https://www.scmp.com/rss/326216/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com ­First contact For 11 days in November last year, John Allen Chau lived mostly in darkness. While a cyclone thrashed the Bay of Bengal, Chau quarantined himself inside a safe house in the tropical backwater of Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, never stepping outside. The 26-year-old American mission­ary hoped to rid his body of any lingering infections so he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe he dreamed of converting to Christianity. Isolated... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3040770/life-and-death-us-missionary-john-allen-chau?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3040770/life-and-death-us-missionary-john-allen-chau?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 08 Dec 2019 01:30:17 +0000 The Impossible Journey Any North Korean knows that escaping their nation is near impossible. First, the woman called “Faith” would have to evade the soldiers and surveillance cameras on the border. But even once she’d sneaked into China, the danger would have only just begun. To reach a South Korean embassy, where she could find asylum, she would still have to clandestinely journey thousands of kilometres across China and then Southeast Asia. If discovered, she would likely be repatriated to one... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3020060/escape-north-korea-underground-railroad-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3020060/escape-north-korea-underground-railroad-and?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 27 Jul 2019 23:00:11 +0000 When I first heard stories of a tribe that hunted sperm whales with bamboo harpoons, I didn’t believe them. It was 2011, and I was living on a backwater Indonesian island. Locals told me all sorts of tales – that dinosaurs lived in the surrounding jungle was one. But once I had verified that several anthropologists had indeed written about this indigenous group, I decided I had to see them for myself. It took a week of ferry hopping to reach the tribe’s even more remote cranny of the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2187840/last-whale-hunters-traditions-indonesian-tribe?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2187840/last-whale-hunters-traditions-indonesian-tribe?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 03 Mar 2019 08:02:20 +0000 On a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati in the United States, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony. They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea. One of their last glimpses of him had been in a televised news conference from Pyongyang, during which their boy – a sweet, intelligent 21-year-old scholarship student at the University of Virginia – confessed to undermining the regime at the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2169308/otto-warmbier-what-happened-north-korean-jail-led?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2169308/otto-warmbier-what-happened-north-korean-jail-led?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 19 Oct 2018 13:15:30 +0000 When Kim Jong-nam was a boy, his father, the dictator of North Korea, sat him on his office chair and said, “When you grow up, this is where you’ll sit and give orders.” If the child had fulfilled that promise – if his half-brother Kim Jong-un had not ultimately usurped his throne – he would have tyrannised 25 million people. His pudgy finger would have caressed the launch buttons of nukes. The United States and China would have debated how to manage him. But as he glanced up at the departures... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2135434/kim-jong-nams-accused-killers-north-korean?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2135434/kim-jong-nams-accused-killers-north-korean?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 04 Mar 2018 01:45:00 +0000 From his tent in the illegal shanty town carved out of a Bangladeshi forest, 25-year-old Abdul watched as men, women and children limped into the refugee camp, gaunt from days without food. They were, like him, Rohingya – the Muslim ethnic minority often called the world’s most persecuted people. Abdul had arrived in the camp as one of 66,000 refugees who fled neighbouring Myanmar in the last months of 2016. Nearly a year later, the Rohingya were once again on the run, hundreds of thousands... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2128432/inside-rohingya-refugee-camps-traumatised-exiles?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2128432/inside-rohingya-refugee-camps-traumatised-exiles?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 16 Jan 2018 09:00:15 +0000