IN THE FIRST PERSON.
Philip Bowring remembers Tiziano Terzani, who died aged 65 in July. 
by Philip Bowring


I, like most people, have a biased opinion of Tiziano. He was the godfather of my eldest son, a role which he acquired over a drink at the FCC in Hong Kong shortly after he had been booted out of China in 1984.

But my first memories of him go back more than a decade before that, to Singapore in 1973. It was there that I first encountered not just the flamboyance and the ego of Tiziano but the generosity. He offered space support in his office and moral support to a struggling but determined Singapore journalist, Arun Senkuttuvan, whose role as a stringer for the Far Eastern Economic Review made him an object of official wrath. Arun was subsequently jailed then driven from journalism by the authorities there. But Tiziano’s friendship and support for Arun never faded.

At root was always the journalist trying to understand more about the societies in which he lived and how they related to a West of which he knew he was part but with which he was often uncomfortable. It was not a journalism of scoops but of social investigation through meeting people which ultimately led to him transcending journalism to become a fine travel writer and almost a moralist.

Memories are too numerous to detail. He was always connected to something special, different, more imaginative. With him in Tibet, back in 1980 with only the second group of foreign journalists allowed to visit, it was Tiziano who escaped from the group (and its angry encounters with our Xinhua minders) to get to see a forbidden event – a sky burial.

There was his time in the Turtle House in Bangkok, a Thai-style house and garden in the midst of fast high-rising Bangkok with a pond and a huge, voracious old turtle and a meeting place for writers, artists and even politicians from all over Asia. Tiziano understood his own good fortune was to be expressed in his environment, and Angela, his wife, added to both the diversity of the visitors and the aura of easy hospitality.

Not that Tiziano wasn’t ill at ease with much of modern Asia. Vietnam eroded many of his hopes, four years in China showed him the brutality of power and of Communist absolutism in particular. The Forbidden Door was his vivid account of that society’s oppressions even in the relatively more liberal climate under Deng Xiaoping.

Wary of Western materialism he was troubled by Asia’s embrace of it and destruction of much of the old. Perhaps for this reason to me he never seemed quite at home in Japan. 

His last years saw him battling both cancer and the West’s most recent attempt to impose its will on Asia. His Letters Against the War in Afghanistan and his battles against Islamophobia in his native Italy won him a bigger following than ever. 

But his international public legacy will probably be two books which were the outcome of a yen to travel and a desire to find out what really moved societies. The best known is A Fortune Teller Told Me but my personal favourite is Goodnight Mister Lenin, an account of a 1991 journey through the Soviet Asian republics just at the point when that empire was falling apart.

For those lucky enough to know him, whether as the flamboyant war correspondent of 1973 or the white-bearded, kurta-clad guru in Delhi 2003, he was the friend who never changed his personal loyalties however much his idealism was contradicted by his experience as a journalist. He, for one, did not lapse into cynicism but always used his talents in pursuit of a better world for all.