course we fret about how little of it we have, but we don’t give much thought to what time is, how we measure it, and why this matters.

What prompted me to think about time were visits to two fascinating places during my current trip to England. The first was about a week ago, when I went to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, a picturesque place on the Thames River on the outskirts of London.  Running across a courtyard outside the Observatory is a metal strip marking zero degrees of longitude. When I was there foreign tourists and local schoolchildren were taking turns standing astride the line, having their photographs taken with a foot in each hemisphere. The Observatory is now a museum, and in it are the most important timepieces in human history (more on them later.)

I am now in Manchester, the birthplace of both the industrial revolution and passenger rail, and yesterday I paid a visit to the oldest passenger rail station in the world, opened in 1830. It’s no longer a station – it now houses Manchester’s fascinating Museum of Science and Industry – but the old buildings and train platforms are still there.  Also still there, outside the first class ticket office, is a sundial. It’s there because, when the station opened in 1830, a sundial was a pretty good way of telling the time. That’s because all time was local time, and so in every town, noon was when the sun was at its highest point in the sky.  Standard time didn’t exist because there was no need for it. But rail service soon put the station’s sundial out of business; in 1840 the railroad started using Greenwich Mean Time – local time at the observatory at Greenwich – for all of its schedules, and in a little more than a decade most clocks in Britain were set to GMT. (The was initially known as ‘railway time,’ to distinguish it from local time.)

The reason that standard time didn’t come about until the advent of the railroad (and the telegraph) is that nobody really needed to know what time it was anywhere else. It really made no difference what time people in the next town or county were starting work or having their lunch.  But there was one group of people for whom knowing the time in some other place was supremely important: navigators at sea. Without being able to tell the time accurately, they had no way of figuring out where they were.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, astronomer, mathematician, and architect of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Even before the age of modern technologies, it was easy enough to measure latitude anywhere on land or sea. All a sailor needed to be able to do was measure the angle between the horizon and the sun at noon, and he could figure out your latitude, or distance from the equator. (The sun is higher in the sky at lower latitudes than at higher latitudes.) Figuring out longitude, though, was a much more complex problem. In fact until the late 18th century determining longitude while on the open ocean with any accuracy was impossible.

This made navigation out of sight of land a rather haphazard enterprise. Consider, for example, a Dutch ship sailing to the Spice Islands of Indonesia in the 1600s. The ship would probably sail around the southern tip of Africa, heading south to 40 degrees of latitude, where it could take advantage of strong westerly winds to blow it across the Indian Ocean. When the ship lay due south of western Indonesia, all it would need to do would be to make a left turn and head north to Indonesia. But, without any way of knowing the ship’s longitude, when to make this left turn relied on being able to figure out the distance traveled by measuring the ship’s speed, at best a matter of educated guesswork by the navigator. Turn left too soon, and you could waste valuable time getting to Indonesia. Turn left too late, and you could find your ship wrecked on the desert coastline of Western Australia (as many ships were.)

The so-called Longitude Problem was probably the most pressing scientific problem facing maritime powers from nearly three centuries, from the time of Columbus and da Gama until the late 1700s.  So important was the problem that in 1675 King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to solve it. In 1714 the British Parliament, acting on the advice of such luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, offered a prize of £20,000 (a vast sum at the time) to anyone who could figure out a way, “Practicable and Useful at Sea,” to determine longitude to within half a degree (At the equator, half a degree would span 110 km)

There were two main bodies of opinion on the way that the Longitude Problem might be solved. Some believed that the key lay in astronomical observations; this turned out to be an exceedingly complicated and unworkable approach. Others saw hope in a second approach: using time to determine longitude.

In principle, figuring out longitude using time is very simple. There are 360 degrees of longitude, and 24 hours in a day. This means that the earth rotates 15 degrees per hour. So, if a navigator at sea can measure the difference between noon at the ship’s location and noon at the home port, he can figure out the ship’s longitude (for example, if the sun reaches the highest point in the sky when the local time at home is 10 am, then the ship must be 30 degrees west of the home port’s longitude.) Simple: all the navigator needs is a clock that is set to local time at home.

In practice, this was extremely difficult. The reason was that clocks that worked on land didn’t work at sea. Pendulums didn’t do well on the moving deck of a ship, and all of the mechanisms used on other kinds of clocks sped up or slowed down as temperature and humidity changed on board ship. Even if a clock could remain accurate to within a minute a day (which would have been remarkably accurate for the times) this could amount to an hour’s discrepancy at the end of a two-month voyage. That would mean an error of fifteen degrees of longitude, a distance of over 1,600 km at the equator.

Enter John Harrison (1693-1776), a carpenter by trade, and a man with little formal education. He built his first wooden clock in 1713, and by the mid 1720s he had build a pendulum clock which was accurate to within a remarkable one second a month. But it wasn’t portable, and it wouldn’t work at sea.

John Harrison's H1, on display at the Greenwich Observatory (Photography is prohibited in the museum so I have borrowed this image form the Observatory's website.)

Between 1730 and 1735, Harrison devoted himself to building his first Marine Timekeeper, known as H1.  It contained various revolutionary mechanisms and materials designed to keep it ticking at a constant rate even on board ship.  It was much more accurate than any device that preceded it, but not yet accurate enough. Between 1737 and 1759, he worked on two more clocks, H2 and H3. After 19 years in the making, H3 failed the Longitude Board’s test. So Harrison went back to the drawing board, and this time came up with a completely new design.

H4 sits a case at the Greenwich Observatory alongside its three predecessors. It is completely different in appearance, though.  H1, H2 and H3 were elegant though somewhat complicated devices, with lots of visible moving parts. H4, by contrast, looks like an oversized pocket watch. It is 13 cm in diameter, and weighs about one and a half kilograms. The only visible moving parts are the hands. In 1761, H4 set sail aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, and when it arrived there two months later, the

Harrison's prizewinning H4 timekeeper.

clock was only 5.1 seconds slow.  After a second trial run three years later, the clock was accurate to within 39 seconds on a journey of 47 days, more than meeting the requirements for the Longitude Prize. Sadly for Harrison, wrangling and intrigue meant that he did not receive full credit for his invention, and for solving the Longitude Problem, until a decade later.  He never did receive the full prize, though.

In 1772, Captain James Cook relied heavily on a copy of H4 in his second circumnavigation of the globe; Cook described the clock as “our faithful guide through all the vicissitudes of climates.”

I am writing these words on a laptop computer in my hotel room in Manchester. My computer is connected by wireless network to the internet, and the digital clock in the corner of my screen synchronizes itself regularly with the world’s most accurate timekeepers. My iPhone can not only tell me what time it is and where I am,  it can also give me directions to my destination, and show the route to me on a map. On the phone I can even summon up a satellite image of my location (or just any other location) via Google Earth.

Determining time and location today is so easy, so accurate, and so ubiquitous that we don’t think of them much any more. But it’s worth pondering the fact that finding information we take for granted today stumped some of humankind’s greatest scientific minds. And when the problems of time and navigation were finally solved, the course of history was changed.

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Update. Oct 20, 2009.  This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference of 1884, when 41 delegates from 25 nations gathered in Washington, D.C.  to decide from where time and space should be measured. The winner, by 22 votes to 1, was Greenwich. The BBC has a good article on the conference, its background, and the reasons for the selection of Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.

