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Memorial for Yelü Yanning in Khitan large script. Dated 986.
From From President To Prison from Ferdinand Ossendowski an idiosyncratic retelling of 10th- to 12th-century Northeast Asian history (the guy is just like a proper historian!):
In the course of my business, I made the acquaintance of the richest merchant of the town and heard from him some interesting law regarding these Kara-Khorch’ins. He told me that this tribe had often swept down toward the Great Wall,
I was lucky this weekend to get a chance to read a book which has been lying on my desk for a few months now (next to
Man And Mystery In Asia
the ever-growing pile of the latest research in my field…): Man And Mystery in Asia by Ferdinand Ossendowski, the Polish noble/ chemist/ biologist/ geologist/ explorer/ fugitive from the Cheka and the Bolsheviks/ bestseller author/ hunter/ storyteller extraordinaire. I’m sure I’m leaving a number of defining qualifications out of this description, but the fact that he saw the inside of a prison both under the Tsar and under the Bolsheviks on account of ideological crimes tells you something about the man. That he was a fundamentally decent and courageous person. Or incredibly stupid and unfortunate to fall foul of two such formidable enemies,
Beasts, Men And Gods. I’d like to write a book with a title like that. A take-it-or-leave-it title. An I-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck-what-you-think title. Written by a Polish chemist on the run for the Bolsheviks during the Red-White civil war in Siberia and Mongolia. Ferdinand Ossendowski was a Polish noble in trouble with the secret police of the Russian Czar. Then he got into even worse troubles with the not-so-secret police of the Bolsheviks. He fled to Siberia, then Mongolia and finally Manchuria, in the course of which he matter-of-factly spent a Siberian winter by himself in a forest in a self-made shelter. Consorted with a confessed murderer and torturer.
