Middle East Policy, Volume VII, Number 3, June 2000

Book Review

Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999. 634 pages,with index, maps and photos. $35.00, hardback.

David Nalle
Associate editor, Central Asia Monitor

Not only do oil and gold lurk under the inhospitable ground of Central Asia waiting to be exploited, there is also history, full of tales of bravery, hardship, imperial hubris, tragedies both individual and national, stupidity, vanity and the inhumanity of man to man -- a whole gamut of exciting events played out against the backdrop of the world's highest mountains by a cast of romantic and improbable characters. In fact, mining Central Asia's history has become something of an industry.

The two authors of this hefty book have done a prodigious job of digging into that history. They have ranged widely to round up the most dramatic actors on the stage of Central Asia in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. They seem to have consulted archives around the world and most of the accounts written by the participants in the "Tournament of Shadows," a phrase attributed in the prologue to Count Nesselrode. The aptness of the Russian foreign minister's phrase is underlined by a comment on the Great Game that the authors gathered from an elderly British historian of the period: "In the light of history, I think the Game really was a game, with scores but no substantive prizes" (p. 557).

The "Game" was supposed, by British statesmen in particular, to be a relentless struggle between the Russian and British empires for the control of South Asia. That the game was a chimera, with a denouement that was never to be, doesn't spoil the story, since it served as a casting call for such a remarkable group of heroes and villains. Meyer and Brysac have searched them all out and told their stories with charm and just enough detail to bring them alive and fit them into the mosaic of the game and the playing field.

We learn first of William Moorcroft, a "horse doctor" sent to India in 1808 to recruit new blood for the stud of the East India Company. He used his profession as a pretext for travel in the uncharted highlands of Kashmir, Ladakh and Nepal and eventually through Afghanistan to Bukhara, "the greatest horse market in the world." He smoothed his way by practicing medicine more on the local people than on horses. Moorcroft succumbed to a fever on his way south from Bukhara and found his final resting place in Balkh, the "Mother of Cities," just south of the Amu Darya.

Shortly after Moorcroft, an improbable American, Josiah Harlan, joins the swelling procession of visitors to Central Asia. A Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania, he became a military commander in the service of the Afghan emir, Dost Mohammad. In 1838, on his way with his troops to quell an uprising in the north, Harlan planted the American flag in a 12,500 foot pass in the Hindu Kush and honored it with a 26-gun salute. Only three years later in Kabul, the gallant Sir Alexander Burnes, just 36 years old and serving a policy he advised against, is hacked to death by outraged tribesmen in the final act of Britain's disastrous First Afghan War. An equally undeserved fate is served up for British officers Stoddart and Conolly, who spent months in the infamous "bug pit" of the emir of Bukhara before being beheaded in the public square.

After chronicling these and other grisly doings, the focus of the book, and of the Tournament towards the end of the century, shifts to the east, to Inner Asia and the approaches to Tibet. Among the players here are the Russian Nikolai Przhevalsky and, later, Sir Francis Younghusband, the Swede Sven Hedin and Sir Aurel Stein, originally from Hungary. These men are professional explorers and for the most part their ultimate target is Lhasa, forbidden capital of Tibet. Their travels are supported because they make maps filling in the "white spaces." The focus of the Game has become the winning of Tibet.

These are fascinating, driven people whose lives are covered in some detail. Hedin is rated by the authors as the most professional map maker but the least attractive individual. He is pictured in the photo insert shaking hands at the 1936 Olympics with Adolf Hitler, to whom he shifted enthusiastic allegiance when his fame as an explorer was at its height. His knighthood, bestowed in recognition of his dramatic geographic discoveries, was eventually rescinded by the British. The curious fixation of Heinrich Himmler on "Aryan" Tibet is also woven into the Hedin story.

Przhevalsky also seems not to have been entirely lovable. Described as a ruthless exploiter who invaded Central Asia "with a carbine in one hand, a whip in the other," he collected great quantities of specimens of plants and animals and discovered for the rest of the world equus przhewalskii, a pony found only on the Dzungar steppe on the edge of Mongolia. His legacy is also shaded by the rumor, the authors report, that he was the natural father of Josef Stalin.

Aurel Stein comes across as a much more sympathetic personality, and the authors are at some pains not to condemn too harshly his prodigious looting of the paintings, manuscripts and other treasures he found in the caves around the Taklamakan Desert. Of these four, only Younghusband, contrary to orders and the wishes of the Tibetans, actually made it to Lhasa.

Chapter Eighteen, "The ‘Shambhala Project,'" covers what is perhaps the most unfamiliar and incredible among the many exotic tales included in this book. Shambhala was a "hidden paradise" located in eastern Russia that would somehow figure in the establishment of a "great Buddhist confederacy" of Russian Buddhists, Mongolia and Tibet (p. 454). Too convoluted to recount here, the story involves Nicholas Roerich, Russian "artist, explorer, ethnographer, visionary and adventurer" (and set designer for Diaghilev's 1913 presentation of Le Sacre du Printemps), the Panchen Lama, the 1935 redesign of the American dollar bill, Theosophy and Henry Wallace, Westbrook Pegler and the 1948 American presidential elections. It has to be read to be believed.

This is a long, wonderfully readable book. It contains lessons, among them that single-minded individuals can accomplish marvelous, seemingly impossible things. Embedded in the stories there is also something about the importance to humans of geography – and of maps – and of the lines they impose on those maps. George Nathaniel, Lord Curzon, a major player in the Tournament, put this in a way that should have resonance for the old and new states of Central Asia today: "Frontiers are the razor's edge on which hang suspended the issue of war or peace and the life of nations."