Nick Fielding

Travellers in the Great Steppe FROM THE PAPAL ENVOYS TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION NICK FIELDING “In writing this book I have tried to explain some of the historical events that have affected those living in the Great Steppe – not an easy task, as there is little study of this subject in the English language. And the disputes between the Russians and their neighbours and between the Bashkirs, the Kazakhs, the Turkomans, the Kyrgyz and the Kalmyks – not to mention the Djungars, the Dungans, the Nogai, the Mongols, the Uighurs and countless others – means that this is not a subject for the faint-hearted. Nonetheless, I hope that the writings referred to in this book have been put into the right historical context. The reasons why outsiders travelled to the Great Steppe varied over time and in themselves provide a different kind of history. Some of these travellers, particularly the women, have been forgotten by modern readers. Hopefully this book will stimulate you the reader to track down some of the long- forgotten classics mentioned within. Personally, I do not think the steppe culture described so vividly by travellers in these pages will ever fully disappear. The steppe is truly vast and can swallow whole cities with ease. Landscape has a close relationship with culture – and the former usually dominates the latter. Whatever happens, it will be many years before the Great Steppe finally gives up all its secrets. This book aims to provide just a glimpse of some of them.” From the author’s introduction. TRAVELLERS IN THE GREAT STEPPE For my fair Rosamund TRAVELLERS IN THE GREAT STEPPE From the Papal Envoys to the Russian Revolution NICK FIELDING SIGNAL BOOKS . Oxford First published in 2020 by Signal Books Limited 36 Minster Road Oxford OX4 1LY www.signalbooks.co.uk © Nick Fielding, 2020 The right of Nick Fielding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-909930-86-5 Cloth Typesetting, pre-press production and cover design: Baseline Arts Ltd, Oxford Main cover image © Potemin Anton CONTENTS k Introduction vii 1. The Early Traders and Adventurers 1 2. John Castle’s “Mission” to Abul Khayir, Khan of the Junior Horde 19 3. Thomas and Lucy Atkinson: Across the Great Steppe to the Seven Rivers Region and the Djungar Alatau Mountains 43 4. Exploring the Djungar Alatau Mountains: The Atkinsons in the Zhetysu 89 5. The Race to Khiva: The Travels of Vassili Mikhailov, Nikolai Muraviev, Eugene Schuyler, Januarius MacGahan, David Ker, Fred Burnaby and Robert L Jefferson 121 6. The Russians in Central Asia: Opening up the New Empire 173 7. The French Are Coming 199 8. Science in the Steppe: Johann Peter Falk, Herbert Wood and William Bateson 229 9. The Venerable Dr Lansdell, the Indefatigable Missionary 255 10. Business – and Revolution – Comes to the Steppe: Samuel Turner, E Nelson Fell, J H Wardell and Ralph Fox 277 Postscript 309 Index 313 v Traditional Kazakh eagle hunter. vi INTRODUCTION k I first travelled to Central Asia during my early twenties when, like many others of that generation, I set off along the “Hippie Trail” eastwards from England to India and beyond. For a brief period in the sixties and seventies thousands of young people were gripped by the idea of finding places that had never been seen by our parents, of experiencing something more than the packaged, pre-processed and, above all, safe holidays that they had taken us on as small children. We left Europe with our creaky unbranded backpacks, gripping a copy of BIT’s Overland to India guidebook – produced on a Roneo duplicating machine and full of useful tips culled from the letters to the editor from people who had done the same journey before – and made our way to the Pudding Shop in Istanbul and all places east. There were no published guidebooks of any description to the wilds of eastern Iran or the Afghan hinterland, or the tribal areas on the Pakistan border. There was barely even a good guidebook to Turkey. Since those times the world has become a smaller place. Modern communications and transport have brought once remote places much closer – although many of the areas I visited then cannot be entered today because of war or political instability. Today, the gap year road trip is a rite of passage for many young people. There are websites devoted to it and the marvels of smartphones mean that you are never – and I mean never – more than a call away from family and friends. And that is fine. It is all that most people want. But it was always my dream to be out in the wilds, to be independent and to relish the chance of finding people with a different outlook on the world. Sadly, those kinds of experiences are harder and harder to find. In Afghanistan I sat on the head of one of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas, vii TRAVELLERS IN THE GREAT STEPPE now, alas, destroyed by the explosives of the Taliban. I drove through the Khyber Pass, something I have done since, but certainly would think twice about doing today. Later I walked for weeks through the beautiful and imposing Fann Mountains in eastern Tajikistan, visiting the Kulikalon Lakes and Iskanderun Lake, whose very name echoes that of the region’s most formidable conqueror. Ever since, time and again, I have been drawn back to these sometimes desolate and uninviting, sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful, places. Kyrgyzstan, a pristine jewel in the heart of Central Asia, amazed me. Song Kul Lake, set in a perfect extinct volcanic crater like a sapphire in a diamond ring, the views of the magnificent Tian Shan Mountains and the sense that things have continued much as they always had done, were more than sufficient reward. The remarkable Sulayman Mountain just outside the age-old city of Osh is said to hold the burial place of a Koranic prophet, but the tiny strips of cloth tied to every available branch of a tree or bush tell a much older tale, that of the shamanic traditions that shaped this land for millennia. Further to the east I have spent time with nomads on the Mongolian plains in the Gobi-Altai region, where saiga antelope can still be seen and where wild rhubarb can be found in the rock crevices. To the north of there I have walked in the Western Sayan Mountains of Tuva, where the taiga is at its most glorious – rushing rivers, mixed forests and open-topped mountains that stretch forever. And in the Eastern Sayan Mountains of Buryatia I rode on horseback to the homeland of the reindeer-riding Soyots and the places known to the ancestors of Genghis Khan. Of all these regions, perhaps the most inspiring for me personally is the Zhetysu/Semirecheye region of eastern Kazakhstan. Time and again I have returned, visiting the places associated with the remarkable English travellers, Thomas and Lucy Atkinson. They spent 18 months in total in this region from 1848 to 1849, during which time Lucy gave birth to their child. At that time, the Russians had only just built their first military bastion in the area and the Atkinsons were the first outsiders for well over 500 years to reach this beautiful region. When I first started travelling here in 2014, barely any outsiders had been there in years. The incorporation of the Great Steppe into the Russian viii INTRODUCTION Empire and then the Soviet Union meant that travel in these mountains and valleys that lie along the border with China was far too sensitive to allow foreigners to visit. However, as my interest in Central Asia grew, I realised that there was a history of travel to be written, one that had never been told before. Of course, when we speak of Central Asia, inevitably the first thing that comes to mind is the Great Game and the political and military machinations that absorbed and engulfed relations between Russia and Great Britain for much of the second half of the 19th century. That story, told so well by Peter Hopkirk in his many books, concerns itself with different issues to those of which I have written.1 The Great Game itself was in essence about the borders between the Russian and British Empires, particularly along the line of the Amu Darya river that marks, at various points, the present-day borders between Afghanistan to the south and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to the north. From a British perspective it was about whether or not Imperial Russia would attempt an invasion of India. But my interest is in the vast regions that lie to the north of this fractious borderland and in particular in the Great Steppe – the central region of the vast Eurasian Steppe that stretches from the Hungarian plain almost to the Pacific. The Great Steppe stretches from the River Volga and the Caspian Sea in the west to the easternmost limits of Djungaria in the present-day Xinjiang region of Western China. To the north its limits vary with time; sometimes it is the Irtysh and Ural rivers, sometimes much further north.

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