By Their Own Compass

Emily Hahn in China: War, Romance, and Opium

Seeking the perfect travel companion: Must like adventure, dodgy neighborhoods, good gin joints, handsome and interesting men (a spy or a poet, if you please), gibbons (which are NOT monkeys), and opium. Not in that particular order. Meet Emily “Mickey” Hahn, a writer, an adventurer, and a professional rule-breaker whose wanderlust took her from the American Midwest to Europe and Africa, and finally to China, all before she turned 30. By the time she got to China, she had already established herself as an up-and-coming literary voice and one of the New Yorker’s earliest star writers. In her career, she published 54 books and over 200 articles, but her most famous book is China to Me, a memoir of the years that we’re going to talk about in this episode. She partied with poets (and her pet gibbon) at Shanghai soirees. Wrote biographies while dodging bombs in wartime Chongqing, and did her best to keep herself and her family alive in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Along the way, she became famous (some might add “notorious”) for her affairs, including with Chinese writer Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei 邵洵美) and the head of British intelligence in Hong Kong, Charles Boxer. Mickey lived through some of China’s most tumultuous moments. While many foreigners experienced these events, Mickey gave her readers an unvarnished look at what was happening, with a style all her own. We’ll explore Mickey’s life, travels, and adventures, and we’ll also discuss how to follow in her footsteps today through the modern cities of Chongqing, Hong Kong, and especially Shanghai. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe [https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

History’s Funniest Diplomatic Fails: the US in Guam, Louis XIV’s Fake Persian Ambassador and China’s Unluckiest Envoy

In diplomatic history, some missions don’t always go off with a bang, but with a cringe. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the US Navy attacked Guam and waited for return fire that never came. Turns out the Spanish-run island had no idea they were enemies and sent an army officer and port commander out in a rowboat to go say a cheerful hello instead. In 1715, Louis XIV donned his finest diamond encrusted outfit to welcome a Persian “ambassador” in his spectacular Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles only to be told his translator was no good; and in 1870, Chinese diplomat Chonghou went all the way to France to say sorry for the murder of some nuns during the Tianjin Massacre, only to wait around for a year to find someone to apologize to. In this episode, Jeremiah and Sarah take turns to tell the stories of three of history’s most embarrassing diplomatic incidents and attempt to put themselves in the shoes of those who were there. Jeremiah balks at Sarah’s lack of Beatles song recognition, and Sarah reveals her favourite modern diplomatic fail: when Emmanuel Macron surprised Donald Trump with a Daft Punk medley performed by the [https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/jul/14/french-army-band-medleys-daft-punk-bastille-day-parade-macron-trump-video]Garde Républicaine [https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/jul/14/french-army-band-medleys-daft-punk-bastille-day-parade-macron-trump-video]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe [https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Leo Africanus: Pirates, Popes, and the Moor Who Knew Too Much

Captured by a Spanish pirate? A gift to Pope Leo X? Europe’s expert on Africa for nearly three centuries? Leo Africanus lived many lives. Born al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan around 1488 in Granada, Spain, he was trained in the madrasas of Fez to be a diplomat. He travelled across the Sahara Desert and North Africa, sailed the Red Sea, and called on courts from Tunis to Timbuktu, Cairo to Constantinople. Then he became a prisoner of Rome, a convert (possibly) to Christianity, and one of the most celebrated scholars of his era, writing the Cosmography and Geography of Africa in 1526 (published in 1550). Then he disappeared. In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we tell the story of how a roving ambassador from Fez ended up a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the dungeons and luxury apartments rolled into a single fortress on the Tiber. We follow his capture at sea in 1518, his fifteen months in the papal cells, his baptism by the Medici pope who gave him his own names, and the nine years he spent in Rome as a convert, a scholar, and a curiosity. We also follow him out, because when the city was sacked by mutinous Imperial troops in May 1527, Leo Africanus used the chaos to disappear, most likely back to Tunis, where he becomes untraceable in the historical record. Become a member of the By Their Own Compass Club on Substack for research notes on Leo Africanus, extended travel tips for Fez and Rome, a full episode transcript, and an original parody song we’re not entirely sorry about. The gratitude is real. Along the way, we talk about what it meant to be a Muslim diplomat captured in Renaissance Europe, the family history that starts with the fall of Granada in 1492, and the Venetian editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who published Leo’s manuscript and, in the process, smoothed over the Islam and sharpened the Christianity for his European readers. We also ask the same question we asked of Marco Polo. How much of Leo’s Africa did he actually see, and how much did he hear about in the markets of Fez and write down as if he’d been there? Our guide through the tangle is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Trickster Travels is the most thorough reconstruction of who this man was. An updated edition of Cosmography and Geography of Africa is out from Penguin Classics, the first new English translation of the book in over four hundred years. Sarah and Jeremiah take you through the Rome and Fez of Leo’s life too, from the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Passetto di Borgo (the corridor the Pope fled down in 1527) through the May 6 swearing-in ceremony of the Swiss Guard, and across the Mediterranean to the medina of Fez and the Chouara tanneries, where the smell still hits you on the terrace. Share this episode with a friend who thinks Kashmir is part of Morocco simply because Robert Plant used to buy the really good drugs there back in 1973. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe [https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Lost Generation in 1920s Paris: How Glamorous Was It Really?