In writing this entry, I drew heavily on Dava Sobel’s excellent book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Sientific Problem of his Time (1996.) The book is short, and well worth reading (and re-reading.) The story of Harrison and the Longitude Problem is also told, more briefly, on the website of the Royal Observatory.

For more information on Manchester’s excellent Museum of Science and Industry, visit the Museum’s website or, better still, the Museum itself.  The Museum has a very good exhibit on the history of the textile industry in Manchester; I will be writing about that here soon.

The Songstam Monastery, Shangri La.

Shangri La, China. July 2009

Shangri La is a town (and a county) in the northwest part of China’s Yunnan Province, not too far from the Bumese border. The town is on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, which puts it at a dizzying (literally) altitude of about 3,300 meters (10,000 feet) above sea level. Shangri La is surrounded by magnificent mountains, snow capped for much of the year; a few hours drive to the northwest of the town is Meili Mountain, a holy site for Tibetan Buddhists.

Shangri La wasn’t always Shangri La. It acquired its name only in 2001. Before that, the town’s name was Zhong Dian.  How – and why – the city came to be renamed is a fascinating but complicated tale.

Northwest Yunnan Province.

The story starts in the 1920s, when an Austrian botanist, photographer, and sometime cartographer named Joseph Rock arrived in the then-remote town of Li Jiang, south of the current Shangri La. Rock was fascinated by the plants, people, and landscapes of northern Yunnan Province, and ended up staying in Li Jiang for more than two decades. During this time, he published a two-volume book on the Naxi people who inhabit the area, and also penned nearly a dozen articles for National Geographic magazine (he also took it upon himself to name a mountain peak in Sichuan Province “Mount Grosvenor” after the National Geographic Society’s president.)

Joseph Rock (1884 - 1962) in the field

In the early 1930s, Rock’s NG articles came to the attention of a British author named James Hilton, who in 1933 published a novel titled Lost Horizon, which he dedicated to Rock. The novel tells the story of four travelers, three of them English and one American, who are abducted from an airfield in India, and end up in an idyllic lamastery in the shadow of a towering mountain peak. The travelers don’t know exactly where they are, but they do learn that the place is called Shangri La. (Hilton, incidentally, never visited Asia.)

Shangri La is a place of great beauty and serenity, run by an order of monks whose creed is based on the notion of moderation. “We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds,” a lama tells one of the abductees, “Our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.” One thing Shangri La’s monks do not do, however, is live to a moderately old age. The lamastery is led by a High Lama from Luxembourg who is more than two centuries old; all of the other monks (mostly foreigners) are also of unusually advanced years.

Initially, Lost Horizon wasn’t a great success.  But it came to fame on the coattails of Hilton’s next novel, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and the book became so popular that Frank Capra made it into a movie in 1937 (a musical version followed in 1973.)  Franklin Roosevelt was so taken with Lost Horizon that he named the newly established presidential retreat Shangri La. (Dwight Eisenhower didn’t share Roosevelt’s sentiments; he renamed the retreat Camp David in honor of his grandson.)

The mythical Shangri La quickly became a synonym for utopia; a remote, beautiful and imaginary place where life approaches perfection. The name was adopted in 1971 by a luxury hotel chain based in Singapore, which acknowledges the Hilton’s novel and mythical nature of Shangri La on its website.

Now our story moves to the 1990s and to the remote Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China’s Yunnan Province (I warned you this would be complicated.) Diqing was a place that historically had little going for it. Surrounded by mountains, it was not easy to get to, and its elevation and climate made it a difficult place for agriculture. In the 1960s, the state forestry bureau recognized the area’s potential as a source of lumber, and in a pattern familiar in many parts of China, the bureau began building logging roads and speedily chopping down the area’s trees. By the mid 1990s, 80 percent of Diqing Prefecture’s GDP came from logging.  The consequences of rapid deforestation in Yunnan and elsewhere became tragically clear when, in 1998, runoff from denuded forest lands contributed to floods in the Yangtze River valley that killed 4,100 people and left millions homeless.  The Chinese government, unencumbered by the complications of a democratic state, acted with swiftness and decisiveness. In August 1998, a logging ban in the upper Yangtze was announced, to become effective a month later. In an instant, local governments lost up to four fifths of their revenue.

But all was not lost. Diqing had something else going for it aside from logging. It had scenery and it had Tibetan people, the raw material for a tourist industry if only tourists knew about the place and could get there. Providing access to the area was difficult but doable. A good but tortuous road was built from Li Jiang and, in 1999, a new airport was opened in Diqing.  These alone weren’t enough though; potential visitors needed to be made aware of this idyllic place.  And it was here that the bureaucrats of Diqing showed their true PR genius.  They determined that parts of Diqing county were “very similar to the Shangri la described in James Hilton’s novel  Lost Horizon,” and considering the location, geographic environment and local Tibetan culture, they pronounced that the town of Zhong Dian was indeed the long-lost Shangri La. This decision was not reached in haste: a government-appointed team of historians, linguists, and anthropologists had been researching the issue since 1996. And so, by edict of the Yunnan government and amidst considerable fanfare, the name of Zhong Dian was changed to Shangri La (rendered as Xienggelila in Mandarin.)

Renaming the place was only a start, though. The cache of a 60 year-old novel wasn’t in itself enough to ensure a tourist trade, especially considering that most tourists coming to the area would have to be Chinese people who were unlikely to have read Hilton’s book or seen Capra’s film. So the authorities decided that Shangri La would also be marketed as a showcase of Tibetan culture (Tibetans comprise about a third of Diqing county’s population.) Seven million yuan (about a million dollars) was given to the local 800-monk Songtsam Monastery; the funds were used for a new gilded rooftop and a parking lot for tour buses.  New buildings in town were adorned with faux Tibetan architectural flourishes. A decree was issued requiring that all hotel, restaurant, and shop signs had to be in Tibetan script as well as in Chinese (according to Australian scholar Ben Hillman many of these signs are “hasty transliterations of Chinese that no literate Tibetan can understand.” A beauty shop, for example, misspelled the word ‘beauty’ in its name, instead using the Tibetan characters that mean ‘leprosy.’)

Changing a few signs, however, isn’t enough to bestow a true Tibetan heritage on a place. So the government experts went further. They determined that the name Zhong Dian means ‘loyalty to a Naxi feudal lord.’ The Naxi are another ethnic group in Yunnan; according to the experts they ruled over Tibetans during the Ming dynasty.  The name therefore memorializes the suppression of the Tibetan people, and is demeaning to them. Hillman notes that in months of traveling and interviewing in the area, he never met anyone who expressed this sentiment.  The name, he claims, has a more prosaic origin. Zhong Dian in Chinese simply means ‘middle district;’ in the Naxi language the name is Zuqdiail, meaning ‘a place of many yaks,’ or ‘a place where a friend lives.’

Regardless of the veracity of the experts’ findings, the rebranding of Zhong Dian as Shangri La worked. By 2001, the tourist industry was already bringing in more money that logging did at its peak. As I walked around the town in 2009, it was clear tourism had grown even more since then.

A recent visitor to Songtsam Lamastery laments the impact that people like her have had on the place (from a visitors' book at Songtsam.)

