The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  The pilgrims come from as far away as Mongolia and Nepal, India and Ceylon, China and Japan, as well as from Tibet itself. Over the years many have perished in the icy passes, the victims of frost-bite or starvation, avalanches or bandits. However, it has taken more than the fear of death to deter men from making the hazardous journey through the mountains to Kailas. Even today they come, with their prayer-wheels and amulets, some carrying heavy rocks on their arduous circuit of the holy mountain as an act of extreme penance. But nowadays the ragged pilgrims have to share this sacred terrain with jeep-loads of Western tourists who have added it to their list of exotic destinations.

  Until quite recently the Kailas region was one of the least accessible places on earth. Only a handful of Europeans had ever set foot there, the first being two Jesuit priests who passed through it in 1715, describing the mountain as ‘horrible, barren, steep and bitterly cold’, before hastening on to Lhasa. A further century was to pass before the next European set eyes on it, this time a British veterinary surgeon travelling the far north of India and beyond in search of horses for the East India Company’s cavalry, and combining this with a bit of unofficial exploration. His name was William Moorcroft, and he had come to India in 1808 at the Company’s invitation to be superintendent of its stud. He soon became convinced that somewhere to the north, in the wilds of Central Asia or Tibet, there was to be found a breed of horse of great speed and stamina which could be used to revitalise the Company’s bloodstock. It was in the course of the second of three long journeys he made in search of these horses – this one to the Kailas region of Tibet – that something happened which gave birth to an obsession that haunted him for the rest of his life.

  It occurred in the house of a Tibetan official. There, to the Englishman’s astonishment, he was greeted by two strange dogs which he knew at once to be of European origin. One was a terrier and the other a pug, both of them breeds unheard of in Central Asia. But where had they come from? Very soon Moorcroft guessed the answer. Clearly recognising him as a European, the two dogs jumped all over him, licking him and barking excitedly. Then, after begging, the creatures put on a passable imitation of military drill. To Moorcroft this meant only one thing. The two dogs had once belonged to soldiers. The villagers told him that they had acquired them from Russian traders, but Moorcroft was persuaded otherwise. Either way, however, it demonstrated that the Russians had already been there. From then until his death in 1825, Moorcroft was to deluge his superiors in Calcutta with impassioned warnings about Russian intentions in Central Asia.

  St Petersburg, he was convinced, was out to seize the great untapped markets of Central Asia. The East India Company, he wrote, must decide whether the natives of Turkestan and Tibet ‘shall be clothed with the broadcloth of Russia or of England’, and whether they should purchase their ‘implements of iron and steel from St Petersburg or from Birmingham.’ More than that, he believed that the Russians were intent on conquest. First it would be the khanates of Central Asia, and then India itself. In one letter to his superiors he explained how a handful of British officers commanding native irregulars might halt an entire Russian army advancing southwards through the passes by rolling huge boulders down on it from the heights above.

  But these were early days yet. In both Britain and India the Russophobes were still very much in a minority, enjoying little or no support from either the government or the Company. Indeed, although they shared similar views, it is unlikely that Sir Robert Wilson, the father of Russophobia, and Moorcroft had ever heard of one another, let alone corresponded. Meanwhile, the Company’s directors remained far from convinced that St Petersburg, officially still Britain’s ally, harboured any ill intentions towards India. Their own first priority was the consolidation and protection of the territories they had already acquired, which was proving costly enough, rather than winning new ones in the Himalayas and beyond, as Moorcroft was urging them to do. His warnings were thus dismissed by his superiors as resulting from excessive zeal rather than from sound judgement. They were simply filed away in the Company’s archives, ignored and unread, and were not destined to see the light again until after his death.

  It had long been the dream of Moorcroft, in his quest for horses, to visit the great caravan city of Bokhara, the capital of the richest of the Central Asian khanates. For in the markets there, he was convinced, he would find the horses he needed for the Company’s stud, which so far had eluded him. These were the legendary Turcoman steeds, of whose speed, stamina and manoeuvrability he had heard so much in the bazaars of northern India. In the spring of 1819 his persistence was rewarded, and finance and approval were granted for the 2,000-mile expedition, which was to be his third and last. But, like the Russian traveller Muraviev on his mission to Khiva, Moorcroft was given no official status, so that he could be disowned if he got into difficulties, or if his visit to a city so far beyond India’s frontiers were to lead to protests from St Petersburg.

