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"Our man in China"
Editor Mike Edwards.
Photographs Michael S. Yamashita.
Archive photos Joseph F. Rock.
Tо THE BANDITS who preyed on travelers in the backcountry of China in the 1920s, the caravan approaching on a mountain trail must have looked like an invading army.
There were 26 mules and 17 men, escorted by 190 soldiers with rifles. The leader had an imperious demeanor, and, in contrast to the ragged soldiers, he was well dressed in boots, riding breeches, and pith helmet. And he was white.
This was no invading troop, however. Joseph F. Rock, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC explorer, writer, and photographer, was on another marathon expedition through the unmapped mountains
and kingdoms of premodern China. Rock had surrounded his caravan with soldiers to keep the bandits at bay.
Had those brigands been able to peer into the boxes lashed to his mules, they would have discovered things as strange as the sight of this stern-visaged foreigner who had penetrated their territory. Setting out for months at a time, Rock traveled like royalty. His baggage included tents, a folding bed, chairs, table, and, naturally, table linen and china. There was even a battery-powered phonograph. Sometimes he played opera for astonished nomads or monks at a Buddhist monastery;
he duly noted that the nomads howled with laughter at the sad parts of La Boheme and IPagliacci.
Rock was a complicated man, a loner, stiff, proud, self-made, extraordinary, imperfect. Born in Vienna, the son of a nobleman's servant, he came to the United States in 1905 at the age of 21 and became an American citizen in 1913. Yet he never shed his autocratic, Old World ways.
He usually traveled on horseback, but when he called on a local ruler, Rock's expense accounts-among the most memorable at the GEOGRAPHIC- might contain such an entry as: Chair coolies, 4 coolies at 80c per day.
Since there were no roads where Rock operated, and hence no automobiles, the sedan chair, a compartment borne on two long poles, was his limousine. When the four porters put it down, the figure who alighted wore a white shirt, tie, and jacket. "You've got to make people believe you're someone of importance if you want to live in these wilds," he once said.
That was probably true. It was also true that Rock liked being important, and if he did not receive what he considered proper respect, his temper, always short-fused, would explode. Once, when a Chinese merchant entered his quarters and sat down without offering a greeting, Rock seized the man by the collar and tossed him out. "I will not put up with an impertinent Chinaman," he wrote in his diary, revealing the racism that was also among his imperfections.
He was the GEOGRAPHIC's man in China in 1923-24 with the imposing title, "Leader of the National Geographic Society's Yunnan Province Expedition, " a title renewed in 192 7 for three years. From mountainous Yunnan in I the south, bordering Burma and Tibet I he worked his way almost a thousand miles north, close to the Gobi and Inner Mongolia. "No white man, since time began, ever stood here," he boasted as he overlooked the gorges of the Yellow River in Qinghai Province-a claim he repeated in most of his articles.
In "Through the Great River Trenches of Asia," August 192 6, he wrote of sliding across the frothing Mekong River on a rope of twisted bamboo strips. In "The Glories of the Minya Konka," October 1930, he described travel under blizzard conditions among some of China's highest peaks: "We packed our tents and bedding with numb hands. As we left our camping place the blizzard increased in fury." Rock often camped above 10,000 feet, sometimes exchanging exhausted mules for yaks, which were better suited to high altitude. He suffered bandit attacks on the trail, despite his large escorts, and dysentery attacks while staying in villages that stank from accumulated filth.
Besides ponderous manuscripts, Rock had been sending back photographs in black and white. Grosvenor believed color photos from Rock would "be worth thousands of dollars to our Magazine," but Fisher's word "experiment" suggested a more cautious outlook. At the time, color photography was a novelty;
most of the "color" photos then published in magazines were black and whites that had been artificially tinted.
The odds against the success of this "experiment" were formidable. First, there was the shipping problem, for Rock would be working with five-by-seven-inch glass plates of the Autochrome color process. And indeed, many of the carefully packed plates broke en route to China.
The process was extremely slow. To make the colors, the plates bore a coating of potato-starch grains dyed orange, green, and violet.
The image passed through this layer before it reached the emulsion. Even when photographing a landscape in bright sunlight, Rock had to expose the plates for a whole second. Of course, Rock's human subjects had to stand still at least that long while confronted by his big tripod-mounted camera-and few of them had ever even seen a camera.
None of these obstacles discouraged the indefatigable Rock. In fact, he usually processed the plates as he traveled, once, as he wrote, "tying our black developing tent to the branches" in a forest. He filtered water through cotton and lit dung fires to warm the chemical-developing baths to the required 6S°F. A helper waved cardboard to shoo flies away from the sticky emulsion.
"I have one great difficulty in drying the plates," he complained in August 1929. "At this time of year the atmosphere is saturated with moisture . . . unless they dry
quickly the film bursts in spots and leaves green spots all over the plate."
Sometimes defective coatings simply floated off the glass.
Inevitably, some of the developed plates that Rock shipped to magazine headquarters in Washington, D.C., also arrived in pieces. Still, nearly 600 reached us intact, and Rock's depiction of subjects both sublime and bizarre-glacier-topped peaks, temple rituals performed by dancers in frightening masks-began to be published with a chromatic breadth that approached the real thing, providing a glimpse of China that was both vivid and unique.