I spent my first two nights in Shangri La at a brand new Tibetan-themed Accor hotel, located on a hillside overlooking the Songtsam monastery.  The hotel opened a few months ago, and already an expansion is under construction. For the remaining three days of my stay, I moved to a guesthouse in “Old Town” Shangri La, an area of (restored) old buildings and cobblestone streets. The streets are lined with stores selling “traditional” Tibetan products, ranging from Buddhist religious artwork to wood carvings and yak yogurt. Women in traditional garb sit at the entrance to stores weaving traditional scarves, and every evening at seven locals gather in the main square of the old town for traditional dancing.

On the outskirts of town, at the monastery that supposedly served as the inspiration for Hilton’s work, the community of lamas go about their business while groups of tourists from Beijing and Shanghai (together with the occasional American academic or European backpacker) snap pictures of them. In moderation, of course.

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I consulted a number of fascinating sources in writing this blog. These included:

Hillman, Ben. Paradise Under Construction: Minorities, Myths and Modernity in Northwest Yunnan. Asian Ethnicity, Volume 4, Number 2, June 2003.

Kolas, Ashild. Tourism and the Making of Place in Shangri-La. Tourism Geographies, Vol. 6, No. 3, 262—278, August 2004.

Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. First published in 1933; I used this online version of the book. The book makes interesting reading, not just as a fantasy tale but also as an exemplar of the colonial attitudes its times. Early British and French explorers credited the ruins at Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat to lost tribes of Europeans; in a similar vein Hilton appears to be compelled to populate his imaginary Tibetan lamastery mainly with Europeans.

Alsevich, Christopher, Another Day in Paradise. USC US-China Institute, March 2008.

The map above is from Maps of China; the photograph of Joseph Rock comes from the Hunt Institue for Botanical Documents.

For more photographs of the Songtsam Monstery, Shangri La (new and old towns) and the town’s environs, see my Picasa and Facebook albums.

An Zhong, Yunnan Province, China

An Zhong, Yunnan Province, China
June 30, 2009.

Twenty five year old Mu Yun Zhan lives with his parents, his wife, and his 7 month-old daughter in the small village of An Zhong, about a half hour’s drive south of the town of Li Jiang, in China’s Yunnan province.  Yun Zhan was my guide when I visited Lashi Hai Wetlands Park today. He was supposed to take my traveling companion and me on a horseback ride to the top of a nearby mountain, from where we could view the Park and surrounding farmlands. But it was a cloudy and drizzly day, and so three quarters of the way up the mountain, he asked whether would like to continue to the top, or visit An Zhong instead. That’s how we got to visit the Mu family home, and see something of the village.

Riding along the tea horse road, 2009.

The sixty families who live in An Zhong are mostly members of Naxi ethnic minority, one of the fifty six minorities recognized by the Chinese government. The are just over 300,000 Naxi people in China, living mainly in the Li Jiang area, but also in parts of neighboring Sichuan Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Region.  In the past, the Naxi relied largely on farming as well as trade, plying the ancient tea horse road between Yunnan and Tibet. Mu Yun Zhan’s grandfather was just such a trader, crossing the mountains with small, sturdy Lijiang horses carrying tea, salt, and sugar and other goods to Tibet, and returning home with furs, musk, and other Tibetan products.

A mudbrick farmhouse in An Zhong village.

Reliance on horses skipped a generation in the Mu family; Yun Zhan’s father was an accountant working for a government-owned store in the days before the capitalist marketplace came to the country.  But today the Mu family has returned to a dependence on horses as its main source of a livelihood, albeit a livelihood more lucrative than that of Yun Zhan’s grandfather. Like fifty other families in the village, the Mus own four horses (the maximum allowed in An Zhong) which they use to take tourists like me around the Wetland Park and mountains.

Although capitalism and the tourist economy have come to An Zhong, a strong communal spirit remains among the families. The 220 yuan (about US$ 32) that Yun Zhan earned for guiding us today will go into a common pot, to be shared equally among horse-owning tour guides of the village.  The village also rents out a building housing a small store selling drinks, snacks and local craftwork to tourists (and, by the looks of things, copious quantities of beer and spirits to locals.) Tour packages generally include lunch at a small restaurant next to the store, where families take it in turns to cook, serve food, and clean.

The Mu homestead consists of two courtyards, encircled by buildings and walls. We entered the

Part of the Mu family farmstead.

business side first: in it half a dozen chickens scrabbled in the dirt, two pigs grunted in dark and malodorous pens, and a small dog strained at rope holding it to a post.  A covered hole in the center of the yard used to be a well, but now the village is served by a government-run water supply. A doorway leads to the next courtyard, where we found Yun Zhan’s mother, a woman in her mid sixties, washing clothes in a metal tub. This courtyard is paved with concrete and is spotlessly clean. Along one side of the yard is a barn, piled high with straw, and adjacent to it is the family home. It is a single story building at the moment, but between the existing rooms and the roof is an open space ready for a second story when the family’s means allow it.  A large living room takes up much of the house; one side of the room is dominated by a stereo system and  television set, a gift of Yun Zhan’s in-laws when the couple was married last year.

The Mu family living room.

Next door is a house belonging to Yun Zhan’s older brother, and beyond are a few hectares of farmland devoted to corn, fruit trees, and the hay used to feed the horses through the winter.  As we passed the fruit trees on our way out, Yun Zhan picked a few green plums for us from one of the trees. The fruit was sweet and delicious.

By the standards of rural China, the Mu family and the villagers of An Zhong are very well off. Their prosperity is newfound, coming recently as a direct result of the advent of large-scale (primarily domestic) tourism.  Most of China’s rural dwellers, however, are not so lucky. They live far from tourist attractions, and from the job opportunities that have proliferated in the country’s eastern coastal regions.  For this half of China’s population, a lifestyle like that of the Mu family remains a distant prospect.
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James Ke and Mu Yun Zhan

Note: My thanks go to Mu Yun Zhan for his hospitality and for sharing his family’s story with me. Yun Zhan speaks no English, and I speak neither Mandarin nor Naxi. I am therefore indebted to my friend and translator, James Ke, for making it possible to me to learn about the Mu family and the lives of the villagers of An Zhong.

Playing mahjong in a park on Shamian Island

Shamian Island, Guangzhou. Thursday June 25, 2009.

I took a walk today around Shamian Island, a picturesque and somewhat upmarket district on the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China. I then came back to my hotel where I spent some time catching up on news from back home on the Washington Post website, news dominated by the sad tale of the adultery and tearful public confession of yet another U.S. politician. And, of course, I caught up on the latest news from my 128 friends on Facebook.  All of this got me thinking about notions of privacy, and how they differ with place, time, wealth, and culture.

Taichi on Shamian Island, Guangzhou.

Consider, for example, the use of public space. In China, it is common to find people using parks, sidewalks, and public squares to do things that most middle class Americans would never dream of doing outside a home, enclosed yard, or members-only gym. In the park along Shamian Island’s waterfront, for example, I found an old man doing a tai chi routine alone, arms outstretched, eyes closed, and a serene expression on his face. A short distance away, a boom box was playing and several couples, who appeared to be in their sixties, were

Resting in a park, Shamian Island

waltzing.   I walked a bit further and found a group of women of a certain age sitting on plastic stools being led in song by a conductor moving a baton over lyrics hand-written on a large sheet of paper posted to a wall.  Nearby, two park benches were occupied by well-dressed people stretched out taking a nap, and four women were sitting around a table playing mah jong.

