Byline: Rupert Winchester

All for nought

The concept of ‘zero’ is perhaps the most paradoxical theory of mankind. At once nothing and everything, it is the basis of the numerical system incorporated into most Westernised societies.  Amir D. Aczel investigates its origins in his latest book, Finding Zero.

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Finding ZeroThe concept of zero, nought, or 0, is considered to be one of the highest intellectual achievements of mankind, and almost certainly the greatest conceptual leap in the history of mathematics.

As science writer and mathematician Amir Aczel puts it, “zero is not only a concept of nothingness, which allows us to do arithmetic well, and to algebraically define negative numbers… zero enables our base-10 number system to work, so that the same 10 numerals can be used over and over again, at different positions in a number.”

Finding Zero describes Aczel’s lifelong quest to discover from whence our number system came.

In the West, the Roman numeral system was used up until around the 13th century, yet didn’t have a zero, and it was incredibly cumbersome. Before that, the Sumerians and Babylonians counted in base 60 (which is still in use today for telling time and measuring angle), but also lacked a zero. The Mayan civilization of Central America used a glyph for a zero in some of their more complicated calendars, but its use varied, and it never made it out of Central America, so it can’t be related to “our” zero.

Aczel’s quest for the first zero takes him around the globe. Along the way, he encounters Indiana Jones-esque artefacts with splendid names, like the Ishango Bone, the Aztec Stone of the Sun, the Bakhshali Manuscript and the Nana Ghat Inscriptions. He travels to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, and to India, where he studies a stone inscription found at the Chatturbhuja temple in Gwalior, which has been dated to 876 AD, and was long thought to be the planet’s first zero.

Eventually, his research leads him to Cambodia in search of an inscription originally discovered by French scholar George Coedès in 1929. The stone was found among the ruins of a 7th century temple at Sambor-on-Mekong, in present-day Kratie.

The key phrase on the stone is a date marker: “The Chaka era reached 605 in the year of the waning moon,” and can be dated to 683 AD, making it a full two centuries earlier than the Indian zero.

The stone with the zero (actually a dot), known prosaically as K-127, was moved to Phnom Penh, then to Siem Reap in 1969, when it disappeared. Many thought that the Khmer Rouge, with their hatred of culture and learning, had destroyed it. Nevertheless, Aczel tracks it down, rescues it from some entertainingly stupid Italian archaeologists, and sees it consigned, quite properly, to the National Museum (it’s worth noting, however, that K-127 is not on display at the museum, and no one seems to have much of a clue about where it is).

Along the way, Aczel considers whether Buddhist philosophical concepts about being and nothingness could have pushed Eastern thinkers toward developing the concept of zero, and decides that they probably did.

Aczel has written some 20 books on scientific topics. His prolific output and range of interests might make some of his mistakes in Finding Zero forgivable (e.g. Siem Reap does not translate to “Siam Victorious,” and you’d have had to have lived a very sheltered life to describe Phnom Penh’s National Museum as “one of the finest museums in the world”). And while it’s unlikely that “writes like a mathematician” will ever be seen as a huge compliment, Finding Zero is at least clearly and efficiently written, and tells an engaging and important story.

Available at: Monument Books

Diplomatic interests: Britain And Sihanouk’s Cambodia

From the outset, it’s worth nothing that this isn’t a book for everybody and it probably won’t be flying off the shelves. It’s a nearly 400-page-long, densely annotated analysis of the diplomatic relations between Britain and Cambodia between 1964 and 1970. That may or may not be your thing. If it is, you’re gonna love this book.

The problem, however, is that Britain played a pretty minor role in shaping Cambodia’s history during this period. British influence in the region had faded alarmingly after India’s independence in 1947, and even more so after Burma’s in 1948, so despite the flood of diplomatic cables and papers quoted in the book, its role really didn’t amount to much. In 1967 the British closed its military bases in Malaysia and Singapore, really bringing the curtain down on its strategic role in the region.

Of most interest to the author, Nicholas Tarling, is the gap between Britain’s need to play along with the diplomatic interests of the United States, at the height of the Cold War, and its own rather more neutral King Sihanouk-centric philosophy.

While Sihanouk bravely strove to maintain Cambodia’s neutrality, caught between the superpowers’ travails in Vietnam, both China and the US put him under enormous and unsustainable pressure. Britain also had to try to find a middle ground, recognising as it did the existence of the People’s Republic of China (which the US did not, until 1979) and would have been happy to see a non-aligned Southeast Asia, much as Sihanouk would have done.

King Sihanouk is the most interesting personality in the book (almost all the other characters being minor Foreign Office mandarins of the mid-1960s). While Tarling talks of Sihanouk’s ‘baffling’ and ‘mercurial personality’, his ‘flamboyance’, ‘exaggerated vanity’ and ‘outrageous speeches’, one never really gets a sense of the man; buried beneath the thick layers of academic verbiage, Sihanouk fails to come alive as the spectacular character he clearly was.

While Britain privately admitted that it had had ‘nothing but trouble from the touchy, temperamental and doubtfully sane ruler’, it recognised that continuing diplomatic relations might help prevent Cambodia becoming a satellite of China, and ‘exasperating and unpredictable though the personality of Prince Sihanouk might be, he has so far maintained the peace and unity of Cambodia’. Sadly, this was not to be: Sihanouk was overthrown in March 1970, and Cambodia’s long slide into the hell of civil war and the Khmer Rouge really began.

