FEER – The Beginning and the End

These day there are precious few serious journals devoted to Asia. This is perhaps an odd fact given that the boosters would have us believe that international interest in Asia, and particularly China is an at all time high (a rather dubious notion I think and argued in my Through the Looking Glass book) and that legions of businessmen, politicians and commentators tell us we should be more aware of the rise of Asia. The bookshelves groan while the magazine racks remain rather sparse. It may be true that there is a lot of 5,000 feet coverage of Asia and China but dedicated in-depth coverage seems to me to be somewhat lacking given all the chatter. And so it is a regret that we are losing one of the few more in-depth publications on the region – The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER). Dow Jones, the publication’s owner, is closing the title which, as FEER, launched in 1946 (I think). It’s last incarnation was as a journal sized publication, though when I used to read it religiously it was a full magazine and quite impressive (as above).

So as it closes perhaps time to remember where it came from – which is a good story – and how through various permutations, title changes, ownership changes etc the FEER came about. And that’s really the story of Edwin Dingle.

Englishman Edwin John Dingle, or Ding Le Mei as he was known in Chinese. Dingle deserves a mention in any history of the foreign press corps due to the fact that, though he had become a successful publisher on the China coast, he decided that there was more money in running a religious cult. Many called him a faddist and fanatic, but he personally preferred to be known as an esoteric scholar and cartographer. He had started out as a journalist in Singapore, where his brother worked for the Harbour Board, and then moved to Shanghai to work on publications including the China and Far East Finance and Commerce, the most distant predecessor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, published in Shanghai from 1920 until 1937.

The publication was really a digest of market data on commodities and goods traded throughout the region. However, Dingle also made his fortune with a cartographic business based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, mapping western China for Sun Yat-sen and studying Tibet. His contributions to cartography in China were recognised by the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) in London and his maps regularly appeared in the North-China Daily News. He published Across China on Foot in 1911 (now reprinted – click here), an account of his trek across China two years before which nearly killed him. While wandering in Yunnan, he claimed to have been “at the point of death” due to lack of food and shelter. The book somewhat retrod (both literally and literarily)  Morrison of Peking’s trek from Shanghai to Burma; and, like Morrison, Dingle spoke little Chinese and seemingly did equally sparse pre-trip preparation which was presumably why he kept running out of food and nearly dying.

It was during his time in Tibet that Dingle became interested in alternative religions. He befriended both Earnest Holmes, the founder of the Religious Science metaphysics movement, and Paramahansa Yogananda, the founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship that practised meditation — when their guru died his followers claimed that his body did not decay. For his part, Dingle went on to found The Institute of Mentalphysics in 1927, a spiritual teaching and retreat centre in the Southern California desert (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) teaching his own pseudo-science, Mentalphysics, which was founded on breathing techniques and known by some adherents as “super yoga”. Dingle, now calling himself a Reverend, claimed to have learnt these skills, which were designed to open the consciousness, clear the body’s energy centres and reconnect the practitioners with their higher selves, in a Tibetan monastery. Detractors described it all as “enlightenment by mail order”: Dingle did sell lessons successfully and profitably via the postal system. He carried on writing and published a series of books including Breathing Your Way to Youth (1942) that apparently worked for him as he lived into his nineties while also obviously enjoying himself: another book was called The Art of Love Making.