The Image and the Likeness

Up from the horror of Hiroshima came a god. He gave the people hope and for this they killed him--as they have always killed their gods.ExcerptShanghai had changed. We sensed that the moment we came ashore. Extraterritoriality was long gone; we had known that, of course. The days of exploitation, of clubs where Chinese and Burmese and Indian servants waited on Britons and Americans were passed. Pan-Asia had seen to that. This was 1965. The white man's burden in the east had been upon brown and yellow shoulders for over sixteen years now, and the Indians and Burmese and Indonesians were ruling themselves, after their fling at communism in the fifties.The initial bitterness which followed the debacle of 1955 had passed, we were glad to see. Porters no longer spat in the faces of white men. They were polite, but we had not been in the city a half hour before we sensed something else. There was an edge to that politeness. It was as Major Reid had written before we left San Francisco--a subtle change had come over Asia in the previous few years. They smiled--they waited on us--they bent over backwards to atone for the excesses of the first years of freedom from foreign rule; but through it all was an air of aloofness, of superior knowledge.Baker put it in his typically blunt British way."The blighters have something up their sleeves, all right. The whole crew of them. Did you notice that rickshaw boy? When I said to take us to the hotel, he answered 'Yes, today I take you'. The Major was right--there's something in the wind, and it's damned serious."We were sitting, surrounded by our luggage, in our suite at the New China Hotel. There were four of us: Llewelyn Baker, Walter Chamberlin, Robert Martin, and myself, William Cady. Baker and Martin were anthropologists, and old China hands as well. Chamberlin was a geologist, and I claimed knowledge of zoology. We were here ostensibly as a scientific expedition, and had permission from the Republic of East Asia to do some work on Celebese man, following up the discoveries by Rance of bones and artifacts on that East Indian island in 1961.We had another reason for coming at this particular time, although this was not mentioned to the authorities. Our real objective was to find out certain things about New Buddhism, the violently nationalistic religion which was sweeping Pan-Asia.