  To purchase horses was only one of Moorcroft’s objectives. He also planned to open up the markets of the far north to British goods, and so pre-empt the Russians whom he believed to have similar aims. So it was that on 16 March, 1820, he and his party crossed out of Company-held territory followed by a large and slow-moving caravan laden with the finest British exports, ranging from porcelain to pistols, cutlery to cotton, and deliberately chosen to outshine the greatly inferior Russian goods. Apart from the many pony men and servants, Moor-croft’s companions for this long-distance raid across the Oxus were a young Englishman named George Trebeck, and an Anglo-Indian, George Guthrie. Both men would prove not only capable and reliable, but also steadfast friends when things became difficult. Though none of them could have foreseen it, due to long and frequent delays their journey into the unknown was to take them no less than six years to complete, and then it would end in tragedy.

  The most direct route to Bokhara, Moorcroft knew from his earlier travels in the north, lay through Afghanistan. Unfortunately a bitter civil war was raging there which, despite their small Gurkha escort, would expose the expedition to the gravest danger, especially when word got around that their camels were weighed down with valuables intended for the markets of Turkestan. Moorcroft decided therefore to try to bypass Afghanistan, and approach Bokhara from the east, from Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan. This was most easily reached across the Karakoram passes from Leh, the capital of Ladakh. By approaching Bokhara this way, moreover, Moorcroft also hoped to open up the markets of Chinese Turkestan to British goods. In September 1820, after innumerable delays in the Punjab, and more than a year on the road, Moorcroft and his companions finally arrived in Leh, the first Englishmen ever to set foot there. They at once set about trying to establish contact with the Chinese authorities in Yarkand, on the far side of the Karakorams, seeking leave to enter their domains. But it was not to be that easy, as Moorcroft soon discovered.

  For a start, Yarkand lay 300 miles away to the north, across some of the most difficult passes in the world, especially in winter, and it could take months to get a reply from officials there who, at the best of times, were not given to hurrying themselves. However, although it was some time before he realised it, there were other factors conspiring against Moor-croft’s efforts to enter Chinese Turkestan, or Sinkiang as it is now called. The powerful local merchants had for generations held a monopoly over the caravan trade between Leh and Yarkand, and had no wish to lose this to the British. Even when Moorcroft offered to appoint the most prominent of them as the East India Company’s agent, they continued to sabotage his efforts. Only afterwards was he to discover that they had warned the Chinese that the British were planning to bring an army with them the moment they were allowed through the passes.

  Moorcroft had not been long in Leh when he discovered that he had what he most feared, a Russian rival. Ostensibly he was a native trader who operated across the passes between Leh and the caravan cities of Chinese Turkestan. In fact, as Moorcroft soon found out, he was a highly regarded Tsarist
agent, of Persian-Jewish origin, who carried out sensitive political and commercial missions for his superiors in St Petersburg. His name was Aga Mehdi, and he had begun his singular career as a small-time pedlar. Soon he was dealing in Kashmiri shawls, celebrated throughout Asia for their great warmth and beauty. Then, with remarkable enterprise, he had made his way across Central Asia, eventually reaching St Petersburg, where his shawls had attracted the attention of Tsar Alexander himself, who had expressed a wish to meet this enterprising merchant.

  Alexander had been much impressed by him, and had sent him back to Central Asia with instructions to try to establish commercial contacts with Ladakh and Kashmir. This he had succeeded in doing, and some Russian goods now began to appear in the bazaars there. On his return to St Petersburg the delighted Tsar had presented him with a gold medal and chain, as well as a Russian name, Mehkti Rafailov. A more ambitious mission was next planned for him, this time with political as well as purely commercial objectives. His orders were to proceed considerably further south than ever before, to the independent Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. There he was to try to establish friendly contacts with its ageing but extremely astute ruler, Ranjit Singh, who was known to be on excellent terms with the British. He bore with him a letter of introduction from the Tsar, signed by his Foreign Minister, Count Nes-selrode. This, innocent enough on the face of it, declared that Russia wished to trade with Ranjit Singh’s merchants, who would be welcome to visit Russia in return.

