SHANGRI-LA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1939, Page 3

SHANGRI-LA

LAND OF GREAT PEACE — I TIBETAN PEOPLE OF ANCIENT I CULTURE. VISITED BY AMERICAN EXPLORER. Tucked away among the mountain j ranges of northern Tibet and southern China there are as many as five or six completely isolated ' communities, gleaning a simple. primitive living from the soil, paying allegiance to a benevolent king, scarcely knowing and certainly not caring that war is raging 100 miles away. This from the lips of Quentin Roosevelt, Harvard ’4l, the grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt, and in his own right an explorer and adventurer after the best tradition of his distinguished family. He returned to college in October from an expedition into China and Tibet. "As you know,” he told a member of the staff of the “Christian Science Monitor." "I set out last winter for the Orient under contract to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to search for additional .copies of an ancient Nash! ’Funeral scroll’ which my father had found. We believe these scrolls and the other evidence I obtained will help to clarify the story of the development of Chinese civilisation. “I arrived in Japan in January, took a Japanese military plane to Chin?., sailed down the coast to Hong Kong and Indo China, and took a French railroad up across the Chinese border. It was a roundabout route, but it was better than risking bombing raids. Over 3.000 miles of the continent I flew in a Chinese military plane which, on the way. was more than once driven off its course and pursued by enemy combat ships because of the 8,000.000 dollars it was carrying to guerilla troops. “The last leg of the journey was the most, exciting of all. Through friends of mine and of my father, I obtained an escort of 50 tough horsemen of the Chinese army and an equal number of foot soldiers—this is order to get through a territory overrun by Tibetan bandits. We caravaned on foot, on horseback, with oxen and with mules. Once we were attacked by bandits and there was some fighting, but my' escorts easily overpowered them and they fled. “Finally, after crossing the Tibetan mountain ranges, I arrived at the little community I was to study and which I like to call Shangri-la. the land of great peace. There, with a culture more than 3 000 years old, lives a nation of simple agriculturists. They were not always peaceful, to be sure; about the year 800 they were a mercenary army I for the Emperor of China and executed a notable campaign in which they invaded and defeated the Burmese. “But gradually their military prowess deteriorated and they were defeated by the surrounding tribes. Tired of war, they took advantage of their magnificent geographical isolation, and became a peaceful. farming people. Remnants of their old glory remain—the hereditary king, the cult of priests, the devil worship, the pictographic language. the legends. It was these I came to study." Mr Roosevelt brought home 20 crates of documentary material, purchased for 200 dollars and a few "odds and ends." He also has a great many pictures. including a movie of the tribal priests doing an ancient religious dance and an inexhaustible store of memories from which he draws experiences as casually as others would speak of a weekend trip. Most vivid, however, is his cumulative impression of an actual Shangri-la, where men are proving that it. is possible to live harmoniously together.