Lost Horizons

By Jonathan Mirsky on December 20, 1990

Except for the Chinese Communists, who call him names like “the wolf in monk’s robes,” or “the criminal Dalai,” virtually everyone speaks well of the Dalai Lama. The latest incarnation is the Fourteenth in a line that began in 1351 and exists simultaneously with the seventy-fourth “manifestation” (the Dalai Lama’s term) of Chenrezig the Compassionate Bodhisattva, a contemporary of the Buddha in the fifth century BC. It is impossible not to like him. “I am not the best Dalai Lama ever,” he said when he was in London in September. “Or the worst. Maybe I’m just the most popular. Perhaps it’s time to stop having Dalai Lamas.”

History on the Wing

By John K. Fairbank on December 20, 1990

Golden Inches is a charming memoir of an American couple who built up the YMCA in Chengtu and Chungking. Their careers on America’s farthest Western cultural frontier in Szechwan province give us a sense of the day-to-day texture of Chinese-American relations during the golden age between 1905 and 1935. America was then no threat to China but seemed to have what the country needed and the YMCA could offer by way of education and help in improving social welfare without having missionary strings attached.