  Moorcroft was not slow in discovering all this, and through his own agents even managed to obtain a copy of the Tsar’s letter. It appeared to confirm his worst suspicions about Russian intentions. He also found out that this enterprising rival was expected shortly in Leh, on his way to Lahore, Ranjit Singh’s capital. ‘I was anxious to see him,’ Moorcroft observed in his journal, ‘that I might be able better to ascertain his real designs, as well as those of the ambitious power under whose patronage and authority he was employed.’ Moorcroft learned too that Rafailov, to use his new name, was carrying not only a considerable sum of money, but also rubies and emeralds, some of great size and value. The latter, Moorcroft suspected, were almost certainly intended as gifts from the Tsar to Ranjit Singh and others, being too valuable for local sale or barter.

  The Englishman also heard, from those returning across the passes from the north, of Rafailov’s worrying activities in this strongly Muslim corner of the Chinese Empire. In Kashgar, it was reported, he had secretly promised local leaders the Tsar’s support in casting off the Manchu yoke. Were they to dispatch to St Petersburg the rightful heir to the throne of Kashgar, Rafailov was said to have told them, then he would be sent back at the head of a Russian-trained army to recover the domains of his ancestors. Whatever the truth of this, Moorcroft observed, the local populace appeared only too happy to believe that the Tsar was their friend. Rafailov, it was clear, was a formidable adversary. His knowledge of the peoples and languages of the region, not to mention his intelligence and enterprise, equipped him superbly for the task with which Moorcroft believed he had been entrusted – ‘to extend the influence of Russia to the confines of British India’, and to gather political and geographical intelligence from the intervening territories.

  All this Moorcroft reported in his dispatches to his superiors, 1,100 miles away in Calcutta, together with his discovery that Rafailov had been escorted across the most treacherous stretch of his journey, the lawless Kazakh Steppe, by a troop of Cossack cavalry. Moorcroft was now more than ever convinced that behind St Petersburg’s bid for the markets of India’s far north lay what he called ‘a monstrous plan of aggrandisement’. Where caravans of Russian goods could go, the Cossacks would surely follow. Rafailov was merely a scout, feeling the way forward and preparing the ground. Believing that the destiny of northern India lay in their hands, and that this wily newcomer, now only a fortnight or so away, had somehow to be foiled, Moorcroft and his companions awaited his arrival with some excitement.

  It was never to be, however. Precisely how the Tsar’s man died is not clear. But somewhere high up in the Karakoram passes he perished, his remains joining the thousands of skeletons, human and animal, strewn along what one later traveller called ‘this via dolorosa’. Moorcroft tells us little except that his rival’s death was ‘of a sudden and violent disorder’. One can only guess that he died of a sudden heart attack or from mountain sickness, for in places the trail carried the traveller up to nearly 19,000 feet above sea level. Possibly even Moorcroft, an experienced medical man as well as a vet, did not know the cause of Rafailov’s death, or perhaps the answer lies buried somewhere among the 10,000 pages of manuscript which represent his reports and correspondence. Any suggestion that Moorcroft himself had anything to do with it can almost certainly be discounted. Not only was he an extremely honourable man, but he was also generous to a fault. According to his biographer, Dr Garry Alder, perhaps the only man to have thoroughly explored the Moorcroft papers, he saw to it that his adversary’s small orphaned son was adequately provided for and educated, although that is all we are told. Until the Russian secret archives of the period are made available to Western scholars, the precise truth about Rafailov will not be known for certain. Moorcroft, however, was genuinely convinced that he was a highly trusted agent of Russian imperialism – just as Soviet scholars today brand Moorcroft himself as a British master spy sent to pave the way for the annexation of Central Asia. Had Rafailov lived a few years longer, Moorcroft maintained in a letter to a friend in London, then ‘he might have produced scenes in Asia that would have astonished some of the Cabinets of Europe.’

