After spending a day acclimating to the Ulaan Baatar streets as modern nomads, it was our time to investigate the inner-workings of a new economy.  Mongolia, which had a GDP per capita of $1,573 in 2009, was now boasting a booming minerals extract sector.  This drove corporate profits and foreign direct investment up, making the Mongolian economy a veritable proto-kazakhstan, and explained the presence of Irish pubs, Lexus SUVs, and commercial bank branches which dotted the capital city.

Today was to be a lucky and fortuitous day, as we had the opportunity to wear the most presentable clothing we owned, which at this point was for both of us a pair of well worn jeans and shirts which were to hopefully ment to be worn wrinkled.  We polished our shoes in the divice provided at the door of the glorious and fortuitous Wen Zhou Hotel that morning and strolled into the blazing Mongolian sun before Ariunna arrived in her charriot.

Today we were to have the opportunity to speak to Jargalsaihan Dambadarjaa, chairman of Xacleasing and a seasoned financial professional known regionally for his adept employment of Social Media.  As a prolific blogger concerned with the well being of his countrymen, Mr. Dambadarjaa engages sociopolitical issues through both his publishings and the daily work he does at the head of Xacleasing, a member company of Tenger Financial Group.  With Ariunna, Dr. D’s daughter, at our side, we considered some final questions for the seasoned financial professional in this no doubt arduous and volatile financial climate.

XacLeasing, the firm which Dr. D chairs engages in what it discribes as a kind of Microfinance.  While generally considered a socially organized financial arrangement in which money is pooled to provide loans on the magnitude of 3 to 4 figures, microfinance in Xacleasing’s case deescribes loans generally considered small by international commercial banks.  In the case of Xasleasing, these loans to individuals, small ventures, and medium sized enterprises are collateralized by assets such as construction, transport, or mining equipment, and in the occasional case, real estate.

With Dr. Dambadarjaa, we discussed the nature of recent growth in the Mongolian economy driven by resources, the fledgling financial market, and the gigantic untapped potential on regional borrowers and lenders, most of whom were modest in size.

He encouraged us to continue our investigation of the economy through his firm, and to that end introduced us to the Philipp Marxen, a recent recruit from Germany who now headed up Tenger’s China investment office.

Philipp went into detail describing Tenger’s efforts in developing microsavings accounts with no minimum balance marketed toward first time bank customers in the country.  I could relate to the fellow as a lad with a taste for adventure and a penchant for frontier markets.  With experience leading investment project’s in Paraguay’s agricultural market and a licensed derivatives trader on the European Energy Exchange, Philipp  came to Mongolia seeking career development alongside the change to do something truly different.

After an informed explanation of the regulatory environment of Chinese consumer finance, Philipp invited us out for  lunch at a local Indian restaurant which apparently garnered some fame.  Sipping down Lassis, Philipp delved into his background further.  By the time we had finished, the Mongolian microfinance landscaped looked significantly more fascinating than it had when it was completely opaque that morning.

Strolling off the rice and curry, we walked to the splendorous main square in front of Mongolia’s parlament, the great Khan holding court atop a mighty steed.

Across the street, we saw a forlorn pink building in a fantastic location.  Upon further inspection, it revealed itself as the Mongolian Capital Market, commonly known as the Mongolian Stock Exchange.  Rapping on the door and speaking to the attendant, we were able to garner a guided tour through the establishment.  Each broker member of the exhage has a seat at the exchange to trade on behalf of its clients, and the exchange is open for one hour each day.  For most of Asia’s exchanges, the Mongolian Stock Exchanges trading hours represent a lunch break.

Fascinated by the exchange’s earnest and deserted interior, we perused the walls, looking at charts of bond issuance and stock offerings over the past couple of years.  We took a lucky moment to host a brief press conference in front of the marble backdrop of the press box.

Considering the challenges and thrills of operating in such an environment, our minds entertained ideas of new ventures in Mongolia.  Was this country to become the next Dubai or the next Kazakhstan as a result of its newfound resource wealth?  How much of the extracted value would recycle its way back into the economy of the nation?  Was the role of a small and illiquid equity market on its way to playing the role of its larger Indonesian counterpart?  We pondered thee thoughts over a small feast of mayonaise carrots.

And with that, we prepped our bodies for a next day of rigorous wheeling with a night of rest.

For ages, the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, has been a symbol of the East, a symbol of modesty and mystery. The practice of veiling has deep seated religious roots, originating when the wives of the Prophet Muhammad veiled themselves from worshipers who came to visit their home (which was converted into the first mosque). However, the hijab is an avenue for political expression as much as a religious garment.

Many think (and have thought) of the Middle East and the West as two opposing spheres of thought and cultural heritage. Despite the gross over-simplicity of this idea, the belief has been and is being used in conjunction with the practice of veiling to support political movements and rally people around nationalistic ideologies in the Middle East.  Kemal Atatürk, in his campaign to westernize Turkey in the late 1920s dissuaded Turkish women from wearing the Hijab.  For the garment was seen as a cultural artifact, alienating to the West. Today, with an awareness of the cultural connotations of the hijab, some women use the garment as a socio-political tool and veil in tacit rejection of the West, be it of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan or of past damage to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and then Palestine during the period of colonization and systems of mandate.

It is certain, though, that many women today still wear the hijab for reasons of perceived chastity and modesty. It seems that veiling can at once empower women and strip them of identity or agency. But there is no doubt that it is an injustice when women are forced to veil or not to veil for social reasons.

One way the veil can empower women is by allowing them to move freely within public spheres and escape sexual harassment on the street, a growing problem in the Middle East. It is thought that women wearing the hijab are harassed less because they are “good Muslim women,” mothers and wives who project an air of modesty. So we can consider the veil as a tool that allows women to be treated with respect in public spheres, rather than as sexual objects open to verbal or physical harassment.