A few blocks away from Shamian Island is a bustling street lined with open-front stores displaying herbs, spices, and traditional medicines.  Behind and above the stores are apartments, and today each one had windows open and clothing hanging outside to dry. On the sidewalk, men sat shirtless on stools and folding chairs, reading newspapers, eating, or playing board games.

By contrast, in the American suburbs where I have spent much of my adult life (or the suburbs

Singing, Shamian Island

of Johannesburg where I grew up), I have never seen senior citizens of sound mind dancing or singing in public, gainfully employed people sleeping on park benches, or the ladies of the local bridge club playing anywhere where they might be seen by passers-by. Nor, even in the heat of a Richmond summer, have I witnessed the middle-aged men of the Fan district sitting bare-chested in folding chairs along the sidewalk.

Even in the ‘private’ space of the suburban American yard, there are certain things that are Simply Not Done. In unfenced front yards, for example, I have seldom seen homeowners doing anything except tend to their lawns and flowerbeds. It would be rare indeed to see a suburban family on the lawn in front their house eating dinner, taking a nap, or playing a board game. And even if a neighborhood resident was so brash as to wish to hang undergarments out to dry in public view, the practice would probably be forbidden by local covenants or zoning regulations (Indeed, in townhouse complexes and apartment buildings where I have lived, hanging laundry anywhere, even indoors, where it might be seen from outside was expressly outlawed.)

Playing cards at 11.30 pm last night in People's Park, Guangzhou

What we can perhaps conclude from all of this is that we Americans are a modest, even prudish people who prefer to live our lives in private rather than in the public gaze. We are driven to public slumber only by homelessness, to public singing and dancing only by insanity or inebriation, and to sitting outside in front of our homes only by poverty.

But are we really so modest? How can we be shocked at the sight of a neighbor’s drying briefs, but feel compelled to learn about Governor Sanford’s adulterous affair in Buenos Aires, Senator Ensign’s or Edwards’s extramarital dalliances, Governor Spitzer’s indiscreet transactions, Senator Craig’s airport antics, Bristol Palin’s incomplete understanding of abstinence, Rush Limbaugh’s predilection for prescription medications, Oprah Winfrey’s weight gain, or the source of the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress? (Americans of course aren’t alone in their fascination with the private lives of others. Also in the news today is Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s proud announcement that he has never paid for sex, because it takes away the thrill of conquest.)

Ah, but that’s different, I hear you argue, these people have all voluntarily surrendered their privacy by entering the public arena; living in a goldfish bowl is the price of celebrity and/or power. Most Americans are modest and privacy-loving people; we don’t choose such lives, just as we prefer not to cavort, nap or dance in public parks or on our front lawns.  The fact remains, though, that we choose to – no, insist upon – knowing the details of celebrities’ lives. This may make us voyeurs, you might say, but surely we remain modest and private at heart?

Which brings me to Facebook. I have no reason to believe that, in most respects, my 128 Facebook friends are not reasonably normal people, albeit probably skewed to the left politically, to the eastern part of the U.S. geographically, and to the wealthier rather than the poorer echelons of society.  In terms of modesty and social sensibilities I would venture to guess that they are mostly pretty average folks, not prone to public emotional extravagances or hanging up their damp undergarments in public view.

Let’s peruse today’s Facebook postings to find out what these average, privacy-loving folks have chosen to tell the world.  Here’s one who announces that she is suffering from a stomach ache, another who’s sprained an ankle, and one who is feeling overwhelmed at work. Another misses her college friends, while several shares details of their latest meals (complete with uploaded photographs. Wait, didn’t I just post that picture?) Others include friends who tell us all that they are preparing to buy a car, boarding a plane, getting ready to take a nap, or feeling happy.  Another describes a dream she had last night. Several announce that they have taken quizzes that reveal what color, mythical creature, film star, or national identity best matches their character. Many of my friends choose to tell me and the world what their relationship status is (and whether or not it is complicated,) and whether they prefer men or women.  But I know that neither I nor any of them would ever be caught taking a nap on park bench.

What we grow up and live with is what we consider normal, and we generally accept it unquestioningly unless we are provoked to do otherwise. Something I particularly enjoy about travel is that it provides such a provocation.  When I saw the man doing his tai chi in the park this morning, my first reaction was to feel a bit embarrassed for him. Then I realized how utterly unselfconscious he was, and got to questioning my own feelings. This prompted me to notice all of the other aberrant activities that were going on in the park. Eventually I got to thinking about which behavior was aberrant, that of the Chinese people in the park, or of my own compatriots who would never indulge in such exhibitionism.

I have never danced, sung, or slept in public park and, to the best of my knowledge, since leaving the store where I bought them my undergarments have never been in public view. But, as I watch the citizens of Guangzhou enjoying their parks, streets, and sidewalks, I can’t help thinking that my society is missing out on something. We have surrendered too much of our privacy in our intangible and virtual worlds, and we guard it too much in our real and everyday lives.  We would do well to learn from those folks on Shamian Island, and reveal more of ourselves in the park, and less of ourselves online.

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P.S. It wasn’t only the streets and parks of Guangzhou that got me thinking about notions of privacy. On my flight to China, I read Ben Elton’s novel Blind Faith, in which he paints a depressing picture of London at some indeterminate point in the future. In this society, public ’sharing’ and public emoting are mandatory and a desire for privacy or modesty is seen as a dangerous and sinister perversion.

Guangzhou

When I last visited China in January 2009, I was unable able to post entries to or read this blog from anywhere in the country. The reason was that access to my website, regionalgeography.org, was blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China, the electronic filter that supposedly shelters Chinese internet users from salacious and subversive material.

This put me in the company of Amnesty International, The Huffington Post, Penthouse Magazine, and the companion website to the PBS documentary The Tank Man, all of which had also incurred the opprobrium of the Chinese state.

But it appears that I have now redeemed myself in the eyes of the authorities and their censorship algorithms; I can now access my site and post entries such as this one. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or insulted at this change in status: does this mean that I have been officially declared to be innocuous?

Censorship is one of the most insidious weapons of an authoritarian state. This is because, unlike bullets, tear gas, arbitrary imprisonment, or disenfranchisement, censorship’s victims seldom know that they are victims, except in the most general sense.  After all, how can you possibly know what you don’t know? Of course, the people of China are fully aware that their media are censored. But they don’t know what is being censored, or when.

Today’s edition of the government-controlled English language newspaper China Daily is a case in point. The paper carries a front-page story on a dispute between the government and Google.  The search engine, it appears, has been insufficiently diligent in removing undesirable materials from the search results it delivers to Chinese users.  “Google’s English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lewd and pornographic, seriously violating China’s laws and regulations,” the paper reports a government official as announcing yesterday. Authorities had therefore “summoned representatives of Google in China and urged them to remove the content immediately.”

