I-Cias: Encyclopedia of the Orient (original) (raw)

So, “Encyclopedia of the Orient”. You know, that one. I just… found it. And found it hard to put down. What a book. Just… wow. The whole thing is batshit crazy in the best way possible. The name alone is straight-up gibberish. Sounds like it’s out of the 19th century, and it was. Gives it this big old pompous, slightly skeezy Indiana Jonesy feel. Indiana Jones meets his Spanish grandmother, more or less. A bit dusty, probably pulled out of a long-forgotten library of an old mansion somewhere. But it covers everything on the topic of “the Orient”! (Red flag, by the way, when an encyclopedia calls itself “The Encyclopedia of the Orient”. Red, red flag. But still). You can see it down there, can’t you, past the red flags? The dusty library stacks, the gilded lettering, the solemn stone busts of the great men of history guarding the shelves around it. Seducing you. Pulling you in. Call me a sucker, I don’t care. This thing is big brass balls time. Literally the definition of absurd.

The whole thing was spearheaded by Giovanni Gentile. Big-time philosopher, bigger-time Fascist intellectual. That context is kinda impossible to ignore. It hangs over the whole project. So when you’re reading it, you’re not just getting facts about, say, Buddhist temples in Tibet. You’re getting those facts through a very specific 1930s Italian filter. It’s a lens. A very, very strong lens. It’s fascinating and also a little cringe, sometimes at the same time. The tone is so… confident. So sure of its own perspective on these cultures it’s supposedly just documenting. It’s this weird mix of genuine academic curiosity and pure ideological flexing. A monument to knowledge, but also a monument to a certain worldview.

But here’s the thing. You open these volumes up, and they are beautiful. I mean, physically stunning objects. The paper quality, the binding, the sheer weight of them. They feel important. And the illustrations! They went all out. We’re talking full-color plates of artwork, super detailed maps that are works of art in themselves, and tons of black-and-white photographs of places and people. This was before Google Images, you know. For someone in Italy in 1935, this would have been like looking into another universe. A carefully curated universe, sure, but still. The visual side of it is just top-tier, even by today’s standards. It’s not some cheap hacky job; they poured a ton of money and effort into making it look and feel monumental. They absolutely succeeded on that front.

But the text. The thing goes on and on and on and on. A veritable wall of text. It’s an encyclopedia. They try to cover literally everything. History and geography, yes, of course, but also art, literature, religion, politics, ethnography, fucking everything for pretty much all of Asia. Japan, China, India, Siam (yes, that was what Thailand was called), Persia… there was just everything. You open it up and you might be reading about Japanese Shinto rituals one moment, and a few pages later get absolutely immersed in a dense study of the textile industry of British India, or some specific architectural element of a Cambodian temple. There was just so much content. The scale of the thing, the sheer volume of data they attempted to collect and present in an ordered form for a pre-internet world. It’s Wikipedia before they even had a fucking idea of the topic.

Of course, none of it is remotely impartial. Not by a long shot. In fact, the whole thing needs a massive grain of salt. A whole salt shaker, in fact. Published in Barcelona in the 1920s, the perspective throughout is frankly proudly Eurocentric, Spanish colonialist even. There’s this overall tone to it that’s so dang… self-assured. Opinions and stereotypes presented as flat facts. And there’s this undertone to it, like it’s an Us (civilized Europe) explaining Them (exotic Orientals) narrative. Parts of it are so badly worded, so transparently cringe in its description of a local custom or a people or a nation that you want to laugh. But then it’s not funny anymore. It’s sad. It’s a perfect time capsule of the colonial mindset, and I suppose, for better or for worse, that’s a history lesson in and of itself.

On the other hand… it’s an incredible repository of knowledge. Flawed, but incredible. For researchers, it’s a goldmine. Not just for the information it contains, but for what it says about the people who wrote it. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time. A document of how the West saw the East at this major turning point in history, right before World War II blew everything up. It’s a primary source for understanding the intellectual climate of Fascist Italy. You can’t separate the scholarship from the ideology. They’re woven together so tightly you can’t pull them apart. And trying to do that is part of what makes it so interesting.

Trying to find a set is a whole other story. It’s rare. Super rare. These weren’t printed like paperbacks. They were massive, expensive sets for libraries and universities and probably some very wealthy individuals who wanted to look smart. So finding a complete set in good condition today is a real challenge. They pop up at auctions sometimes, but they command a pretty penny. It’s a collector's item for a very specific kind of collector — someone interested in history, Asian studies, or the history of ideas. It’s not exactly a coffee table book, unless your coffee table is made of reinforced steel.

The whole thing is an oxymoron, really. On the one hand it’s this beautiful work of scholarship, for its day. The level of ambition is astonishing, and to have collected as much information as they did without Google is mind-boggling. The art. The maps. Fucking wow. On the other hand, though, it’s a fossil. It parrots an entire slew of ideas that are just horrifying to read back today, without a hint of self-awareness of any kind. It’s a relic of another era with a long-superseded understanding of how the world works. It’s invaluable and hopelessly outdated at the same time.

Can you use it, then? I dunno. As an actual encyclopedia? To learn about modern Asia? Please, God, no. It’s hopelessly dated. But as a historical document? As a lens into the West’s view of the East a century ago? Irreplaceable. Tells you more about early 20th century Europe than it does about Asia, truthfully. It’s not an encyclopedia of the Orient. It’s an encyclopedia of Europe’s idea of the Orient. And that, I find, is far more interesting.