But the question I have is: what came first, the chicken or the egg? Do women veil to escape harassment, or did the trend of veiling prompt widespread harassment of unveiled women?

A strange concept, certainly counter-intuitive, but bear with me. The veil, in religious terms, serves the purpose of covering a woman’s body in order to quell the devious thoughts of men. Perhaps extreme, but there have been campaigns which push women to veil that promote just such an idea. The caption of this add reads: “A veil to protect or the eyes will molest.”

This poster characterizes women’s bodies as sweet and tempting, and men’s eyes on them as spoiling. It seems that the consensus here is that a woman’s body is inherently sexual, something to be desired. The act of veiling springs from this belief, and attempts to counter the issue by obfuscating the temptation of the body.

However, it seems to me that wearing the hijab reinforces, intensifies, and to some extent creates the belief that women’s bodies are sexual objects, cementing this belief as a culturally accepted conviction. This phenomenon fits in with the sociological theorem “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In this mode of thinking, if veiling is accepted as the norm for women’s dress, a woman who chooses not to veil is automatically deemed immodest, and, however unfairly, can be seen as fair game for harassment. In this vein of thought, the hijab desexualizes individual women, but sexualizes the concept of “woman,” possibly creating issues for women who do not veil.

Others would argue that veiling at times has an effect opposite to that of quelling temptation directed toward the covered woman. Veiling can give women a more subtle power as sexual agents. As Scott and Woody can attest, there is a certain allure and eroticism associated with the garment. Furthermore, when someone sees a veiled woman,  one’s imagination can create the woman as attractive, unbounded by how she may actually appear behind the façade of cloth.

No matter how veiling is perceived — by foreign men as alluring, by foreign women as confounding, or by its wearers as preserving or political, the veil will not be lifted any time soon. As religious conservatism gains momentum in places, more and more women are choosing to cover. With global tides carrying people and Islam across borders and seas, it is becoming all the more necessary to understand the implications of this sartorial phenomenon.

When Scott asked if I could write a post on Islamic Finance for the blog, I nodded with enthusiasm. To be honest I am a relative newcomer to this topic and a non-Muslim, and though while supremely curious I feel I run the risk of offending others on a subject that can be sensitive. Nevertheless, here we are.

The first thing that caught my attention about Islamic finance is its recent origins. Although religious scripts governing Sharia law have been around since Prophet Mohamed’s time, Islamic finance only emerged after the Second World War. It didn’t emerge as a result of new, groundbreaking economic principles, but as a response to a series of clashes between western and Muslim nations, which led to a rise in pan-Islamism.

Among the consequences of this movement was a change in the ways of commerce among Muslims. As Gulf nations withdrew petrodollars they held in the West and began dumping them in their own backyard, cities like Dubai and Kuwait emerged as hubs for the practice and display of Muslim financial piety. By the 1970s, Islamic scholars, economists, and intellectuals were busy studying and interpreting passages of the Quran for the creation of a framework for Islamic finance.

Theological Underpinnings

There are several factors that appear to make modern day Islamic finance different from conventional finance, the most important of which is the prohibition of interest. Wikipedia amply lists all these traits.

Al-Baqarah 2:275 Those who consume interest cannot stand [on the Day of Resurrection] except as one stands who is being beaten by Satan into insanity. That is because they say, “Trade is [just] like interest.” But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest. So whoever has received an admonition from his Lord and desists may have what is past, and his affair rests with Allah . But whoever returns to [dealing in interest or usury] – those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide eternally therein.

But this prohibition isn’t unique to Islam. The Old Testament also regards the charging of interest as immoral. Exodus and Deuteronomy specifically regard lending to the poor as a sin.

Biblical Parallels

Exodus 22:25 - You shall not give him your silver at interest, nor your food for gain.

Deuteronomy 23:19 - Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury

Leviticus 25:37 - Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase

It was only during the European Renaissance when Protestant reformer John Calvin changed the status quo. He argued that not all rules in the Old Testament set out for Jews (who were permitted to lend to gentiles) were applicable to Christians and that one must not interpret these passages in a literal manner. The bible should simply serve as a guide. But Calvin’s real concern was the exploitation of the poor through high interest rates. In Calvin’s letter to Oekolampadius, he writes that he is unwilling to condemn usury so long as it is practiced with equity and charity. Whoever borrows should make at least as much, if not more, than the amount borrowed, meaning that as long as one is fair and reasonable, charging interest should be allowed.

Calvin’s words were such a blow to the Church that interest became legalized across Europe. This was a major turning point in history. It is interesting that Calvin’s view, which forms a basis for modern day capitalism and bank lending, was effectively reversed by Islamic scholars in the 1970s. Is this to say that Muslims, who did business like others in corporate America up until the 1970s, were all of a sudden subject to the new rules of Islamic finance? Yes, in a sense. But there is a twist to it all.

According to Sharia scholars, a guaranteed rate of return on an interest rate is prohibited because the lender and borrower typically bear an unequal level of risk. For example, Sharia scholars prohibit the issuer of a bond to default on an interest payment and then go bankrupt, because those at the bottom of the pecking order virtually have no claim to their monies. Therefore much of Islamic finance is about creating a mechanism that reaps the benefits of bank lending with the appearance of profit sharing (Mudharabah).

