Why the East is imagined and the West is experienced

A walk through Rome is a walk through a managed past. The Colosseum, the Forum, the Pantheon—they stand as curated monuments, patched and preserved, hemmed in by ticket barriers and audio guides. It is an experience, polished and presented. History is a commodity you can purchase for an afternoon.

Now, try to take a similar walk through the history of Baghdad, the Silk Road, or the Indus Valley. You find fragments. You find mounds of earth where cities once stood, a single minaret standing guard over a field of dust, or a modern metropolis built hastily atop its own layered past. The library of Alexandria is a story; the great cities of the Oxus are footnotes in military histories.

This is not an accident. The West’s heritage was largely preserved because the West, for the past 500 years, was the victor. Its cities were not razed by foreign conquerors in the same sustained, comprehensive way. Its treasures were kept, catalogued, and eventually turned into tourist attractions. It had the stability and the resources, extracted from elsewhere, to monumentalise its own story.

The East, by contrast, became a landscape of the mind. Deprived of the physical continuity of its own golden ages—a process accelerated by colonialism, purposeful neglect, and modern wars—its grandeur was relegated to literature, to art, to imagination. It is the world of 1001 Nights, of Omar Khayyam’s verses, of shimmering, ethereal cities that can’t be visited because they no longer exist.

This asymmetry in preservation quietly trains our modern gaze. We are taught to ‘experience’ the West. We trust its reality because it is tangible, walkable, a thing to be consumed. But we can only ‘imagine’ the East. It becomes a project of romantic reconstruction, a fantasy of what-if.

And when the difficult, messy reality of these places intrudes on our fantasy—through headlines of war, poverty, or political chaos—our reaction is not one of genuine empathy. It is one of disappointment, of pity. A feeling that these places have failed to live up to the imagined version of themselves we hold so dear. We see a brokenness that offends our romantic sensibilities, a reality that doesn’t match the poetry.

This dynamic underpins so many of the intractable problems we claim to care about. Our foreign policy is premised on fixing a place whose history we’ve turned into a fairytale. Our development models assume a blank slate where, in fact, there are deep, traumatic scars. We seek to rebuild palaces in places that first need functioning hospitals, because our imagination is more powerful than our analysis.

The world is thus divided between tourist attractions and archaeological digs, and we are then surprised this defines the relationship between the curators and the curated.