Kara Khota: The Story of a Lost City the Wind Buried

Bertha Lum

This drawing, done in graphite with white gouache highlights on thick illustration board was done by Bertha Lum around 1928 to accompany a story by her 20 year old daughter Balliet (Catherine) about the lost city of Kara Khota for the magazine World Traveler (pages 39 & 55). Lum would sometimes use a sort of pen name for her illustrative work, in this case signing the work as "Berll Lum." Written in pencil on the verso of the drawing is "Kara Khota Story of a lost city the wind buried /published in World Traveler"

Lum was fascinated by the folk tales of Japan and China and many of her images were based on the witches, goblins and other characters and events from these tales. "Kara Khota" is the story of the lost city of gold, buried under sand in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. In this drawing she depicts a devil wind setting down as the residents scatter.

The ruins, buried under up to 50 feet of sand and rock, was partially excavated by the Russian archeologist Peter Kozlov in 1896. It was immortalized in 1920 by author James Churchwood in a series of 5 books about the Lost Continent of Mu.

Bertha Boynton Bull, was born in Tipton, Iowa and spent her youth in Iowa and Duluth, Minnesota. In 1895, she attended the Art Institute of Chicago for one year, focusing on design. A few years later studied stained glass with Anne Weston and illustration at the School of Illustration with Frank Holme. In the fall of 1901 to March 1902, Lum studied figured drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1903, Bertha married Burt F. Lum, a corporate lawyer, and their honeymoon voyage to Japan in 1903 was the precursor to Bertha’s exploration of and fascination with the Orient. Returning to Japan in 1907 for fourteen weeks, she gained an introduction to Bonkotsu Igami, a master block cutter in Tokyo, who disclosed to her the techniques of carving and arranged for her education in block printing.

Though married, Lum was fiercely independent and traveled for extended periods of time. Accompanied by her two young children, her 1911 sojourn in Japan lasted six months. By this time she had a thorough understanding of color woodcut and opted for the traditional division of labor. Lum moved easily within Japanese society and hers were the only foreign woodcuts in the Tenth Annual Art Exhibition in Tokyo in 1912. She was awarded the silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and and her work was included in the 1919 Exhibition of Etchings and Block Prints at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lum was in California at the end of 1916 and moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1917, but the following years were interrupted with travel. Her most extensive stay in California was between 1924 and 1927. The 1923 earthquake in Tokyo destroyed most of her blocks and many woodcuts. Lum spent the late 1920s and the 1930s living in Peking, returning to California in 1939. She spent a great deal of time in China between the years 1948 and 1953. Bertha Lum left China to be with her daughter Catherine who lived in Genoa, Italy and she died at the age of eighty-four in February, 1954.