Financing Structures

Consider a car loan. If I were to take out a loan in the UK, the bank lends me money and I repay the loan at a predetermined interest rate. Should I become unfit to service the loan, the bank revindicates (repossesses) the car, collects what is owed, and refunds the remainder (if any). If I were to go to an Islamic bank, the bank buys the car, and then sells it to me at a premium, also to be repaid at predetermined intervals (Murabahah). Although I end up paying the same amount under both scenarios, Islamic scholars believe that the latter scenario is only fair because should I default, the bank simply revindicates the car with no further claim on me. In the earlier scenario, the bank may further pursue me for any remaining principal if the repossession doesn’t provide enough. Thus Islamic banks do charge for the time value of money.

Another popular Islamic investment product is a sale/lease bond, aka Sukuk. Suppose I am a property developer and wish to build an apartment complex. I would sell a piece of real estate to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which raises the funds by selling share certificates. The SPV leases the asset back to the issuer (me), thereby collecting principal plus interest and passes the proceeds back to the sukuk holders in the form of rent. At the end of the lease, the SPV sells or gives the property back to the issuer.

Other types of Islamic financial transactions exist. But to me the above examples are enough to suggest that Islamic finance is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Islamic finance uses complicated structures to achieve the same goal as conventional finance, but with added cost and decreased transparency. At the end of the day, profit and interest by any other name is still profit and interest. It is hard to imagine that this was the Prophet Mohamed’s objective.

Interest in Indonesia

Having grown up in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, I want to share my observations on Islamic finance in this part of the world. In my opinion Indonesia sees Islamic finance like a dot in the horizon. I can assure you that the majority of business done in Indonesia is definitely not Sharia compliant. Even more fundamentally, more than half the population, which lives in poverty, has probably never even heard of Islamic finance.

The problem with Islamic finance is that it has no global standardization. It emerged in the 1970s in the Middle East, which explains its varying level of demand in different Muslim countries. And as Islamic finance continues to emerge in different parts of the world, it faces the danger of generating greater differences and inconsistencies. A recent Bloomberg article calling for certification among Muslim scholars is further testament to this problem.

Don’t the Saudis own shares in Citi? Are wealthy Indonesian Muslims putting their money into Singapore or their own Sharia banks?  As the market continues to develop, time will tell how market priorities interplay with religious doctrine.

Hong Kong has built its reputation as a city famous for transacting business.  Both an active market itself, and the great gateway to China,  the city boasts a fantastic cast of commercial characters.  During our time there, I met with a few old friends who are working on various ventures, in capacities ranging from entrepreneurial chief executive to dogged analyst in the largest transactions the global financial markets have ever seen.

Robert Neville – California Wine Supply

Rob, an eminent entrepreneur, rugby player, Brown alum, and childhood friend spends his time developing a business, California Wine Supply. He imports wine from our native California to the Hong Kong market.  Initially planning on selling to mainland China, Rob has chosen to start with the local market as a healthy foundation for the business.  Now his considerations range from logistics (how does one transport 20 cases of temperature-sensitive wine across the Pacific Ocean), to judging local tastes, to engineering price-points palatable for restaurants and retail, and securing available capital.  Luckily, regulations are on his side, as the import taxes on wine in Hong Kong have dropped considerably recently, allowing him a fantastic opportunity to build a new market.  What’s more, the most natural way he saw to market himself – social media – has become the darling medium of the consumer world.

Cool, calm, and collected, Rob serendipitously found himself in the position of the Social Media King of Hong Kong wine by releasing admittedly hilarious wine tasting videos from his time in Hong Kong and Shanghai.  Furthermore his Twitter feed attracts followers of the Hong Kong wine scene, and earned him a spot as an organizer of the Hong Kong Tweetfest and as the social media guru for upcoming wine shows in city.

What kind of an appetite will Hong Kong, and eventually mainland China, have for California wine?  In a market dominated by French vineyards, it will take a bold character like Rob to innovate and produce a product for sophisticated consumers.  Some prototypes now include blended varietals inspired by European tastes from regions in California previously wedded to wines consisting of single grape stocks.  Packaging too, he claims, could use a revamp, as that’s how most buyers, in conjunction with price, choose a wine.  Imagine a single piece of duct tape in place of the front label:  title optional, with only regulatory labeling on the rear.  Whatever the market demands, he’ll no doubt imagine and engender a set of imaginative solutions.

Mr. Josh Z. – Banker Extraordinaire

Mr. Z has quite a different approach to his career than Mr. Neville.  Mr. Z worked tireless summers in New York and Hong Kong during Brown University summer breaks at the finest investment banks in the business.  Upon graduating, he turned down admission to Stanford’s graduate school to take a job with China International Capital Corporation (en – 中文), the Beijing-based state-owned investment bank that co-underwrites IPOs for major Chinese corporations.  There, under a strenuous schedule, he worked on the initial public offering of the Agricultural Bank of China, which, if the bank chooses to exercise their full offering of shares, will be the largest IPO in history.

Completing that, he was poached by a global top-tier investment bank to work in Hong Kong under a senior advisor responsible for taking some of the most venerable firms in Silicon Valley (like Amazon, Google, and Cisco) public.  At this new bank, he takes responsibility for a swath of clients in the technology and media space, most of which are Chinese variants of western Internet super-phenomenons.  Curiously, these firms choose to go public as the successful firms of Web 1.0 did, while the largest western players in Web 2.0 tend to get acquired or stay private.

We met at his offices in Central and hustled over to a street of Lan Kwai Fong.  There, we sat down at the Luk Yu Tea House, one of the last surviving in Hong Kong with interiors ornately decorated in the Old Shanghai style.

After ordering an array of mouth-watering dishes, he began to describe the professional life that was now his own.

