Compass Dispatch: New Episodes, Heavy Metal on Ice, and this week in historical travel
In which your correspondents consider the peculiar human urge to freeze oneself for glory, perform silent concerts for penguins, or keep pet gibbons in 1930s Shanghai.
Good morning from wherever you happen to be consulting the calendar and counting down to the holidays.
New Episode: Emily “Mickey” Hahn
By Their Own Compass is back with our second episode, in which we follow the adventures of Emily “Mickey” Hahn through 1930s China. Mickey was a writer, epic traveller, and bon vivant whose wanderlust made the rest of us look like agoraphobics. By the time she landed in Shanghai, she was one of the New Yorker’s earliest star writers, armed with a sharp pen and a complete disregard for polite colonial society.
In this episode, we tackle her most famous years, chronicled in her memoir China to Me. This is the China of 3 AM soirées, smoke-filled rooms, and impending war. Mickey partied with poets in Shanghai, often with her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, suitably dressed for the evening, clinging to her shoulder whilst she wrote biographies of China’s most famous people, and dodged both Japanese bombs and the explosive gossip of Hong Kong society wives.
Mickey was famous (delightfully notorious, really) for her affairs, notably with the Chinese poet Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei), Shanghai man-about-town Victor Sassoon, and later with Charles Boxer, the head of British intelligence in Hong Kong. She navigated the fall of Hong Kong and the Japanese occupation with a scrappy, hard-drinking fortitude that kept her baby and baby’s daddy (the aforementioned Boxer) alive in the worst of circumstances.
[Listen to the Episode on Apple Podcasts] | [Listen on Spotify]
Coming Soon: Finding Old Shanghai with Tina Kanagaratnam
Want more Emily? Later this week, we have a bonus conversation dropping Thursday as Sarah sits down with Tina Kanagaratnam, a woman who likely knows more about Shanghai’s secrets than even Emily was ever able to uncover.
Tina is a co-founder of Historic Shanghai and an award-winning writer who has lived in the city for nearly 30 years. She authored the original Insight Guides Shanghai, the Zagat Guide, and wrote a long-running column on historic architecture for the Shanghai Daily. If you’ve ever walked past an Art Deco building in the French Concession and wondered who lived there, Tina probably knows not just their name, but what they had for breakfast in 1935.
In this bonus episode, Tina and Sarah discuss how visitors to Shanghai can find and experience Emily Hahn’s China even in 2025.
This Week in Travel History
This week in history seems particularly determined to remind us that humans have a peculiar obsession with travelling to the bottom of the world to see what happens when one’s core body temperature drops from “a good gin and tonic” to “ice lolly”.
December 14 is the anniversary of explorer Roald Amundsen planting the Norwegian flag at the South Pole in 1911, a feat of Scandinavian efficiency that made everyone else look rather disorganised. Amundsen, of course, pipped British explorer Robert Falcon Scott by a mere 34 days.
But why simply survive the South Pole when you can rock it? On December 8, 2013, Metallica—yes, that Metallica—performed a concert inside a small transparent dome at Argentina’s Carlini Base. They called it “Freeze ‘Em All,” because apparently someone in the band’s management thought puns were as important as frostbite prevention.
To avoid disturbing the local penguins, who are naturally fans of cool jazz, the band played without amplifiers. Instead, Metallica entertained a small but enthusiastic audience of contest winners and scientists who listened to the music on headphones. Only Danish-American drummer Lars Ulrich, keeping up the “Scandinavians doing improbable things in Antarctica” theme that Amundsen started a century earlier, could be heard by the local wildlife. Even metal gods must occasionally bow to international treaty regulations and the surprisingly firm musical opinions of flightless fowl.
The gig also meant that Metallica could claim to be the first rock band to play all seven continents.
A Note on Support
If you enjoy our ramblings about polar concerts and literary adventurers with pet primates, do find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A follow goes a long way, and a stellar review goes even further.
[Listen to the Episode on Apple Podcasts] | [Listen on Spotify]
For those who wish to truly join the expedition, consider a paid subscription. It supports our mission to drag the best of travel history out of the archives and into your earbuds, preferably before we all freeze to death silently performing metal shows for disapproving penguins.
P.S. If you missed our debut, do go back and check out the episode on Ibn Battuta. He travelled three times further than Marco Polo and didn’t have a gibbon, which makes his mileage all the more impressive.
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