The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

The next two years in Warsaw were happy. He made friends with one or two other teachers, such as Iosafat Fateyev, who remained on close terms with him for the rest of his life. Przhevalsky got on well with his students—as he always did with his juniors. He was free to work without restrictions or reprimands from superior officers.

  Every day he would rise at four in the morning. Then he would sit at his desk in his underwear, working on a geography course for cadets. (It was eventually published as a textbook.) His classes began at eight and finished at noon. He was a very effective teacher; his lectures were eloquent and interspersed with virtuoso recall of passages from the classic geographers. So enthralling a teacher was Przhevalsky that many of his cadet students later left the army’s service to become geographers, agronomists and historians.

  After lunch Przhevalsky regularly went either to the Warsaw Museum of Zoology to study and consult with the zoologist Taczanowski, or to Warsaw’s famous Botanical Gardens where he learnt a great deal from the director, Aleksandrowicz. At three o’clock he went back to the college, where his chief preoccupation was administering and building up the library. Here his favourite students—among them Mikhail Pyltsov who was to accompany him into Mongolia—helped him issue books. He never went out in the evenings; with puritanical zeal he hated the theatre as a form of ‘self deceit’. At home, in his simple flat of three rooms, he would play cards with his friends. He usually held the bank, and he usually won. The income from card-playing, added to his royalties from the geography textbook and the money that his investments in railway shares were bringing in, made his first expedition to the Ussuri River feasible.

  On holidays Przhevalsky entertained his students. There were some of whom he was very fond, though he remained scrupulously impartial as a teacher. He could relax only in the company of his juniors. There was a ritual: students were admitted by Przhevalsky’s manservant, Zaikin, and kept hushed until Przhevalsky had finished working and was ready for merriment. Then, in his living room, furnished with plain beech chairs and a table, and containing a few books—geography classics such as Humboldt’s Pictures of Nature and Karl Ritter’s Asia, a small selection of Romantic literature consisting of Byron, Lermontov and Victor Hugo—and Przhevalsky’s herbaria, collections of the flora of Smolensk, Radom and Warsaw provinces, a feast would begin. Przhevalsky loved sweet things. He consumed apples and pear juice cordials literally by the barrel; he was to eat strawberry jam in the alpine wastes of Tibet, to haul barrels of pumpkin juice on camels across Asia. In Warsaw, his visitors saw him get through a whole tureen of soup, followed by three steaks, washed down alternately with red wine and mineral water. But this Gargantuan appetite did not set the tone for the party. Przhevalsky drank no spirits and little wine. After a few hours’ conversation and jokes the visitors dispersed. Przhevalsky liked to be in bed by nine.

  But this bachelor’s idyll did not give him the ‘wildness, breadth and freedom’ which he longed for. He had become a teacher not in order to teach, but to learn, to equip himself for the career of explorer. The sheer drudgery of writing a textbook on general geography had given him a thorough grounding; Taczanowski had not only made him a competent zoologist—and an excellent ornithologist—but had also taught him how to prepare skins and stuff carcases; in the Botanical Gardens Aleksandrowicz had helped Przhevalsky become one of Russia’s best botanists. After eighteen months in Warsaw, he was ready for the next step.

  Although he counted as a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff, Przhevalsky had still not been appointed to the General Staff. He needed the transfer in order to qualify for official military expeditions and to obtain freedom of movement. His Polish-sounding surname was, in his eyes, the real reason for this delay in promotion. Przhevalsky began to seek help from influential generals. In March 1866 Major-General Chernitsky in Warsaw wrote a letter recommending Przhevalsky: ‘This young officer with his vast knowledge of geography, history and statistics will be very useful for a survey of our provinces in Central Asia.’ There was no reply, although the Russian army badly needed well-qualified officers to reinforce its presence in what is now Kirghizia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

  Then in summer 1866 another influential figure, Lieutenant-General Minkvits, wrote asking for Przhevalsky to be considered for transfer to Siberia, if not Turkestan (Central Asia). This time there was a response; Przhevalsky was released from his Warsaw duties. But the authorities raised another obstacle: he had never taken his final examination at the Academy and could not be considered properly qualified. Przhevalsky asked General Leontyev, the director of the Academy, for references, and these were at last accepted. At the end of November 1866 he left Warsaw for ever: he was off to the East Siberian military district, the district which had been the field for his dissertation.