His schedule:

• Monday to Wednesday: Work in office from 10:00 am to 5:00 am
• Thursday: Fly early morning to Beijing to meet with clients; fly to Shanghai in evening.
• Thursday night: No sleep – prepare meeting materials for the clients in Shanghai.
• Friday: Meet with Shanghai client; fly to Hong Kong in evening
• Saturday and Sunday: In the office from 1:00 pm to midnight, catching up on sleep while not at work

What exactly does he do during these many working hours?  Model financial statements, produce pitch books, proofread, prepare filings with regulators, and author massive investment prospectuses.  As we spoke, he punched away on his Blackberry, communicating with high-quality, highly confidential printers in Hong Kong and on the mainland whom the firm would pay $100,000 to print 10,000 three fingers books.  Some of these IPOs, he mentions, generate $1,000,000 in fees for printers alone.  “I should be in the printing business,” he quips.  Quite amazingly, these printers will reprint the prospectuses again and again for the bank if any changes need to be made in the text.

He admits that it’s putting a tremendous amount of stress on him, letting his body and social life deteriorate.  He flies first class on Cathay Pacific every week, and stays at the nicest five-star hotels in the cities where he travels, but he couldn’t care less about those perks.  Without much entrepreneurial freedom, and mostly fighting exhaustion, he quizzes me on start-up life and on getting involved with high-tech ventures.  While tense to witness, Mr. Z is admittedly making history, taking gigantic Chinese banks public and participating in the IPOs of the most notable Chinese tech companies.  It’s bankers like Mr. Z who empower entrepreneurs, their customers, and their users by providing providing the ultimate liquidity of a public stock offering.  China needs people like him, supporting these entrepreneurs in high-technology, high risk ventures.  Where he will go next? To the start-up side, or to the investment buy-side? It is yet to be seen, though we will no doubt revisit him on AsiaWheeling 3.0 as he continues to seize his destiny.

Ben Rudick – Doing Good and Doing Well

I originally met Mr. Ben Rudick by inviting him and Mr. Nathan Wyeth to join Woody and me for dinner in Tokyo at the delicious Korean yakiniku restaurant Ton Ton Tezi.  At this restaurant, the plate that fries the meat is slanted, with meat upstream and cabbage at the bottom of slant, thus coating the vegetable in delicious fatty oil.  In Hong Kong, we met for lunch, and I snapped this portrait of him outside his office in central, joking that he needed a photo for the back of his book cover.

At the time, Ben and Nathan were working for the Shoenfeld Foundation identifying projects for investment in the social enterprise space.  Now in Hong Kong, Ben is focusing much of his effort on being director of the program for “Empowering Chinese Social Enterprise Leaders” (ECSEL) This fantastic program provides full scholarships in the U.S. for young Chinese social entrepreneurs to develop their businesses and engender positive change.  The program was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009. Pictured below are two of the 30 scholarship winners, Jingji Zhang and Wang Jun, next to Ben Rudick, Bill Clinton, and Bill Shoenfeld (of his eponymous foundation).

Ben’s efforts continue to grow in the social enterprise space, with future possibilities for investment and further cultivation of Chinese social entrepreneurs.  Graciously, Ben provided some invaluable advice for my own ketchup business over don-katsu lunch from the delicious cafeteria in ThreeSixty (more below), and for this I am forever grateful.

Beyond these fascinating characters, there are a few other phenomena in Hong Kong worthy of an Adventure Capitalist mention.

Pick Your Poison – Signing with Currency Choice

My blue polo shirt became stained, ripped, and eventually lost at some point on AsiaWheeling and thus I was happy to visit my favorite Japanese clothing retailer, Uniqlo, to acquire an identical one to replace it.  At the cashier, I was surprised to see a receipt in which I was to circle which currency was preferable to pay with my credit card- U.S. Dollars or Hong Kong dollars.  Before this, I had not come across this, and wondered what the value was in giving the customer this choice.

The Hong Kong Dollar is soft-pegged to the U.S. dollar, so the discrepancy in values would not be great, though I wonder if credit card issuers may add fees to purchases in foreign currencies.  Thanks to CitiBank, this was not a concern, though I encourage more hypotheses for why this system developed.

A Day at The Races

Horse racing, the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong remains phenomenally popular among the people of the city.  Cabbies have their favorite horses and study the odds published in the sporting press, while expats attend the races to socialize and punt on random horses, and all over the world gamblers can place bets thanks to the advanced online betting system set up by the Hong Kong Jockey club which organizes the races.

I was lucky enough to be invited by a group of expats to watch a race in Happy valley, which was quite a visual experience.  Elderly ladies with FM radios gather around each other to chat, while middle aged men swill skol beer and roll up their pantlegs.  All in all, it was most definitely a spectacle to see these beasts race, as well to consider the races a a popular point for socializing among the many expats, many of them British.

Brand and Retail Evolution

Hong Kong has also gained in retail sophistication since my time studying there, and while not all the below firms are new to the city, they warrant a mention.

Aesop, a Aussie line of skin care and cosmetics that AsiaWheeling highly regards has expanded to Causeway Bay.  Their scientific  presentation, black, green and white color scheme, and codified simplicity of packaging make them a joy to behold.  The brand respects consistency as the aesthetic extends from the product, to the marketing collateral, to the retail store design.  While much less complex and developed, they rival Apple in their ability to immediately convey calming value to the onlooker.

Another is Greenfingers in central, which provides plants and accessories for home gardening with a striking aesthetic.  With all the growth in urban farming, I’m curious to know trends about houseplant purchases in cities worldwide.  I remember colleagues of mine investing in Christian Tortu designed indoor plants at Tokyo Midtown and being quite curious about the market for these beautiful inanimate green pets.

Great Food Hall, City Super and ThreeSixty are three phenomenal gourmet grocers which have also continued to grow.  Focusing on the highest quality products and shopping experience for a market increasingly conscious about a natural and organic origin of their foods.