There are several interesting aspects to this story. First, it is notable that it was published at all, highlighting as it does the issue of internet censorship. One must therefore conclude that the authorities want the public to know that their web searches are being screened. But notice the emphasis in the story: it’s not the Chinese government that is reported as blocking access to undesirable materials, it is Google that is “spreading” this information around China. Nowhere in the article is government blocking of internet access mentioned.  Second, the article reports that the government is concerned about “lewd and pornographic” material, a concern probably shared by most people in this socially conservative society. There is no hint, however, about the government pressure on Google to remove politically sensitive sites from the search results it delivers in China.  So the average Chinese newspaper reader, after perusing this article, might be forgiven for failing to recognize it is not pornography that is the government’s main concern, but rather the much broader and pervasive censorship of politically sensitive information.

2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. On June 5, anniversary of the brutal crackdown on the protesters, news media worldwide carried stories commemorating the event. China Daily did not mention the anniversary or the event itself*.  This omission isn’t unique to the government-controlled media: enter the words “Tiananmen Square” in the search box of Chinese version of Google and you will see links to articles on architecture, tourism, and monuments, but not on the 1989 protests.

I tried entering the words in the English language version of Google here this morning, and a strange thing happened.  At the top of the list of results was a Wikipedia entry on the protests. I clicked on the link, and was taken to the Wikipedia page, which included the iconic photograph of the young man standing in front of a convoy of tanks leaving the Square after the crackdown. But before I could read anything on the page, it disappeared, and was replaced with an ambiguous error message:

The sad truth about censorship is that, to a surprising extent, it works. When the PBS program Frontline showed a group of Chinese students the famous photograph of “Tank Man,” none of them recognized it or knew what it was.  I had a similar response when describing the photograph to young Chinese friends recently. The events of 1989 had been mentioned in their history classes, but only briefly; they had no idea of the brutality of the crackdown, the extent of the protests, or the worldwide response to it.

A diligent researcher in China could, despite the Great Firewall, find lots of information about the protests online, and perhaps even a photograph of Tank Man. But that presupposes that he knows what to look for.  If you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you look for it?
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*You can’t easily go back and check this. As far as I can tell, China Daily doesn’t have a searchable online archive. Journalism is, after all, the first draft of history. Official histories are polished drafts, palimpsests at best, purged of those inconvenient elements which do not conform with the approved narrative.  Allowing people to go back and read the initial draft would subvert the whole process.

Update, July 1, 2009. I was in a hotel today, watching BBC News as a report came on dealing with the twelfth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China. Apparently demostrations took place today in Hong Kong demanding a greater degree of democracy in the territory. But as the report began, my television screen went blank, and came on again only when the report was drawing to a close. When the report was repeated an hour or so later, the same thing happened. (It’s worth noting that BBC, CNN, and other foreign news channels are available in some hotels, but not to most Chinese television viewers.

Another update, July 9, 2009. Four days ago, protests by Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang Province turned violent, and the Chinese authorities responded by cracking down hard on both the protests and information about them.  Apparently as a part of this crackdown, access to several websites was blocked. On July 7, when I was in Yunnan Province, I found that I could not access either Facebook or Twitter. Today I am in Guangzhou, and both sites are still inaccessible from here. I have had no problems, however, in finding news stories about the situation in Xinjiang on major US and UK news sites.

In the process of investigating the blocking of web access in China, I cam across the very useful and informative site Herdict.org. The site reports on internet accessibility issues worldwide. I was able to find out that Facebook has recently been reported to be inaccessible from China by 37 other uers, and I was able to submit my own report.

The world looks different depending on where you look at it from. This, as all of my  students know, is a central theme of all of my regional geography courses.

We in the United States live in a very, very unusual place, and so we view the world in a very unusual way. If we are to understand the way others see the world, we need to know something about them, and something about the places they live in.

There is a world of difference, however, between knowing about a place through reading about it, and knowing about a place as a result of having traveled there. In my experience, not even the very best geography courses or the very best books can compete with the first hand experiences that thoughtful and observant travel can provide.

And so I strongly encourage students – and anyone else who can – to travel. It’s not as difficult, as expensive, or as dangerous as you might think, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his blog, On the Ground. Take a look at Kristof’s May 18 blog entry, written after his return from a trip to Africa, and at his previous blog entries. If he can’t convince you of the value of travel, then probably nobody can.

Transcend parochialism. Travel!

Updated January 9, 2010

When the great-grandparents of today’s college students entered the job market, they probably had to compete with other job seekers from their home towns or counties. If they did not join the family business or work on the farm, they probably looked for jobs somewhere close to home. Employers usually only advertised in their local areas, and most people seldom if ever traveled very far from home.

When my students’ grandparents started looking for jobs, they may have faced competition from others throughout their home states or regions. Perhaps they moved from a rural area or small towns to a larger city or  a neighboring state in search of work.

College graduates of my generation increasingly found ourselves competing in a national marketplace for employment; applying for jobs other parts of the country and relocating to take up employment had become commonplace. (When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, most of my peers were applying for jobs all around the country, and most academic positions were advertised nationally.)

College graduates in the early 21st century face a very different prospect. The competition they face as they look for jobs comes from around the world. And, increasingly, this applies across the job market from unskilled jobs to the positions seeking the most highly trained experts.

A few years ago, for a newly graduated medical doctor looking for a job in the U.S., any foreign competition would have been from doctors in other parts of the world who would have had to relocate to take up the job. In addition to being offered employment, they would have had to obtain visas for themselves and perhaps their families, and undertake the formidable task of emigrating and settling into a new land. In other words, local applicants had a considerable advantage over foreigners in the US job market.  Some less skilled workers in the US, such as farm laborers, faced somewhat stiffer international competition from migrants coming to the US – many illegally – in search of jobs.

The foreign competition that both the aspiring doctor and the aspiring farm worker faced was from foreigners coming to the U.S. What has now changed is that now it’s not people that are moving into the country to find jobs, it’s jobs that are moving out. And among these an ever-increasing number of highly skilled jobs.

I was reminded of the during recent trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. A friend of mine was taken ill, and had to go to a local hospital for an examination that included an x-ray. But there was no radiologist on duty at the time to read the x-ray. Solution: the x-ray was sent electronically to Bangkok, read by a radiologist there, and the results were back in half an hour. Consider the implications of this: if a Thai radiologist can read an x-ray from a Cambodian hospital because there is no local radiologist, then a Thai radiologist just can just as easily read an x-ray from a Virginia hospital. And that Thai radiologists earns a whole lot less than her American counterpart. In other words, the job of the technician in Virginia who takes the x-ray is safe; it’s the job of the more highly trained radiologist that’s in jeopardy.

We are all familiar with the outsourcing of customer service jobs to call centers in India, the Philippines, and the Caribbean. Indeed, Bangalore, the city in southern India famous for its hi-tech industry and call centers, has, according to the Urban Dictionary, given rise to a new verb, to bangalore, as in “Dude, I just got bangalored! Now I’m gonna have to train on flipping burgers at McDonalds.” (In 2007, the news agency Reuters bangalored the jobs of journalists reporting on company news on the New York Stock exchange. Reuters now employs about a hundred financial journalists to cover Wall Street from their desks in Bangalore.)

