The Lake District, though Chinese sensibilities

 

Sometimes, in the higgledy-piggledy chaos of charity shops overwhelmed with book donations from declutterers, I come across hidden gems. This wonderful travel book, The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, was in the 50p. box of old Ordnance Survey maps and tourist leaflets.

Author Chiang Yee, fleeing political turmoil in his native China, was exiled to England in 1933. He studied politics at the University of London, and wrote The Chinese Eye, a successful literary companion to the 1935-36 International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy, providing an entertaining insight into the ways in which his countrymen perceive works of art and nature.

In July 1935, weary of traffic, smog and crowded pavements in London, seeking solitude and homesick for the mountainous landscapes of central China, he set out for a two-week walking holiday of the Lake District.

The Silent Traveller in Lakeland is his daily account of encounters and observations in a much-loved English landscape: Wordsworth country, seen though Chinese eyes and interpreted with Chinese sensibilities. It is, though, much more that a travelogue. Separated from his own family, and craving inner peace at a time when Europe edged towards Fascism and the precipice of war (the Spanish Civil War has just broken out) he muses on the human folly of armed conflict.

Chiang Yee was a poet and skilled artist. Along the way he illustrated his account with spontaneous paintings using brush, ink and soft paper, water techniques that seem to suit the rainy Lakeland landscape, each accompanied by a poem written in exquisite Chinese calligraphy and translated in the text. They encapsulate what he describes as one of the fundamental distinctions between British and Chinese landscape painting; the former tactual representation, the latter a response to the artist’s inner emotions.

Chiang Lee struggled to find a buyer for his book in London and eventually his publisher only took it on a no-royalty basis. It sold out within a month and, after a rapid renegotiation of contracts, became a best-seller, running through six editions. It was republished posthumously, in this edition, by Mercat Press in 2004.

Chiang Yee’s literary and academic career flourished, with an international series of Silent Traveller titles. For many readers The Silent Traveller in Lakeland remains his masterpiece.

He emigrated to the United States in 1955, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, then finally returned to his hometown of Jiujiang in China in 1975, where he died, aged 72, in 1977.