  Rafailov’s unexpected removal from the scene did little to lessen Moorcroft’s near-paranoia about Russian designs on the northern Indian states. Without consulting his superiors in Calcutta first, and with no authority to so act, he now negotiated a commercial treaty with the ruler of Ladakh on behalf of ‘British merchants’. It was, he was convinced, a master stroke which would eventually open up the markets of Central Asia to manufacturers at home, then still suffering from the economic ravages of the Napoleonic wars. His enthusiasm, however, was not shared by his chiefs. When news of the unauthorised treaty reached them, they at once disowned it. Not only were they unconvinced of Russia’s designs on Central Asia, let alone India, but they were also anxious to avoid doing anything likely to offend Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab, whom they regarded as a most valuable friend and neighbour. The very last thing they wanted was to have him, and his powerful, well-trained army of Sikhs, as a foe. And it was no secret in Calcutta that Ranjit Singh, following his earlier annexation of Kashmir, jealously viewed Ladakh as lying within his own sphere of influence.

  It was too late, however, to prevent him from finding out about the treaty. Moorcroft had already written to him warning him that Ladakh was an independent state in whose affairs he must not meddle, and adding that it was the ruler’s wish to become a British protectorate. An abject apology for Moor-croft’s transgression, together with a total retraction of the treaty, was hastily sent to Ranjit, but not in time, it seems, to save Moorcroft from the Sikh’s fury (let alone that of his own chiefs, who had still to deal with him). For not long afterwards there began a series of mysterious attempts on the lives of Moorcroft and his two companions.

  The first of these was made by an unidentified gunman who fired at them through the window at night, narrowly missing George Trebeck as he sat writing, the would-be assassin perhaps mistaking him for Moorcroft who spent hours at his portable desk preparing reports and writing up his journal. Subsequently two further attempts were made on Moorcroft’s life by nocturnal intruders, one of whom he shot dead. The frustrated assassins now tried a new tack. Before long Moor-croft and his companions experienced unexplained pains, which they attributed to some kind of fever. But if they had fallen foul of Ranjit Singh (not to mention those local merchants whose monopoly they threatened), they still had friends among the Ladakhis, some of whom clearly knew what was going on. One night, as Moor
croft was racking his brains over the cause of their malady, he was visited by two strangers, their faces covered to conceal their identity. By means of gestures they made it unmistakably clear that he and his companions were being poisoned. After some suspect tea had been disposed of, the aches and pains abruptly ceased. And so, oddly, did the assassination attempts.

  But if Moorcroft had survived the vengeance of these foes, he was now to face the displeasure of his own employers. So far the directors had been surprisingly tolerant of their Superintendent of Stud and his endless and costly quest for fresh bloodstock. After two fruitless expeditions, they had even allowed him to embark on another, his present journey to Bokhara. There was no doubt that they badly needed the horses, and Moorcroft had, in the course of his travels, sent back a great deal of valuable topographical and political intelligence. Even his increasing Russophobia did not perturb them too much. They merely closed their ears to it. However, interfering with the East India Company’s highly sensitive relations with neighbouring rulers was an altogether different matter.

  Their first move was to suspend Moorcroft, together with his salary, and a letter to this effect was dispatched to him. This was followed not long afterwards by another letter, ordering his recall. It appears that Moorcroft received word of his suspension, but not of his recall to Calcutta. He was nonetheless mortified. ‘I secured for my country’, he protested, ‘an influence over a state which, lying on the British frontier, offered a central mart for the expansion of her commerce to Turkestan and China, and a strong outwork against an enemy from the north.’ The humiliation of being disowned by his own side must have been hard for him to stomach. On top of that he had signally failed to arouse the directors’ interest in the great untapped markets of Central Asia, or to convince anyone in Calcutta or London of the menace which he believed Russia posed to British interests in Asia.