Here is the challenge for today’s US college graduates. If  you want to prepare yourself for a secure job in the U.S. you need to do one of the following:

a) Pick a job that requires you to be close to the marketplace. A job flipping burgers at McDonald’s is safe; those burgers have to be flipped at the place where they are consumed. An x-ray image has to be taken at the place where the patient is, and potholes can only be filled by workers at the site. But if the job can be performed someplace else – reading an x-ray, taking a customer service call, writing software, or designing an aircraft – it can be done anywhere. And it stands to reason that these jobs will tend to migrate to the locations where people with the necessary skills can be employed most economically. But, if you don’t want to be a hairdresser or a cook, you should…

b) Be prepared to accept pay equal to or lower than that being paid to your competitors in India, Thailand, or China. On a recent visit to Cambodia, I learned that the going rate for a professor at a state university in Phnom Penh is $120 a month. At ten times that salary, it would presumably be easy to hire the very best professors in Cambodia, and get them to teach classes anywhere in the world via video hookup. At, even at that salary, the Cambodian professor would be earning less than a quarter of the starting salary of a new faculty member at UMW.  (Just imagine the savings this would produce for UMW students!) I’m sure that similar pay differentials apply to doctors, accounts, and computer programmers. So another path to a secure job in the US is to offer your services for a wage that, in real terms, is less than those earned by your parents and perhaps your grandparents.

But if you don’t want to do this, there is another choice…

c) Make sure that you are much, much better than your competitors in other countries. If you want a U.S. employer to hire you at several times the cost of your foreign competitor, you had better make sure that you are several times better than that competitor.

You can do this in part through your own individual effort. First, make sure that you acquire the skills necessary to succeed in the global job marketplace. Paramount among these are the ability to define and solve problems, the ability to communicate clearly in writing and orally, the ability to communicate in a language other than English, and the ability to understand basic mathematical and scientific concepts. Second, make sure that you know something about the rest of the world. It’s difficult to compete in the world job marketplace with other workseekers who know more about you, your country, and your culture than you do about theirs.

But even all of this won’t be enough. If we as a society want our college graduates to be competitive in the global marketplace, we need to provide them with the world’s best education. And that means that we, as a society, need to make sure that, from kindergarten to Ph.D, our educational institutions are the very best in world*. We need to make sure that a top-notch education is available to all, not just the children of the wealthy. We need to create a society that respects ability and accomplishment over wealth, education over fame, and knowledge over ignorance. We need realize that we are global citizens, that the people of the rest of the world are our peers, not our inferiors. And we also need to accept that simply being American (or European, or Chinese for that matter) doesn’t entitle us to any special privileges – individually or as a nation – in the global marketplace of ideas, business, or employment.

So, 21st century college students, what are you doing to make sure that you are ready to compete in the global marketplace when you graduate?

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*Update: Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times (April 21, 2009) about a recent report that

“in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow… If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher.”

_____

Some recent news stories have highlighted some of the issues around the international labor market. A New York Times story reported on the problems highly-skilled workers have had in moving to the U.S.; a fasinating series of maps accompanied this article, showing the countries of origin of foreign skilled workers currently in this country.

(I posted a slightly different version of this piece on the Geog 101 blog Thoughts and Notes.)

Stupa at Chuong Ek, near Phnom Penh, site of one of Cambodia's "killing fields."

March 2009

Chuong Ek is a quiet and peaceful place, a far cry from the noise, bustle, and traffic of the center of Phnom Penh only a few kilometers away. It was a sunny day when I visited a few weeks ago, with just a few puffy clouds in the sky.  The only sounds I could hear as I walked around were birds and, in the distance, the shouts of children playing in a schoolyard nearby.  The other visitors to Chuong Ek – twenty or so of them – walked around mostly in silence.

There really isn’t any other way to respond to a place where more than 20,000 people were killed with machetes, axes, or gunshots, then dumped into mass graves.  Today the mass graves are marked by depressions in the otherwise flat landscape. Some are cordoned off, some bear wooden markers: “Mass grave,” “Mass grave of 450 victims,” “Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women majority of whom were naked.”

Chuong Ek is one of Cambodia’s many “killing fields,” place where victims were brought to be killed and buried during the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 – 1979. Today is it a memorial to those who died during this period; a place whose bucolic setting somehow makes it all the more stark and shocking.

Some of the hundreds of skulls in the stupa at Chuong Ek

At the center of the memorial park is a stupa, a tall white monument topped with the spire and roof of a Buddhist temple.  A sign asks visitors to remove their shoes before climbing the steps to the glass door of the monument. Inside is a tall set of wooden platforms, extending all the way to the ceiling.  Each platform is filled with skulls, exhumed from the surrounding mass graves. Gashes and fractures in some skulls are evidence of the hammer blows or machete wounds that killed their victims; others have small round bullet holes. On the bottom shelf is a pile of tattered clothes; these too came from the mass graves.

As I walked away from the stupa along a narrow path that leads between the mass graves, I looked down. Beneath my feet, in the brown dirt, I noticed the remnants of clothes. There were also what look like white sticks or splinters; closer inspection reveals that these are bone fragments. When the graves were exhumed, only the skulls of the victims were moved to the stupa; other remains were left here.

Clothes, teeth and bone fragments exposed after the rain at the site of a mass grave.

It was when I realized that I was walking on bones and clothes of genocide victims that the real horror of this place – and of the Cambodian genocide – suddenly hit me. Reading about the deaths of two million people is horrifying, but the scale of it makes it incomprehensible. Looking down and seeing that I was standing on a victim’s shin bone, though, made my blood run cold.

A half hour tuk-tuk ride from Chuong Ek is another memorial to the Cambodian genocide, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Before 1975 this place was a high school; after the Khmer Rouge took power it was converted into a secret prison (called S-21) where suspected enemies of the regime were brought to be interrogated and tortured.  Only a handful of the 20,000 or so prisoners brought here survived. The rest either died here or were taken to Chuong Ek to be executed.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh.

Like Chuong Ek, the museum here is stark and simple. Some of the interrogation rooms have been left just as they were when Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979.  In one of the former school buildings, classrooms had been converted into interrogation chambers for “high-value” prisoners, many themselves senior Khmer Rouge officials who had come under suspicion.  In each of the first floor classrooms was a single metal bed frame; prisoners were shackled to these frames twenty-four hours a day. A metal bin served as a toilet.  These remain in the rooms today; on the wall of each room is a photograph of the body that lay on the bed when Vietnamese forces arrived.

In another building, classrooms were divided up into cells, separated from one another by crudely built brick walls. Each cell is barely large enough for a person to lie down, but some prisoners spent months here, shackled to the floor.

Equipment used for waterboarding at Tuol Sleng Prison.

Also preserved at Tuol Sleng are some of the instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge to obtain “confessions” from their prisoners.  Some prisoners were tied to a sloping wooden platform, a bit like a tilted bed. Hoods were placed over their heads and water poured over them to give the illusion of drowning (This practice is known as waterboarding.) Prisoners were also suspended upside down from a piece of outdoor gymnastics apparatus, then lowered head first into large pits of dirty water.

A prisoner, photographed on arrival at the Tuol Sleng Prison.

The Khmer Rouge were thorough and systematic in documenting who was imprisoned here. Arriving prisoners were each given a number and photographed. Some of the photographs are on display at the museum; row upon row of black-and-white headshots, male and female, young and old. Some prisoners look terrified, as though they knew what lay in store for them. Others look defiant.

Also on display are photographs of Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them children. (Many of the photographs are displayed on the Museum’s website.)