Ketchup Adventure

Finally, it behoves me to mention much of my time in the city was spent researching how to ply the local market for the gourmet ketchup which my partners and I market primarily in the states.  Serendipitously, ketchup, a cantonese word (茄汁-k^he tsɐp), actually originated in the regions surrounding Hong Kong as a fermented fish sauce.

This experience involved a wonderful creative session at a local print shop to produce our pitch book, as well as meetings with retailers and distributors which led me all across the city.

From riding the trams of Admiralty, to meandering the midlevels, to late-night meetings in private clubs while wearing Sri Lankan sandals (the only shoes I owned), the adventure was a fantastic success in dipping into our first market abroad.

As our travelers sleep warmly bundled in the stone cabin at the base camp of Haba Snow Mountain, the wind whips and howls outside, distributing icy haze throughout the thin air of the night sky.  Before they wake up, we will pause for a brief intermission. We will step back a thousand years to explore the importance of these lands, and the traders who traversed similar mountain passes with far fewer amenities or modern comforts.  Brought to you by Mekong Bureau chief and international chiller Mr. Stewart Motta, we present a special report on the ancient Tea Horse Road.

Tea Caravan - Sichuan 1926

The Tea Horse Road, sometimes known as the Southern Silk Road, although silk never was a large commodity on the route, was first recorded as a major vein of trade during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).  The route was in operation long before tea and horses moved across it, and tombs found in the northern reaches of the route suggest that it has been a corridor of travel for 4,000 to 5,000 years. Over the millennia this road and its tributaries carried not only commerce, but also culture, linking a myriad of people, traditions, and ideas, from Southeast Asia, China, Tibet, and then further west into the kingdoms of northern India.

Both the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road were mainly in existence to supply the empires of eastern China with ample numbers of horses. China’s military relied on acquiring horses from Central Asia, and both silk and tea became China’s main exports to barter for the four-legged beasts. The scarcity of horses in China was a significant advantage to the “barbarians of the north” (Mongols, Turks, Tibetans) who frequently pillaged and invaded the empire on horseback, and would eventually form the greatest cavalry the world has ever seen, conquering most of mainland Asia on horseback in the name of Ghengis Khan. The Book of Tang reads “Horses are the military preparedness of the state. If Heaven takes away this preparedness it will totter and fall.”

A death sentence was in place for any individual trying to destroy China’s monopoly on silk. However, silk worms, eggs, and even farmers, were eventually smuggled out of China to Persia, Vietnam, and Japan. This ended China’s domination of the world’s silk production, and caused concern over the ability to keep the flow of horses heading toward the capital of Xi’an. Fortunately for the Chinese, a taste for tea had developed among the neighboring states. Most of the tea being produced to meet this new demand was grown in southwest China, mainly Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces.

Tea is indigenous to the area around Pu’er and Xishuangbanna Prefectures in southern Yunnan, which is believed to be the birthplace of tea. Some trees found in the area can be dated back over 1,000 years. This area is a cultural cocktail and located near the juncture of present day Lao, Burma, and China. The tea derives its name from the prefecture and the mention of Pu’er will to this day bring creases of satisfaction and pride across the faces of Yunnan’s people.

Pu’er tea was exported into Southeast Asia and north all the way to Lhasa and beyond into India mainly on the backs of horses or mules, but tea porters did exist as well. The price of one horse was around 130 pounds of caked tea. Men and women would pack up horses and stack sacks weighing 150 pounds or more on their shoulders, before trekking through the treacherous terrain of western Sichuan and Yunnan. Eventually China was acquiring 25,000 horses annually in exchange for over 3 million pounds of tea. Exporting this amount of tea greatly increased the traffic on the Tea Horse Road, and multitudes of people hashed out a livelihood from the industry.

Tea porters - 1908

This toilsome travel required a certain resiliency of the tea, and a system was created to dry the tea and form it into dense cakes. The cakes naturally ferment and are treated in Yunnan similar to wine, as the tea becomes better with age and connoisseurs know which years posses the most desirable flavor. Some cakes do not reach their prime age until after 30 to 40 years of slow fermentation. A tea cake could take over a year to complete the journey to Lhasa, fermenting as it climbed up to the Tibetan Plateau. It was this dark earthy temptress of the taste buds that seduced the Tibetan Empire after its unification in the early 600’s. The tea culture quickly grabbed hold in Lhasa, and by the 1700’s the Dalai Lama was reportedly reserving 2,500 kg of tea for his court annually.  To this day, Pu’er Tea is the beverage of choice in most Tibetan areas, being mixed with yak butter to produce a frothy sour beverage that is consumed both morning and night.

Resurgence of the Tea Horse Road and Mr. Scott Norton’s Grandfather

Within months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Tea Horse Road began its revival. Japanese forces controlled Southeast Asia and the waters along most of China’s eastern seaboard. Japan then invaded British controlled Burma, cutting the military supply route to the Kuomintang forces on the Burma Road. With all the seaports closed, the Tea Horse Road became the main overland route to supply Chiang Kai-shek and the allied forces in Kunming, Yunnan. Many American and British pilots were stationed in Kunming flying over “The Hump” on their way to and from Assam, India.

Asia Wheeling’s very own Scott Norton had a grandfather who was stationed in Kunming. If his grandfather enjoyed a glass of foreign booze or cigarettes during his time in Kunming, it had mostly likely come all the way on the backs of one of the 20,000 yaks or 25,000 horses and mules from India, through Tibet, passing through Lijiang, before hitting his parched lips in a Kunming saloon.

Peter Goullart, a Russian living in Lijiang in the 1940’s, who later wrote a famous book on the area called “Forgotten Kingdom,” recorded, “articles were packed for delivery at Lijiang, especially the liquors and cigarettes which were worth their weight in gold in Kunming, crowded with thirsty American and British troops… Few people have realized how vast and unprecedented this sudden expansion of caravan traffic between Indian and China was, or how important.”

