Colin Thubron
Author of Shadow of the Silk Road
About the Author
Colin Thubron is the prizewinning, bestselling author of several travel books.
Series
Works by Colin Thubron
??? 1 copy
Associated Works
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (2013) — Editor & Introduction, some editions — 793 copies, 19 reviews
Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767 (1962) — Introduction, some editions — 390 copies, 10 reviews
The Company They Kept, Volume Two: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships (2011) — Contributor — 25 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Thubron, Colin Gerald Dryden
- Birthdate
- 1939-06-14
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Eton College
- Occupations
- novelist
travel writer
documentary filmmaker - Organizations
- Royal Society of Literature (President, 2010- )
- Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Commander, 2006)
Royal Scottish Geographical Society Mungo Park Medal (2000)
Royal Society for Asian Affairs Lawrence of Arabia Medal (2001)
Royal Society of Literature (Fellow, 1969) - Relationships
- Grazia, Margreta de (wife)
- Short biography
- Colin Thubron was born in London on 14 June 1939. Educated at Eton College, he worked briefly for the publishers Hutchinson and as a freelance television film-maker in Turkey, Japan and Morocco. His first book, Mirror to Damascus, was published in 1967. He continued to write about the Middle East in The Hills of Adonis: A Quest in Lebanon (1968) and Jerusalem (1969).
Among the Russians (1983) describes a journey he made by car through western Russia during the Brezhnev era. Behind the Wall: A Journey through China (1987) won both the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The Lost Heart of Asia (1994) narrates his travels through the newly-independent central Asian republics, exploring the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the region. He returned to Russia for his most recent travel narrative, In Siberia (1999).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1969, Colin Thubron is a regular contributor and reviewer for magazines and newspapers including The Times, the Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator. He lives in London. His latest travel books are Shadows of the Silk Road (2006), an account of his 7,000-mile journey along the route of the Silk Road; and To a Mountain in Tibet (2011), about his pilgrimage to sacred Mount Kailas. - Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- London, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
Colin Thubron’s account of his trek, from the most remote regions of Nepal to the sacred places of Manasarovar Lake and Mount Kailas in Tibet, conveys the sense of a deeply personal and otherworldly experience. His descriptions of the terrain and its people are mesmerizing and seamlessly interwoven with details of the region’s history and spiritual beliefs. A strong sense of place and its mysticism, combined with glimpses of the author’s own memories and emotions, makes this a truly show more absorbing travel narrative.
For the one fifth of the world’s population who are Buddhist, Hindu and Bon, Mount Kailas, known in ancient Hindu scriptures as Mount Meru, represents the center of the world. It is also of great ecological significance, being the source of India’s four great rivers: the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej and Brahmaputra. Protected by its sanctity, topography and strict Chinese controls, Mount Kailas has never been climbed.
Traveling mostly by foot in an area without roads, Thubron is accompanied only by a guide and a cook, and occasionally a horseman. Many of the local people are excruciatingly poor in a material sense, their access to education and even rudimentary health care extremely limited or nonexistent. Yet their lives are embedded in a richness of spiritual beliefs that date back to ancient times, populated by a vast array of spirits, demons and deities who seem to still exist amongst them. Monasteries are scattered throughout the landscape, the monks serving as caretakers for the Buddhas, goddesses and bodhisattvas who are enshrined as statues deep within monastic caves. Thubron devotes substantial portions of his narrative to these belief systems, including some fascinating descriptions of Tantric practices.
Death is a recurring theme of Thubron’s journey. The Hindu God of Death, Yama, dwells on Mount Kailas. Both Indian and Tibetan pilgrims venture to the region to circumambulate the lake and mountain in a quest to erase their sins and gain merit towards reincarnation. Some practice their deaths there, while others actually die, being poorly acclimated to the altitude and ill-prepared for the exertion and extreme conditions. Sky burials are performed here – the bodies burned or fed to vultures - and a litter of bags, boots, socks, hats, human hair and fingernails left strewn over the terrain as offerings. The Buddhist belief in the transience of all things sharply contrasts with the author’s mourning of his own immediate family members, his mother recently deceased and his sister having died tragically as a young woman in a skiing accident on another mountain.
