Features on Asian Art, Culture, History & Travel
Features
Khajuraho
Khajuraho: A Celebration Of Cosmic Union
In 1839 Captain T.S. Burt of the Royal Bengal Engineers published in the pages of the prestigious Journal of the Asiatic Society an account of his discovery of an overgrown and abandoned Hindu temple complex in central India. The good captain, writing in the restrained style of the early Victorian era, noted that:
"I found in the ruins of Khajrao seven large diwallas, or Hindoo temples, most beautifully and exquisitely carved as to workmanship, but the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow rather warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing; indeed, some of the sculptures here were extremely indecent and offensive..."
Sublime Petra
Rose-Red Caravan City Of Ancient Jordan
Not virgin white - like that old Doric shrine
where once Athena held her rights divine,
but rosy-red - as if the blush of dawn
which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn.
The hues of youth on a brow of woe
Which men called old two thousand years ago!
Match me such marvel, save in eastern clime;
a rose-red city - "Half as old as Time!"
Tears of the Poppy
Opium, Morphine and Heroin
Opium has been recognised as a narcotic for at least two thousand years. It is thought to have grown wild in the mountains of the eastern Mediterranean from Neolithic times, and was known to both the early Greeks and Romans. It was probably introduced to both China and India by Arab traders about a thousand years ago, and soon came to be widely valued for its medicinal properties.
Socialist Realism In Laos
Final Frontier for Socialist Realism
Languid, land-locked Laos, "last frontier" of the cold war, innocent victim of meddlesome neighbours and predatory super-powers, is an unlikely setting for the imperial twilight of an essentially European art form. And yet, here by the banks of the mighty Mekong and there by the stone-age burial urns of the Plain of Jars, long after its demise in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the school of art known as ’Socialist Realism’ is on its last Laotian legs.
Venerating The River Goddess
Thailand’s Graceful Loy Krathong Festival
Each year at November full moon, people gather by stretches of open water throughout Thailand to celebrate Loy Krathong. Small but elaborate lotus-shaped creations bearing traditional offerings of flowers, incense, candles and a coin are floated in countless numbers on streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, and even the open sea to reverence and pay homage to Mae Khongkha, the goddess of rivers and waters.
Doi Chiang Dao
Mysterious And Majestic Mountain of Northern Thailand
"The peak of Chieng Dao stands boldly up, 7,160 feet above sea level. It is a very imposing limestone rock, as it springs almost perpendicularly from the plain to a height of six thousand feet." James Macarthy’s description of this eastern outpost of the Upper Tennasserim range, written a hundred years ago, was the first scientific estimation of the height of one of Northern Thailand’s most spectacular formations.
Graham Greene’s Saigon
Old Saigon
I deliberately used a quotation from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in the introduction to this book. It’s probably the best novel, at least in English, on Vietnam, its politics and its mores in the middle of the 20th century. No Vietnamese city is more closely associated with Greene than Saigon. Yet his chief protagonists – Fowler, and Pyle – travel much further afield, to Hanoi and Haiphong in the north, to Ninh Binh and the cathedral town of Phat Diem in south-central Tonkin, as well as to the Cao Dai Holy See at Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon. Fowler even takes part in a French dive-bombing operation in the northwest near Lai Chau, while the sound of heavy artillery from a major battle at Hoa Binh can clearly be heard at night from downtown Hanoi. Even legendary Halong Bay gets a mention.
Images Of Doi Mae Salong
A vision of pristine hills, long ago, straddling an unmarked and unobserved frontier between states as yet unformed. Unpopulated save by birds and beasts, the only human visitors are wandering hunters, mystics and anchorites, refugees from justice – or from oppression. A Southeast Asian Shangri-la without name and beyond knowledge, silently awaiting discovery and settlement.