Fellow Asia Wheeling readers, this concludes our introduction to the Tea Horse Road, which these days sees minimal use besides some scattered tourism. But needless to say, the history and relevance of this road is one ripping good yarn.

Well, dear reader, as you may have noticed, we’ve been wheeling around Bangalore with our dear India Bureau Chief, Nikhil Kulkarni, conducting a special report on entrepreneurship and innovation in that most interesting Indian city. And while we’ve been sharing those reports with you, we are also quite aware that many of you rely on AsiaWheeling as a source of data on interesting Asian foods. And, as you won’t be surprised to hear, we’ve been doing plenty of research on that as well here in Bangalore.

In fact, before we share some of those experiences with you, it might be relevant to mention an interesting phenomenon that we have been experiencing while eating and relaxing with our friends living in India. Namely, that many of them practice something I will define here as culinary escapism.

Culinary escapism, for the purposes of this piece of correspondence, is the propensity of an individual to pursue culinary experiences with the aim of escaping from his or her current surroundings. This can manifest itself in a few ways, but in AsiaWheeling’s experience it almost always means expensive food. Be it Indian or of some other ethnic variant, we have found that all of our friends in India use meals as a means of temporarily relieving themselves of the many stressful jolts that spice this country.

We, here at AsiaWheeling, being in pursuit of the extremes of experience and generally agreeable fellows, have been happy to follow suit and engage in, even foot the bill for, some quite flagrantly escapist meals. So, dear reader, you may find the following series of images to be startling in their lavish nature. We did too.

We have little need for culinary escapism here at AsiaWheeling, since the local cuisine refreshes itself every few days, and we are, after all, in search of, among other things, presence and lucidity within our surroundings (hence all the coffee).

Nonetheless, this phenomenon is worth taking a second to discuss, because it plays a very important role in both the lives of wealthy expatriates and anyone else here who can afford to eat food from a different culture. I imagine most of the non-immigrant clientele at an Ethiopian restaurant in Boulder, Colorado are practicing (an albeit diluted form of) culinary escapism as well. I dare say even many of you out there, dear readers, engage in a little bit of it while reading AsiaWheeling.  Of course, one may even argue that AsiaWheeling’s entire gastronomic adventure is an extended bout of culinary escapism.

What makes it so particularly interesting here in India is its prevalence and its intensity. As we dine with our friends here, we are without exception, also engaging in some of the most extraordinary escapism I have ever seen.

Is it India? Is it our friends? Likely a little of both, but while our budget for Bangalore lies in tattered rags at our feet, rejoice with us in the myriad of interesting places where we joined our friends to seek shelter from the reality outside.

All around town, we had been seeing billboards promoting Ask Laila, a mobile, local search engine.  Now we were lucky enough to be ascending the staircase in an office building on one of Bangalore’s happening roads to the very office of this firm.  Nikhil, our Bureau Chief, checked us in at the front desk and we entered a room of work spaces.

It was well past 6:00 pm on a Friday, and the engineers were hard at work in front of computer terminals running command line scripts.  We were warmly greeted by Ask Laila’s CTO, Birla and his team, and seated in a corner conference room.

He began by explaining that Ask Laila was a tool for individuals to find local resources, such as hardware stores, plumbers, and restaurants, from their mobile phone on the go.  The service, he explained, is also popularly accessed from the web, as 60% of web search traffic is looking for local results.  Ask Laila can also be used as a tool for business owners, who can claim their listing, keep it up to date, and populate it with information that may ingratiate it in the eyes of potential customers browsing lists of results.  In these ways, Birla explained, the model is comparable to Yelp in the U.S.

However, as we learned from Indus, Birla reiterates that creating something like Ask Laila in India isn’t as simple as porting over the Yelp model.  For example, in the United States, one can purchase a vast index of businesses, addresses, and phone numbers akin to a digital yellow pages to incorporate into a local search engine.  In India, this did not exist until Ask Laila painstakingly located, called, and catalogued the businesses into their own proprietary database.  Furthermore, while there is a large group of users searching on their mobiles, as well as searching on the web, it’s more difficult to reach out to business owners to populate their profiles and keep them current.  Such shopkeepers and business owners are not generally web savvy, and especially outside urban areas do not have immediate access to a computer.

The technology must also accommodate users whose first language is almost certainly not English, which creates non-standard spellings of words as search inputs.  For example, the name Nandani, a girl’s name in India, may be spelled in a variety of ways illustrated below.

Ask Laila’s team has created a series of rules for grouping these non-standard spellings of words to produce the intended search result for the user, even if the spelling is not exact.  This allows people to search naturally and find what they are looking for.  Additionally, this series of relationships has not been catalogued as of yet and could prove both useful for other web search businesses, as well as fascinating for linguistic studies in the country.

But the tall tasks Ask Laila has had to take upon itself have placed it in a rarefied competitive position. Ask Laila now powesr mobile local search for AirTel, one of the India’s (and the world’s) biggest mobile phone providers.  This partnership has allowed Ask Laila to scale its technologies and optimize its search rules, like the one illustrated above, with a vast number of users.

The engineers at Ask Laila were sharp as tacks, and impressed us both with their understanding of the business and product, as well as their love of cycling.  At the onset of the company, they bragged that 50% of the employees cycled to the office, as it was much faster than facing traffic in a car, bus, or motorcycle.

After learning about their projects in greater depth, we bid farewell and safe cycling to the team and set off on the road for dinner.

We pulled the bikes up alongside a charming colonial coffee house by the name of Koshy’s. It’s somewhat of a Bangalore institution, as I understand.

