ne summer’s evening in 1928, L. Ron Hubbard, then seventeen years old, came upon a disturbing sight in a Peking graveyard. There in the half light of dusk, fixedly gazing into an open grave, sat an impoverished Chinese coolie.
"He was just sitting there waiting for the groundskeeper to push him in when he was dead," Ron recalled. "He just goes up, he gives the groundskeeper three coppers, he sits down on the edge of a hole and wills himself to die. The groundskeeper will, of course, push him into the hole and push the hole in after him. It was incomprehensible to a young American that somebody would simply get tired of life and decide to die."
And that, Ron later wrote, "is probably my first contact with something this life which startled me."
It was the second of two trips to the East between 1927 and 1929, which had begun a few months earlier when Ron left a stifling Montana schoolroom in search of broader horizons. And in every sense, he found them.
He had left from San Diego on the first of July, 1928, talking his way aboard the USS Henderson to visit his father, then stationed in Guam. Apart from the clothes that he wore on his back, his baggage consisted of little more than a toothbrush, a handkerchief, and a spare pair of socks. By the same token, however, he carried with him the tools that all great philosophers possess including a burning determination to answer questions that have never been answered and "never to turn aside from the fact that there was some possible solution to the riddle of where man came from."
[photo - The photographs on the following pages were taken by Ron during his travels.]