In four years of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, about 1.7 million people lost their lives (more than 20 percent of the country’s population.)  Perpetrators and victims were, for the most part, Cambodian, but outsiders too were complicit in setting the scene for the tragedy, and mitigating adverse consequences to the perpetrators of the genocide. Without the war in Southeast Asia, and more particularly without the wide scale U.S. bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power, and the genocide would not have happened. The Khmer Rouge could not have remained in power without support from China.  The United Nations, with the support of the U.S., gave its Cambodian seat to representatives of the Khmer Rouge, even after the regime had been deposed. The trial of someone charged as a result of the genocide began just this week, thirty years after the end of Khmer Rouge rule (The man on trial is former Khmer Rouge official Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, who has admitted to condemning thousands of people to death when he was head of the Tuol Sleng prison.)

In the wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  Signatories to the Convention affirmed that “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”  But in Cambodia the world did not live up to its undertaking: the Cambodian Genocide marked the first great failure of this noble convention.

But it was not the last. In 1994, in a one hundred day orgy of killing, some 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in an apparently well-planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the country’s Tutsi population. This was a stark act of genocide, and the outside world knew that it was happening as it took place. But, deliberately, the international community chose not to act.  Once again, the Genocide Convention had failed.

In 1995, Bosnian Serbs systematically killed 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica; the killing was found by the International Court of Justice to have been act of genocide. The Convention had failed to prevent this, too.

Today, in Darfur in the west of the vast African country of Sudan, government backed Janjaweed militia are systematically killing or displacing local black African farmers. According to the United Nations, 2.7 million people have been displaced from their homes in Darfur over the past six years, and some 300,000 have died from the effects of war, famine, and disease. Despite extensive worldwide publicity, governments have again been reluctant to act and the dying in Sudan continues.

Thousands killed in Bosnia, hundreds of thousands in Sudan and Rwanda, nearly two million in Cambodia, six million in the Holocaust. These numbers are overwhelming, so large that they are numbing. How can anyone possibly appreciate what the deliberate killing of so many people means? I can’t. But that moment at Chuong Ek when I realized that I was standing on a shin bone protruding from the dirt helped shock me into realizing the horror of the murder of one person, the person who used to walk on leg of which that bone was part.  A million is a number, one is a person.

All of this is why I think that it is so important for as many people as possible to visit places like Chuong Ek, Tuol Sleng, Auschwitz, Srebrenica, and Kigali.  Standing in the place where such terrible atrocities took place, seeing the skulls and the photographs of the victims, we can begin to comprehend what genocide is. It is a crime against humanity as a whole and a crime against our individual humanity.   Only when enough people comprehend this can we ensure that it does not happen again.

March 8, 2009

On the highway from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

When I first visited Cambodia in 2005, I did what most tourists here do. I flew in to Siem Reap, spent a couple of days touring the famous ancient temples at Angkor, and then left the country.

I came back for a few days in October 2006, this time to visit the capital city Phnom Penh. All I knew about the city was that it was the site of Tuol Sleng and Chuong Ek, and I wanted to visit both. Tuol Sleng was a prison during the Khmer Rouge era (1975 – 1979), and the place where more than 20,000 people were brutally interrogated and tortured. They were then usually taken to Chuong Ek, one of Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” where they were killed and dumped in mass graves. Chuong Ek is today a museum and a memorial to those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Visiting these two places was, as I had expected, a powerfully moving experience (They will be the subject of a separate blog entry, coming soon.)

On the river, Phnom Penh

What I had not expected was to be charmed by the city of Phnom Penh. It is a poor, crowded, and somewhat ramshackle city of about 1.3 million people at the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers. There are foreigners here, to be sure, but Phnom Penh is not a favorite destination for visitors to Cambodia. The tourist contingent seems to consist mainly of adventurous-looking backpacker types, many of them here to visit the genocide sites, and some East Asian tour groups. There also seem to be quite a lot of diplomatic and NGO personnel here, many of them moving around the city in large SUVs (The largest and most impressive SUVs in town, though, are those black vehicles with military or government license plates or, most impressive of all, those at the top of the traffic food chain, Lexus SUVs with no license plates at all. Many of these have the word “Lexus” emblazoned on their sides in foot-high letters, presumably to avoid the embarrassment of being mistaken for Toyotas.)

As a person with unusual travel interests (I’m a geographer, after all) Phnom Penh’s lack of “tourist attractions” makes it all the more interesting. It is a very lively, vibrant place, full of people living their lives (in many cases very tough lives.) I found the people I met here almost unfailingly friendly, frequently charming, often with a great sense of humor.

Take for example the young boys selling (apparently pirate) copies of books about Cambodia to diners at riverfront sidewalk restaurants. They are very persistent salesmen, badgering people waiting for meals to buy their wares (but seldom approaching anyone whose food has already been served.) When a dining companion declined to make a purchase, the twelve-year old salesman looked him in the eye, and said with mock seriousness, “Then I will kill you.” Each time he walked by for the rest of the evening he would stare at my friend and make a throat slitting gesture.

During my 2007 visit to Cambodia, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of two brothers; Vita was then a student, and Pheap worked for an NGO. They live in Phnom Penh, but their family home is in Svay Rieng province, near the Vietnam border. After we had met a few times, they invited me to travel home with them for a visit, and I readily accepted.

Taxi on the road to Svay Rieng

And so Vita, Pheap, a cousin of theirs and I set out in a sturdy Toyota Camry taxi one morning for Svay Rieng. I know the car was sturdy because, aside from a punctured tire, it survived the journey. The four-hour trip took us along Route 4, apparently the main road from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam border and Ho Chi Minh City. Much of the road was in the process of being upgraded, courtesy of Japanese aid funds. The upgrade hadn’t come moment too soon. The journey over the unimproved sections of the road reminded me of a friend’s description of a journey somewhere in east Africa: “it’s like being dragged naked over a xylophone.” Only this xylophone was mounted on a roller coaster.

Making the journey immeasurably more hair-raising was the fact that the traffic on the road consisted of Cambodian vehicles. This means a motley collection of motorcycles, trucks, minibuses, cars, ox wagons, and an array of vehicles occupying intermediate positions between these various categories. (On a trip to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, I even saw a large elephant being steered down the road with a full load of passengers and cargo.) What the vehicles had in common was that they were all overloaded, and none of them would pass a vehicle inspection examination in any country which has such things. And by overloaded I mean really overloaded. Minibus taxis in my home country of South Africa are not overloaded; they just make full use of 12 seats by squeezing 20 people onto them. Cambodian minibus taxis make equally efficient use of their interiors, but they then also put six or eight passengers on the roof. A fully laden motorcycle might carry four or five people, or three people and two large bird cages, or a driver, a passenger, and a large live pig bound to a couple of planks of wood,  or perhaps a driver, several large sacks of rice, and an old woman on top of the rice.

But the story doesn’t end there. Cambodian roads not only carry Cambodian vehicles, they carry Cambodian vehicles driven by Cambodian drivers.

In a moment of what I now realize was great naiveté on my first visit to Phnom Penh I asked a hotel concierge whether I might rent a car to travel to Sihanoukville rather than taking a bus or taxi. He raised his eyebrows, and said “No, Sir.” “Do you mean that there are no rental cars available, or that it’s not a good idea?” I asked, “Not a good idea, Sir,” he replied, indulgently but very definitively.