We were meeting there with one of Bangalore’s rising stars, a fellow by the name of Gautam John. We sat down with Gautam over a colonial breakfast of English-style ham and eggs, and plenty of coffee, tea, and toast. We were thrilled to hear a bit of his story.

Gautam began his career as an entrepreneur by starting his own food company. It was an ingredients supplier, providing mostly processed and dehydrated foods. The shop was named “Foods and Flavors,” and he grew it to a respectable 150 employees before striking out in search of something more existentially fulfilling. Gautam found what he was looking for when he joined Pratham Books, where he could draw on his entrepreneurial experience to help them grow their non-profit. He only planned to spend six months, but so far has logged just over two and a half years at the firm. Why did he do this? Certainly it was not the money. As Gautam explained to us, non-profit workers in India can expect to earn about 25% what they would in the for-profit space, compared to a much higher ratio in the west. “For me, it’s the mission of this organization,” he explained. He simply loves the fact that his work is helping his fellow Indians.

Pratham Books was a non-profit publisher, which focused mainly on children’s books. Now it is the largest children’s books publisher in all of India. Its stated mission is to put “A Book in Every Child’s Hand” and they are well on their way, with plenty more work ahead. Currently the company produces about 1 million books, which are distributed mainly by third-party organizations (both governmental and non-governmental) to children in Indian villages. In addition they distribute another 2 million of what they call story cards, more rudimentary short stories, delivered on folding cards.

“We focus on high value for the child by producing books with rich illustrations and with text in their local languages,” Gautam explained. They sell these books to their distributors at heavily discounted rates. Setting a price, no matter how small, rather than giving the books away, Gautam explained, aids in the perception of value associated with the product, encouraging its more efficient utilization.” We are a non-profit, but we run in a way that is very close to a sustainable stand-alone business.”

Gautam also does work at another non-profit called the Akshara Foundation, a service which couples nicely with his work at Pratham. This organization works to aid the government in measuring its own efficiency in primary and pre-primary education. They administer a system of tests that measure Indian students’ acumen in reading, writing, and arithmetic. “The three Rs,” as Gautam described them. “Our tests produce much better data than the Indian government… and they’re not always happy to hear it.” Over 325,000 children in Bangalore have undergone the testing. Using this data, the organization works to implement remedial interventions aimed at helping weak students to catch up.

The work being done by  Pratham and The Akshara Foundation is just another gleaming example of the thriving spirit of entrepreneurship here in Bangalore. At the end of the meeting, we presented Gautam and Pratham with a gift from AsiaWheeling and our esteemed partners at Openmoko: a Wikireader. The wikireader, as you may have noticed, is our faithful companion on AsiaWheeling, providing us access to Wikipedia in all its textual glory, all from the comfort of a hand-held, touchscreen-enabled, year-long-battery-life-endowed handset.

Pratham Books,  AsiaWheeling wishes you continued success.

When we wheeled up to the unassuming, and somewhat brutal exterior of the Janaagraha building in Bangalore, we were not quite sure what to expect inside, and it seemed to us a not-for-profit institution,  which purported to do an impossible number of things for free, which in America would certainly be done at great expense by government-contracted consulting firms. Furthermore, they were performing these valuable services, in addition to huge initiatives mobilizing voters, and raising public awareness of relevant social and political issues.  It seemed too good to be true. What kind of sham were they running inside this brutalist concrete building?

Inside, we were quite floored to find no sham at all. Just a whip sharp team of knowledgeable, passionate, and extremely motivated personnel, working hard on a Saturday to make Bangalore, and India as a whole, a better place to live.

The office was big, but not that big. Same goes for the team. The power was out in Bangalore at that moment, a reasonably common occurrence, but the office seemed hard at work in the window lit offices, working fiercely under still fans on computers that ran from the building’s back-up generators.

Our first meeting was with the voting and political literacy initiative. India is the largest democracy in the world, and many accuse it of crumbling under its own weight, unable to function due purely to its own massive scale and complexity. “This does not have to be so,” the folks at Janaagraha posit. And they are doing much to put their time and money where their mouth is.

In India, the makeup of a particular rural community is relatively static, but in the large cities like Bangalore, massive migration from rural areas to the metropolis make registering voters, disseminating information, and overseeing the implementation of projects quite difficult. Consequently, voter turnout in urban India lags significantly behind that in the rural areas. Janaagraha is doing a few things to help. First of all it has a dedicated team researching issues, aggregating local views, and disseminating relevant information to urban voters. It uses this data to promote certain candidates and attempts to streamline and simplify administrative tasks (like voter registration, error correcting in voter lists) through automation.

As the folks at Janaagraha explained to us, Bangalore has been without local government for the past three years. The elections have been stalled by outstanding court cases pointing at blatant gerrymandering of the city wards. “We might have local elections, hopefully, sometime in the next six months.” But even Janaagraha expressed significant fear of further delay. In the meantime government will continue to come down from the state level, which means that appointed Karnataka executives will continue to have absolute power over the decision-making process for the city. “A further issue is that state government has been unstable,” Janaagraha explained.

But voting is just one of the many issues that Janaagraha is addressing in the city of Bangalore. Traffic and urban planning are also foci of the organization. “We use what we like to call a systems approach,” a representative from the traffic team explained. The systems approach is basically a suite of strategies which, together, are hoped to address a given issue more effectively.

Some traffic-related examples of the “systems approach” are the encouragement of local citizen groups to participate in relevant legislation (bottom up), coupled with policy recommendations that take a regional perspective (top down). Janaagraha is recognizing that Bangalore traffic is the result of inefficiencies at both the microscopic (like a poorly designed intersection) and the macroscopic (like the layout of regional transport systems) levels . Janaagraha also produces a children’s book titled “Me and My City,” to help the city’s young people understand issues of urban transport and how the macroscopic geography of their city relates to day-to-day life.

