page_title: Early life of L. Ron Hubbard
section_title: Second trip to Asia
hierarchical_section_title: Early life of L. Ron Hubbard / Travels in the Far East and Pacific / Second trip to Asia
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Tsingtau, Teilansicht China, Tsingtau.- Teilansicht aus dem Jahre 1930. [Im Vordergrund ehem. Offizierskasino ( jetzt Admiralität), links Reste der alten Yamenbrücke.]
context_page_description: L. Ron Hubbard was the inventor of Dianetics and founder of Scientology. Born in Tilden, Nebraska in March 1911, Hubbard grew up with his family in Helena, Montana. He was unusually well-traveled for a young man of his time due to his father's frequent relocations in connection with his service in the United States Navy. He lived in a number of locations in the United States and traveled to Guam, the Philippines, China, and Japan. He enrolled at George Washington University in 1930 to study civil engineering, but dropped out in his second year. While at GWU, he organized an expedition to the Caribbean for fellow students which looms large in his official biography but was a flop according to contemporary accounts. He subsequently spent time in Puerto Rico panning for gold, before returning to the United States, marrying his pregnant girlfriend, and embarking on a career as a "penny-a-word" writer.
  The Church of Scientology depicts Hubbard in hagiographic terms.
context_section_description: A number of naval families, including Hubbard's, traveled from Guam to China aboard the USS Gold Star between October and December 1928. The ship visited Manila in the Philippines and traveled on to Qingdao (Tsingtao), from where Hubbard and his parents traveled inland to Beijing, before returning to the ship for transport to Shanghai and Hong Kong and finally back to Guam. The Church of Scientology presents a completely different version of this family holiday, stating that Hubbard "made his way deep into Manchuria's Western Hills and beyond – to break bread with Mongolian bandits, share campfires with Siberian shamans and befriend the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan." According to Atack, these occurrences are not mentioned in the diary that Hubbard kept of his trip. Many years later, Hubbard said that "I was a harum-scarum kid; I wasn't thinking about deep philosophic problems."
  As on his previous trip, Hubbard recorded his impressions in his diary. He remained unimpressed with China. After seeing Qingdao he wrote: "A Chinaman can not live up to a thing, he always drags it down." He characterized the sights of Beijing as "rubberneck stations" for tourists and described the palaces of the Forbidden City as "very trashy-looking" and "not worth mentioning". He visited a section of the Great Wall of China near Beijing, which did impress him, but his overall conclusion of the Chinese was very negative: "They smell of all the baths they didn't take. The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here."
  Back on Guam, Hubbard spent much of his time writing dozens of short stories and essays. He is said to have "befriend[ed] the local Chamorros and [taught] in the native schools", exploring "cliff-side caves to disabuse local villagers of a devil named Tadamona". Despite his mother's assistance with his education, he failed the Naval Academy entrance examination. His father's next posting took the family to Washington, D.C., where Hubbard was sent to study at the Swavely Preparatory School in Manassas, Virginia within the D.C. metropolitan area. The Hubbards returned to Helena, Montana for a short visit to Hubbard's grandparents in August 1929 before he enrolled at Swavely the following month.
  Hubbard proved unable to enter the Naval Academy because he was found to be too near-sighted to meet the physical admission criteria.  In the late 1940s, Hubbard wrote a series of private Affirmations in which he tells himself "your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy."
  In February 1930 he enrolled at Woodward School for Boys in Washington, D.C. as a means of earning credits for admission to George Washington University, thereby avoiding the university's entrance examination, and successfully graduated in June. The following September, he entered George Washington University as a freshman.
  While at Woodward, the 19-year-old Hubbard enlisted as a Private in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, stating his age as 21 and listing his profession as "photographer". He was promoted to First Sergeant only six weeks later, a development that Atack attributes to the fact that the unit he joined – the 20th Marine Corps Reserve – was actually a training unit connected with George Washington University. His character was rated "excellent" but on October 22, 1931 he was discharged with the notation, "Not to be re-enlisted." Despite his limited experience of the Marine Corps, he told readers of Adventure magazine in October 1935 that "I've known the Corps from Quantico to Peiping, from the South Pacific to the West Indies."
caption: Aerial view of Qingdao, China, taken in 1930, two years after Hubbard's visit
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