Far more interesting to the general reader was Britain’s behaviour towards Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge: between 1985 and 1989, authorised by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s elite SAS military regiment ran a series of training camps for Khmer Rouge allies in Thailand close to the Cambodian border and created a ‘sabotage battalion’ of 250 experts in explosives and ambushes. That sadly falls outside the scope of this book.

Britain And Sihanouk’s Cambodia, by Nicholas Tarling, is now available from Monument Books for $39.50

An uplifting tale

Orphanages are big business in Cambodia. Unicef says that, since 2005, there has been a 75% increase in the number of orphanages in the country, with the number of children in them almost doubling to 12,000. More than 75% of these children aren’t orphans in the strictest sense, but are placed there by parents desperate for help caring for, feeding and educating their children.

Some orphanages are scams, with children rented or bought in order to part soft-hearted tourists from their dollars. But Wat Opot, an hour or so south of Phnom Penh, isn’t one of them. Established in 2000 by an American medic on land donated by the local temple, it cares for children whose lives have been hit by the scourge of HIV/Aids. About a third of the children there are HIV positive, and all of them have lost at least one parent to Aids. There are anywhere between 50 and 85 children living together at Wat Opot at any time, along with a number of adult patients.

In 2005, Gail Gutradt, a 60-year-old American, arrived at Wat Opot to volunteer, and she’s been back many times since for long stints. Now, in her new book, she weaves the children’s heart-breaking stories into a coherent and graceful narrative that is as uplifting as it is moving.

The thread that holds the narrative together is Wayne Dale Matthysse, an American medic. During the Vietnam War, he followed orders, allowing two children to die – and has since spent his life trying to atone for it. And if the book is to be believed, he’s doing one hell of a job.

As well as caring for vast numbers of sick and orphaned children over the years, he’s done much to change attitudes of local villages towards Aids. Living from hand to mouth, he refuses to shove his Christian faith in anyone’s face, happily coexisting with the Buddhist locals, even in the teeth of opposition from fund-providing churches back in the US. Since opening Wat Opot, Matthysse has cremated several hundred people who’ve died from Aids and related complications.

A Rocket Made Of Ice, the title of which was one child’s suggestion of how to get a man to the sun, is the best book I’ve read about volunteering in Cambodian orphanages. If it plays down the very real problems inherent in ‘voluntourism’; if it avoids issues of corruption and paedophilia; if it relies a little too heavily on the journey of a woman of a certain age looking to find her soul, it is also at times a terrifically moving and beautifully written story of a remarkable man and the remarkable children he has cared for. As Gutradt notes: “It is what we offer each other as human beings that endures; it is the simple and mutual acts of kindness that remain.”

In A Rocket Made Of Ice, by Gail Gutradt, is now available from Monument Books for $23.50.

 

Bouncing down: The back roads of history

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent rides the Ho Chi Minh Trail on a 1989 pink Honda cub

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, for those of you who’ve forgotten, was a transport network running from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, via Laos and Cambodia. Originally made up of primitive footpaths used for local trade, by the time of the Vietnam War the Trail was used to supply weapons, fuel and men in vast quantities to fight the Americans. According to the US government, the Trail was “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century”.

It also caused a great deal of trouble for both Laos and Cambodia: Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bomb load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between 1964 and 1973. US fighters dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped by all sides during the whole of the Second World War. And in Cambodia, American bombing provided a huge impetus for the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
The scale of the Trail was breathtaking. Covering more than 2,000 kilometres, from Sihanoukville in the south and Hanoi in the north, through thick jungle and over the 2,500-metre Truong Son mountain range in Laos, much of it was hidden from the bombers by tied-together tree canopies and trellises. The Americans used increasingly sophisticated weaponry to try to disrupt the Trail, including dousing it with Agent Orange, but all to no avail.

Agent Orange, a viciously unpleasant herbicide and defoliant, was used to strip the ground of plant cover, so the North Vietnamese would have nowhere to hide. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.8 million people were exposed to the chemical, leaving 400,000 dead and 500,000 children born with birth defects. And reports suggest that at the end of the war, 80 million bombs had fallen on the three countries but not exploded, leaving an appalling and deadly legacy.

So, all in all, the Trail was a hugely important hinge for modern Southeast Asian history. It has been traversed before by modern travel writers, on foot and on motorbike: a guy called Chris Hunt rode the length of the Trail on a Russian-made Minsk 125cc in 1995. To top that, British-born Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent decided to make the journey on a bubblegum-pink 1989 Honda C-90 stepthru moped, because “doing it on a proper dirt bike seemed too easy”. She had to have the engine rebuilt four times during the trip, so she clearly found the difficulties she was looking for.

Pink vehicles seem to be something of a motif for Bolingbroke-Kent; previously she had driven a pink tuk tuk from Bangkok to Brighton. On the Trail, at a stately 20mph, she fords rivers, climbs mountains and braves the heat and dust and loneliness and potential tiger attacks, staying in grubby guesthouses, swatting insects and drinking warm Pepsi. If her writing is sometimes a little flat, her knowledge of the history of the Trail, as well as her views on unexploded ordnance and the effects now of the logging and deforestation along the way, are invaluable.
As economic progress turns the Ho Chi Minh Trail into well-paved routes for shipping wood abroad for garden furniture, the Trail itself is disappearing; this is a decent book on a fascinating subject.