After five visits to Cambodia, I still cannot claim to understand what rules of the road Cambodians follow. Perhaps there aren’t any rules, or at least any written rules that are enforced. On one occasion I was riding with two other people on motorcycle, for example, when we

Phnom Penh traffic

passed through a police roadblock. Three people on a 125cc motorbike, none of us wearing a helmets The police didn’t even glance at us, nor did they pull over motorbikes with four passengers. I don’t think I have seen anyone stop at a stop sign here, whether or not there is traffic approaching. And driving on the wrong side of the road toward oncoming traffic doesn’t seem to constitute an infraction.

There are obviously numerous unwritten rules, or at least guidelines, that Cambodian drivers follow. I have managed to figure out only a few. The most important is that drivers here are amazingly calm and very considerate. Despite congestion, agonizingly slow traffic flow, and ubiquitous traffic jams, I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling road rage. Drivers cut in front of each other, trucks back out of driveways and block the street, and tuk-tuks (motorcycle-drawn taxis) stop everywhere to pick up and drop of passengers. But nobody seems to get upset or impatient. The reason that it’s possible to go through a stop sign and merge into oncoming traffic is that oncoming drivers let you in. If you are turning left into a road of busy two-way traffic, it’s okay, as a first step, to turn into the oncoming traffic, then gradually ease your way across to the correct side of the road. Oncoming drivers will avoid you.

It took me a while to figure this all out. To someone like me, used to driving in the USA, first impressions are that Cambodian roads are full of very angry drivers. Horns honk incessantly. The driver of a car passing a motorcycle, bicycle, or a pedestrian will almost always honk. A honk in the US is a reprimand, or an expression of anger or frustration. But in Cambodia, where bicycles and many motorcycles don’t have rearview mirrors, a honk is a kindly warning, “I’m coming up behind you and about to pass.” Indeed, it would be most inconsiderate, even dangerous, to pass a motorcycle without honking.

On display at the open-air butchery, Svay Rieng

But back to my journey to Svay Rieng, where we eventually arrived after a four hour journey.  As in most Cambodian towns, it consists of a bustling area of stalls at which one might buy vegetables, fruit, fish (often still – barely – live,) skinned frogs (cooked or raw,) even spiders (food, not pets.)

And meat. Meat dangling from hooks on the ceiling of the stalls, maturing in the tropical heat and open to the elements. Or lying unwrapped and uncovered on wooden tables, passing the hours until it is purchased by providing sustenance to local flies. At one butchery store, the upper halves of two pigs’ heads lay on a table, exposed brains on display for the customer’s inspection.  Mercifully, my hosts passed over the brains, and selected a large slab of beef lying alongside. This was, it appeared, to be part of our lunch. I was apprehensive.

With my hosts, Svay Rieng

But lunch turned out to be delicious. The hunk of beef was transformed by my hosts’ mother into tasty slices, fried with onions, garlic, and other spices, and attractively garnished with lettuce and slices of green tomato. Another dish was piled high with pieces of roast chicken, whose relatives pecked around on the ground below the table as we dined. (As in other parts of East and Southeast Asia, the cooked chicken here was hacked into pieces rather than being dismantled into legs, wings, breast, and other constituent parts. The bird’s neck was on the plate, as were the feet.) The rice that accompanied the meats was grown by the family in the paddies surrounding the house, and tasted better than any other white rice I have eaten.

Rice paddy, Svay Rieng

While the meal was being prepared, Pheap took me for a walk around the area. We crossed the road in front of the house, and made our way along a narrow strip of raised land separating the rice fields. I saw rice in various stages of growth, some about 30 days old, and a couple of weeks away from being ready for transplanting, some younger. I saw tiny fish, not much bigger than mosquito larvae, their big eyes out of all proportion with the rest of their bodies. In a couple of month’s time, Pheap told me, the paddies would be full of large fish – he indicated their size by clenching his forearm – which I would certainly get to eat if I were to visit the family again later in the year.

On what appeared to be an island in the midst of the rice fields, connected to the rest of the world by a narrow path, was the house of the oldest brother in the Hy family and his wife. Like most houses in this area, it was on concrete stilts. In the shaded and protected area beneath the house was a raised platform, about a meter above the ground. We removed our shoes, and sat down here. Around us was a small courtyard. At one end was a small structure on low stilts, used to store rice. Alongside it was a hand operated pump, the source of the family’s water supply. The house was not connected to the electrical grid, although a fluorescent light was attached to a beam over the platform where we sat. I asked Pheap what powered the light, and he pointed to a small car battery. The family takes it into town periodically to be charged, at a cost of about 25c (the exact price depends on how fully it is charged.) This is enough, as I understood it, to provide light for four hours.

My hosts’ house was similar in design, but somewhat more substantial and better appointed (see photograph). The house itself consisted of a single large upstairs room, its floor made of a smooth and very study tropical hardwood. There were shuttered windows on the sides of the room (no glass,) and the walls were made of wood. The house sat on a dozen concrete stilts, underneath were tables, benches, and a raised sitting platform. The roof of the house was covered with terracotta tiles, and a gutter ran down the side of the building into a large clay pot used to collect water for drinking and washing (the pot was half full when I arrived at the house, and overflowing after the brief downpour that arrived during our meal.)

Several smaller structures surrounded the main house, all of them with walls and roofs of palm leaves. One housed a cow, which peered out at us as we ate. Another, without walls, sheltered a large pig. There were also several other buildings whose functions I could not discern. The house did not have an indoor bathroom.

This makes it a typical home in Svay Rieng province, According to the Atlas of Cambodia, only 4.7% of homes in the province have electricity, safe drinking water, and a toilet; 5.1% have a toilet and safe drinking water, and 70.9% have safe drinking water. 16.1% have no amenities at all (2005 data.) Svay Rieng is by no means the poorest province in Cambodia: indeed, it is one of the better off. Only in Phnom Penh province do a majority of homes have electricity, a toilet, and safe drinking water. In most provinces, most homes have no amenities at all.

On each visit to Cambodia, I have become more fascinated with the country, its people, and its history.  The reason for my current trip to the country is that I am confident that many of my students will share my fascination with this place, and so I am here to set up a study abroad program that will bring students from the University of Mary Washington to Cambodia during the Summer of 2010 and, I hope, regularly thereafter.

The program will include time in Siem Reap, a chance for the students to learn about the history of the Angkor Kingdom, and see the magnificent Angkor Wat and some of the other temples in the area. They will visit Phnom Penh, and learn about the tragic Cambodian genocide.  But they will also learn about more than ancient history and genocide. I hope to arrange a service learning experience for the students, in which they will work with NGOs and others on development projects (such as those working with street children,  or promoting awareness of HIV.) And, most important of all, the students will meet and get to know Cambodians of their own age, through homestay arrangements and a “buddy program,” where each UMW students will start getting to know a Cambodian student prior to traveling to the country.

I will be working on arrangements for the program over the next couple of months, and I will post information on this blog and at regionalgeography.org as soon as I have it. In the mean time, if you think you might be interested in traveling with me to Cambodia in 2010, please let me know, and I will make sure that you get regular updates on our plans.

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I have posted additional photographs from my current trip to Cambodia on Facebook; these include photographs from Kampong Phluk (see my previous post,) and from some of Phnom Penh’s markets.