Honorable Mention

An excerpt from Imperial Grunts:

“I’m culturally at home here,” Wilhelm announced to the gathering, as he sprinkled vodka in the air three times in Mongolian fashion before swallowing a small glassful. “I’m in the Gobi, among Mongolians, and among soldiers.” The statement, like so many others he made, endeared him to the locals. It demonstrated, too, how imperialism can entail the aethetic appropriation of a foreign landscape. The tradition of British literary travel writing would have been impossible without the British Empire. Tom Wilhelm was a man of empire here in Mongolia. He was a more grounded, less mystical version of Francis Younghusband, the early-twentieth-century Brtish army officer and Central Asian explorer who had led a military expedition to Tibet as a preventative to Russian infiltration there.

With thanks to reader Gollios.