Arise Asians Look Upon Our Works With Pride

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I took a short holiday with my wife and a bunch of strangers on a package tour recently. Package tours aren’t my favourite way to travel. But my knees aren’t what they used to be, neither is my back, and my mind is so forgetful it can’t handle the stress of planning and executing a trip to anyplace that requires a passport.
But my knees aren’t what they used to be, neither is my back, and my mind is so forgetful… Oh, I’ve said that already. Moving on.
We travelled to Xi’an, an ancient city that was surprisingly quite a fair bit further north, and hence colder, from where my mind had placed it on the map of China.
Unsurprisingly, this mishap tends to happen when you don’t plan or Google anything beforehand. Served me right.
Xi’an is considered the start of the Silk Road of olden days. I’ve travelled much of the Silk Road, and it’s good to be at one end of it. It’s like finishing a journey that I began in 2012 from Istanbul.
We arrived in Xi’an in midwinter. We happily put on our winter clothes and took a million photos. It didn’t snow—otherwise there would have been a million more photos and we might still be in Xi’an!
Modern and ancient
It was also the winter school holidays in China. The city was crammed with people everywhere. At the site of the terracotta warriors, it felt like all 700,000 workers who toiled there a few thousand years ago were mingling among us.

The Chinese people aren’t afraid to get physical when jostling for space! But Xi’an is a big city, modern and imposing with its ancient city walls and modern skyscrapers, and there’s enough space for everyone.
It’s also very Muslim-friendly, and I learnt the Chinese for “halal” (清真). China, after all, has more Muslims than Malaysia has Malaysians. Perhaps that’s why they—horror of horrors—dared to use non-certified halal signs!
In school I learnt about Emperor Shih Huang Ti. Now I learnt that his name and spelling, and many other things besides, are oversimplifications of the very complex way people and dynasties existed back then.
Why history matters
History, when done well and learned in humility, is very cool and illuminating. I’ve been to many major Asian historical sites from Turkey and Iran, to China and Mongolia, not to mention right here in South East Asia, and there’s always something new to learn.
While the histories of these places—those of our cousins and fellow Asians—had become more prominent over the last few decades, they’re becoming even more so now.
For too long our Asian history had been pushed to the periphery. We grew up learning more about Plato and Julius Ceasar than the great emperors and philosophers of Persia and China and the Indus Valley.
And even our study of China’s history seems disproportionately coloured by what Marco Polo and other westerners wrote centuries ago.
Magnificent Mongols
Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the Mongols, especially Chinggis Khan (note the modern spelling). For far too long they were depicted as just hordes that flew out of Central Asia like bats out of hell, a plague sent by God as punishment.
They were certainly no angels, and they killed millions in their orgy of conquest. And they left in many of us a bit of the Mongol DNA, perhaps even of the great Khan himself!
Creating the largest contiguous land empire in human history was no mean feat. It required complex and sophisticated military and civilian technology, leadership and governance systems for which they didn’t get enough credit.
While the tech bros of the West—the Zuckerbergs and Musks et al—are busy modelling themselves after the Roman emperors, salutes and all, don’t forget that people closer to home were doing amazing stuff back then, or even earlier.
But for far too long their stories had been buried beneath the more “glamourised” and better marketed western ones.
The Asian challenge
We’ve a lot to be proud of. While we claim kinship with all of humanity, we certainly owe more to our closer Asian “cousins” to understand and retell their (our) stories to the world.
What’s the point of my ramblings? Simple—at no time in the past few decades has life been roiled with so much uncertainty, with our identities as Asians challenged and our motives questioned.
Some of the accusations may very well be true. There’s no reason to believe we’re beyond doing some nefarious things ourselves. Many of the reasons our great empires from Persia to Mongolia fell was because of our own perfidy after all.
But we were, and are, just as capable of greatness too. Right now, the world needs some semblance of leadership from beyond the traditional Western ones. The world needs to hear words of hope and not just words of fear or anger.
History goes in cycles. It’s our time to shine and lead the world. While China and India will justifiably take pole positions, we in South East Asia aren’t just rounding errors either. We have over 600 million people who share a lot in common, not least of which is optimism about our future.
The Asian century
We, too, had been great once, even if not quite in the same league as the big boys in Cathay—the archaic name for China—and India and Persia and Turkey and Mongolia. But we’ve been there.
This century will surely be the Asian century. We need to grab it with both hands and make the most of it.
We need to take what is good and throw away what is bad, from both East and West. But remember for far too long we’ve been too besotted with everything Western, and often ashamed of whatever that’s Asian.
Time for a little introspection, to look at our own shared history, to learn lessons from them, and perhaps most importantly to throw away the shame and poor self-image that we’ve saddled ourselves for too long.
A good step is to travel and learn about our own Asian cultures and history. They’re quite cool, and there’re a lot more happy surprises waiting to be discovered.
They are quite cold too if you visit in mid-winter! But with that I wish you and all your loved ones: Happy Chinese New Year of the Wood Snake! And may much of the wood, and the snakes, around us be spared. They have their place in the order of things. - FMT
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

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