Janaagraha is fighting for more transparency in government, pushing for a publicly available record of budgets and expenditures for publicly funded projects. Such a strategy would help to plug leaks in the system, such as the “March Rush,” familiar in one form or another to western publicly funded organizations as well – a scramble to spend the entirety of the budget before the powers that be re-examine the organization and decide the next period’s funding.

Another example of the Janaagraha systems approach is the establishment and publication of benchmarks for public projects and services such as electricity, water, and transportation for use by both the government and the populous in placing their public services development in a more global context. “Without a system of benchmarks, many officials will refuse to disclose data indicating their own substandard public services.” These benchmarks are quantitative, using a system of matrices and linear transformations to quantify and weigh various conditions. The results of the benchmarking studies are also made available at no charge to the public, obscuring only the parts of the studies that present national security risks.

Janaagraha also houses a non-profit consulting group, which provides pro bono consulting and technical assistance for public projects. This team concentrates on urban infrastructure and transport consulting, which they describe as “anything that affects the mobility of people.” Bangalore is about 8% roads. As Janaagraha explained to AsiaWheeling, studies indicate that a city of the same size and type is best served by surface area of 20%-25% covered by roads. This is one of the main reasons for the traffic problems in the city. So streamlining bottlenecks such as mergers and intersections is extremely important. And Janaagraha has been doing plenty of it: 28 projects in totality over the last two years. I was particularly interested to hear that one of the fellows, now hard at work re-designing Bangalore, was once doing the same thing not far from my home in Iowa City, Iowa.

Well, dear reader, as far as your humble correspondents can tell, here is a real-world organization where idealistic approaches to urban reform are being coupled with passion and smart management to implement real change in a part of the world where it is no easy task

Driving out to the Indus West Side hospital took quite some time, working our way from the center to the outskirts on Bangalore’s smokey and crowded streets. At we drove, we noticed a roadside stand advertising a big red cross, and a hand-painted image of a fellow wearing an exaggerated frown, arm in a sling. “What’s that?” I asked our India Bureau Chief, Nikhil. “That’s a bone setter,” he explained, “many people in India do not have the money to pay or the time to wait for a doctor to set their bones, so they might visit a non-licensed bone setter who will set the bone and splint it for about a dollar.”

Amazing, I thought to myself. Once again we find in India emergent solutions to problems traditionally tackled by the government. To be sure, Bangalore bears many examples of the extremes of experience, and as I pondered this, we pulled up to a gleaming brand new glass and metal structure on the outskirts of town. This was the Indus Westside Hospital, a new operation, established with the goal of bringing western medicine at a price that could be affordable to more than just the rich. We made our way inside to where we were welcomed into the office of Dr. Shankar Bijapur, who was more than kind to us, offering us tea and biscuits, and sharing with us the story of this hospital.

He began by outlining for us the basic design of the Indian state-run hospital system. Depending on the size of one’s city, the hospital will have a certain level of equipment and expertise. Because of this, many people are forced to settle for medical care from under-trained or under-equipped providers. But things are changing. Now India sports a number of world class medical institutes. However, these are, for the most part, used only by the rich because of price tags that are orders of magnitude greater than at an Indian government-run facilities. Dr. Shankar Bijapur has some ideas about how to fill the gap between Indian state-run practices, and those for only the hyper rich, providing international standards of medicine, with a significantly diminished price tag. But how? The short answer is by clever capitalization on the mission of the hospital.

Circular, I know… so let me explain: The first part of the answer is funding.

The Indus Westside is funded in part by an international team of doctors, roughly three quarters of whom have also pledged to add their professional expertise into the project at a future time. Funding also comes from philanthropists who have adopted some interesting conditions. For instance some donors have agreed to pay for operations for the poor and needy, allowing the hospital to count on revenue even when the customer is of dubious financial means. The project takes on no debt from banks or private equity, leaving it more freedom to run the project on its own schedule, as it pleases. As the organization gets off the ground, the managers will also take a heavy cut in pay. The other part is in the facility: The land on which the hospital was built was also negotiated at a very cheap rate. The city of Bangalore wants a hospital of this caliber to be built, and Dr. Bijapur was able to use that fact to negotiate unheard of rates on his 100-year lease.

The equipment in the hospital is of the best quality, but purchased at a cut rate due to the humanitarian mission of the organization. Also, building materials and labor in India are very inexpensive. At this point in the interview, we paused to let another doctor enter the office. He was a foreigner, and working on a premature birth. “We need to wait for a decrease in pressure before de-intubation.” “Understood. But how is the family?” Dr. Bijapur later explained to us that the family, having worked with Dr. Bijapur before, had come from across India and at great expense to receive treatment at this brand new hospital. We continued the interview as he took us for a tour of the facilities.

One focus of the hospital is the care of mother and child, but it is also geared toward treating the many victims of traffic accidents that are expected to visit from the nearby highway. Consequently, it features a state-of-the-art burn unit, and is equipped to treat with trauma victims and provide emergency surgery. The hospital has 200 standard beds plus 50 intensive care beds. A normal room has three beds, with one dedicated nurse. Intensive care rooms contain more equipment per bed, and are more heavily staffed.

Patients at the Indus Westside are also treated to a more holistic approach to healing, with in-house massage, steam baths, and use of traditional remedies in congress with western allopathic approaches to healing.

Climbing back into our taxi cab, I found myself thinking about our own medical system in America. Any way you look at it, health care is going to be expensive, and the approach being taken by the Indus Westside gave me some hope that we just might be able to keep ourselves healthy without having to part with an arm and a leg.