J. M. Davis, portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805, oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child.

In the orbit of the Romantics, Manning was the best friend of Charles Lamb, close to the mad poet Charles Lloyd, and friendly with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. He knew Tom Paine and Madame de Staël in Paris, and was considered a handsome charmer in its aristocratic and intellectual salons. He spent twelve years in China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and was attached as a freelance interpreter to Lord Amherst’s disastrous expedition to Peking, which was expelled from the Forbidden City after one day, as Amherst had refused to “kowtow” to the emperor. He was perhaps the greatest English Sinologist of his time, before Sinology existed in England, and was the only one for most of the century who was not a missionary or religiously motivated. As an undergraduate, he had written a two-volume textbook on algebra. It was said that he spoke fifteen languages. He was anti-colonialist and anti-clerical, expelled from Cambridge for refusing to sign allegiance to the Church of England. In Asia he was on his own as an impoverished scholar, working for neither the British government or the East India Company, whose functionaries he found exasperating. He was famous in the cantonments for his erudition, his self-fashioned “Oriental” dress of silk robe and turban, and his waist-length beard. Read More

A male sparrow. Photograph by Rhododendrites, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 

I. He Who Noteth

Everyone had fallen in love with the short (five feet, six inches), young (twenty-four years old), big-hearted leader of the Chicago Zouaves. Even Abraham Lincoln. The president and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth were as “intimate”—these are Lincoln’s words in a letter to Ellsworth’s parents—“as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” Lincoln had given Ellsworth a job in his law office in Illinois and then invited the young man to accompany him on his famous inaugural train journey from Springfield, Illinois, to the East Coast. In his hopeful idealism, Ellsworth seemed to exemplify Aristotle’s description of the virtues of young people: “They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions.” In this account, the young are by nature uncynical, hopeful, magnanimous—in contrast to the pragmatic, fearful, and miserly old, who may maintain their grip on money but not much else; as Mary Chesnut puts it, “all other muscles are relaxed by age.”

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