As he is approaching 73 years of age, Thubron’s years of active travel writing are likely limited. Fortunately, he has compiled a wealth of works to be explored and I am very much looking forward to reading them. show less
For the one fifth of the world’s population who are Buddhist, Hindu and Bon, Mount Kailas, known in ancient Hindu scriptures as Mount Meru, represents the center of the world. It is also of great ecological significance, being the source of India’s four great rivers: the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej and Brahmaputra. Protected by its sanctity, topography and strict Chinese controls, Mount Kailas has never been climbed.
“We are gazing on a country of planetary strangeness. Beneath us, in a crescent of depthless silence, a huge lake curves empty out of sight. It is utterly still. In the plateau’s barren smoothness it makes a hard purity, like some elemental carving, and its colour is almost shocking: a violent peacock blue. There is no bird or wind-touched shrub to start a sound. And in the cleansed stillness high above, floating on foothills so faded that it seems isolated in the sky, shines the cone of Mount Kailas.
…There seem no colours left in the world but this bare earth-brown, the snow’s white, and the sheen of the mirrored sky. Everything else has been distilled away. The south face of Kailas is fluted with the illusion of a long, vertical stairway, as if for spirits to climb by. It shines fifty miles away in an unearthly solitude. Void of any life, the whole region might have survived from some sacred prehistory, shorn of human complication. We have entered holy land.”
Traveling mostly by foot in an area without roads, Thubron is accompanied only by a guide and a cook, and occasionally a horseman. Many of the local people are excruciatingly poor in a material sense, their access to education and even rudimentary health care extremely limited or nonexistent. Yet their lives are embedded in a richness of spiritual beliefs that date back to ancient times, populated by a vast array of spirits, demons and deities who seem to still exist amongst them. Monasteries are scattered throughout the landscape, the monks serving as caretakers for the Buddhas, goddesses and bodhisattvas who are enshrined as statues deep within monastic caves. Thubron devotes substantial portions of his narrative to these belief systems, including some fascinating descriptions of Tantric practices.
“Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinity – a yidam- and by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him…Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to assimilate to the yidam, enthroned, perhaps in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the god himself may be conjured to inhabit it. In time the yogi can summon or dissolve the picture at will. And slowly, at will, he becomes the god. Mentally he takes on his appearance, his language (in oft-repeated mantras) and even his mind. He experiences his own body as a microcosm of the secret body of the universe. The world becomes a mandala. Seated upright, in union with Meru-Kailas, his breathing regulates and stills. At last, he feels his body thinning into illusion, he merges with the Buddha, and it is time to depart.”
Death is a recurring theme of Thubron’s journey. The Hindu God of Death, Yama, dwells on Mount Kailas. Both Indian and Tibetan pilgrims venture to the region to circumambulate the lake and mountain in a quest to erase their sins and gain merit towards reincarnation. Some practice their deaths there, while others actually die, being poorly acclimated to the altitude and ill-prepared for the exertion and extreme conditions. Sky burials are performed here – the bodies burned or fed to vultures - and a litter of bags, boots, socks, hats, human hair and fingernails left strewn over the terrain as offerings. The Buddhist belief in the transience of all things sharply contrasts with the author’s mourning of his own immediate family members, his mother recently deceased and his sister having died tragically as a young woman in a skiing accident on another mountain.
“And you? Why are you doing this, traveling alone?
I cannot answer.
I am doing this on account of the dead.
You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it’s my profession after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end, you come to rest at a mountain that is holy to others…
To ask of a journey Why? is to hear only my own silence. It is the wrong question (although there seems no other). Am I harrowing myself because the world is mortal? Whose pain am I purging?…An old Tibetan monk tells me the soul has no memory. The dead do not feel their past.”
As he is approaching 73 years of age, Thubron’s years of active travel writing are likely limited. Fortunately, he has compiled a wealth of works to be explored and I am very much looking forward to reading them. show less
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, heading towards his eightieth birthday, Thubron followed the Amur from its source in Mongolia (where it's called the Onon) all the way to Nikolaevsk where it enters the Sea of Okhotsk. When Chekhov travelled to the Russian Far East in 1890, the passage down the Amur in a steamship was the only relaxed and comfortable part of his journey, and he gets positively lyrical in his descriptions of the scenery. Thubron's experience is rather different: the opening of show more the Trans-Siberian Railway killed the river traffic on the lower Amur (Vladivostok is a much more sensible place for a port than Nikolaevsk), and border tensions between the USSR and China have also kept its upper reaches off-limits for much of the 20th century.