Cobblestones. Cafes. The smell of baguettes hits you as you walk into a warm boulangerie on a rainy morning. An open notebook on a chequered tablecloth, an old-style pen, and a café au lait at the ready. Paris in April. They even wrote a song about it. Paris is probably the most pre-imagined city on earth, and the so-called Lost Generation, the writers and artists who flooded here after the First World War, wrote a version of the city that most of us still carry with us. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast [https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-moveable-feast-ernest-hemingway/a3f0d724145e0135?ean=9780684824994&next=t] was the book that launched a thousand tote bags. But that version of 1920s Paris with its champagne, café feuds, and glamorised poverty (trust funds and inheritances conveniently hidden) is only one man’s memories, written down and romanticised decades after the fact. In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we take a look at three writers who were all in Paris at the same time, but writing about three different cities. Jean Rhys was a writer from Dominica. Later, she would become famous for her 1966 classic, Wide Sargasso Sea [https://bookshop.org/p/books/wide-sargasso-sea-jean-rhys/426abfbb8f17016a?ean=9780393352566&next=t], but in 1920s Paris, she was a struggling writer with little money and a husband in a French prison. George Orwell was there, too. Washing dishes at a fancy hotel and scraping by in a rundown hotel just 500 metres from where Hemingway lived. We trace their haunts from the Place de la Contrescarpe to Montparnasse, from Jean Rhys’ beautifully evocative Left Bank and Other Stories [https://archive.org/details/leftbankothersto0000rhys] to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, [https://bookshop.org/p/books/down-and-out-in-paris-and-london-george-orwell/984ccd7c124271ff?ean=9780156262248&next=t] whose stories of crowded, profane kitchens would be among the inspirations for Anthony Bourdain and his famous book Kitchen Confidential [https://bookshop.org/p/books/kitchen-confidential-25th-anniversary-edition-anthony-bourdain/eff63f229dfd31e7?ean=9781582340821&next=t]. And we offer a Paris travel guide for those on their way to France or just dreaming of a trip. Sarah and Jeremiah walk you from the Latin Quarter to the Luxembourg Gardens. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe [https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Historian Nicola Di Cosmo on Venice, the Mongols, and Marco Polo in China

Our Marco Polo episode was the most downloaded show in the history of By Their Own Compass. This week, we go deeper into the world of Marco and the Mongols as we sit down with Nicola Di Cosmo, Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and co-author of Venice and the Mongols, out this month from Princeton University Press, to talk about how the Mongol discovery of Europe (rather than the other way around) made Marco's journey possible in the first place. We also ask Professor Di Cosmo why Marco, one of the world's most famous travellers, came home from China and chose to skip out on an entire era of growing economic and political ties between Venice and the Mongols, preferring instead to promote his book and invest in canal-adjacent real estate. Finally, we find out how a slap to the face of a Venetian merchant in a Black Sea trading post might have been responsible for the Black Death reaching Europe. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe [https://bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]