Thubron starts off on horseback in the hills of Mongolia, in a protected region thought to contain the secret burial site of Genghis Khan, and we're only a couple of pages in when he has his second fall, injuring himself and obviously starting to wonder whether he really needs this kind of adventure at his age. But he sticks to it, and finds the source, which like most sources of great rivers is not exactly spectacular.
From there he goes on, cadging lifts with Buddhist monks, hiring taxis or taking local buses or ferries, into Siberia and then over the river to the Chinese side for a while downstream from Heihe, then back to the Russian side at Khabarovsk. As usual, his main interest is in talking to people along the way and finding out how they relate to the place they are living in and its history, and that's something he's very good at: he clearly manages to have interesting conversations even with people most of us would steer well clear of, like the ex-mercenary sturgeon poachers who guide him on the lower river, and gives us what seems to be a fair representation of their point of view.
Great travel writing, and a very interesting look at a part of the world I didn't know much about. show less
Thubron starts off on horseback in the hills of Mongolia, in a protected region thought to contain the secret burial site of Genghis Khan, and we're only a couple of pages in when he has his second fall, injuring himself and obviously starting to wonder whether he really needs this kind of adventure at his age. But he sticks to it, and finds the source, which like most sources of great rivers is not exactly spectacular.
From there he goes on, cadging lifts with Buddhist monks, hiring taxis or taking local buses or ferries, into Siberia and then over the river to the Chinese side for a while downstream from Heihe, then back to the Russian side at Khabarovsk. As usual, his main interest is in talking to people along the way and finding out how they relate to the place they are living in and its history, and that's something he's very good at: he clearly manages to have interesting conversations even with people most of us would steer well clear of, like the ex-mercenary sturgeon poachers who guide him on the lower river, and gives us what seems to be a fair representation of their point of view.
Great travel writing, and a very interesting look at a part of the world I didn't know much about. show less
This is, on one level, a trek to Mount Kailas, a sacred mountain in Tibet. It is also, although not overtly, a journey into the soul. The author has experienced the loss of his sister, when young, and now both parents, such that he is alone in the world. He undertakes the journey to circumnavigate Mt Kailas, which is scared to Buddhists and Hindus. To do so in not a light undertaking and the trek to just the foot of the mountain is hard going. He describes it all in some detail, and is, at show more times, unsparing in his descriptions. There is poverty here, but there is also something soul enhancing. Even for a non-believer, he experiences something over and above the travel in this trek. The details of the journey are well described, the history, background, geology and political turmoil all feature. It is when he is meditating on his fellow humanity and the act of memory that he is at his most human. show less
Another sterling publication from Time-Life Books in their Great Cities series, although this one is quite dated, 1978. But Colin Thubron's scintillating prose makes up to a great extent for its vintage; in keeping with his other works, he approaches the city from the ground level, so to speak, observing the condition and activities of the common people on the streets, rather that conferring with the captains of industry or the political bigwigs. So inevitably, the decrepit condition of the show more streets and buildings, the crumbling infrastructure, the challenges of living with poor levels of basic services, and the dogged spirit of the people, are what come to the attention. In a way, this probably represents more than anything the reaction of a Westerner (and a non-Muslim, to boot), as the nostalgia for the lost world of Christian Constantinople comes forth strongly. A Muslim writer would probably see in the massive mosques and palaces the confirmation of the glory of his faith; the Christian, however, feels the pang of the seat of Orthodox patriarch reduced to a vestige, the few remaining churches and synagogues with almost no attendance, the gradual emigration of the many ethnic communities like the Jews, the Armenians, the Greeks, and others, the relegation of Sancta Sophia to a museum (and now, with the Islamic revival, back to a mosque in use). In turn, ethnic Turks have come in from the Asian mainland, and the 'European' stock of the local populace (descenced largely from the Christian captives imported under the Ottoman regime) correspondingly decreases. Of course, 45 years down the timeline, one expects that the city would have been refurbished, with broad avenues and shining malls and high-rise buildings; we need to compare the current conditions. show less
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- Works
- 31
- Also by
- 13
- Members
- 6,942
- Popularity
- #3,522
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 118
- ISBNs
- 315
- Languages
- 11
- Favorited
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