  But before he started on his 5,000-mile journey eastwards, Przhevalsky chose the first of his young travelling companions. That relationship was one which was to be repeated, with but slight variation, again and again. He had made friends with a young Pole of German origin, Robert Koecher. Koecher was trained in museum work and taxidermy and they agreed, if Przhevalsky should succeed in mounting an expedition to unexplored territory, to go together and to split the collections of plants and animals between them. All seemed set fair for a congenial working relationship. Two factors, however, threatened the friendship: Przhevalsky was insistent that any expedition should be led unconditionally by himself; Koecher had fallen in love and was engaged to marry a girl called Amalia.

  From Warsaw Przhevalsky travelled to Otradnoye for Christmas and the New Year. After a short family reunion, he tore himself away from the wooded hills and the wild marshes of Smolensk and set off by train for Petersburg. He overcame his dislike for the city in order to canvas support from the Imperial Geographical Society for exploration not just of the Ussuri, but of Mongolia and western China. The Przhevalsky who came to the Society and demanded to see the president of the Physical Geography Section was not a man to everyone’s liking. He was disconcertingly direct; he was ingenuously confident that he was the right person for vast explorations in Mongolia and western China, he had a military curtness and an occasionally domineering manner.

  The man he demanded to see was Pyotr Semyonov. Semyonov had become famous throughout Europe for his exploration of the Tien Shan range, or rather system, of mountains, which stretches north-east from the Pamirs to the Altay in Siberia, dividing Russian Turkestan from Chinese Turkestan. Semyonov had earned himself the sobriquet Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky for his extensive dangerous and fruitful travels in the Tien Shan in 1856 and 1857. But this was only one side of his achievements. It has been said that there are three sorts of geographers: travellers, regional experts and organizers. Semyonov was almost unsurpassed in all three roles. Although he did not become vice-president of the Imperial Geographical Society until 1873, he was already the dynamic force behind the tremendous enterprise and achievements of the Society. He had, as an organizer, the valuable talent of knowing whom to pick for great tasks.

  Semyonov liked Przhevalsky. They had much in common; Semyonov, like Przhevalsky, had been born into the poor family of a retired officer and had spent his childhood in untamed countryside. He had a short taste of military service, which he left for the University of Petersburg. In 1848, at the age of twenty-one, he walked from Petersburg to Moscow, and the following year had joined the newly formed Geographical Society of Petersburg. The development of the two men was from this point inextricably linked. Semyonov became known as a botanist and a geographer. He was in many ways a radical, and was briefly involved in the same revolutionary group as Dostoyevsky, but was lucky enough to escape arrest and trial. In 1852 he went to Germany, where he won the admiration and affection of the two giants in geography, Humboldt and Ritter, whose Asia he had translated and updated. Then in 1856 he began his study of the Tien Shan, which turned upside down existing theories, especially that of Humboldt, about the volcanic origin of Central Asia’s mountains.

  Przheva
lsky was one of several explorers to be singled out for fame by Semyonov. (The next was the explorer of New Guinea, Miklukho-Maklay, and there were several more to come.) Semyonov took a calculated risk; he recalled in a speech in 1888, after Przhevalsky’s death:

  In 1867 I met Nikolay Przhevalsky for the first time. Through me he then applied for the first time for help and patronage from the Russian Geographical Society… Przhevalsky was still a little known quantity in the scientific world and the Society’s council hesitated to give a grant for his undertaking, let alone organize under his leadership a whole expedition. But I promised him that if he made any interesting journeys and explorations in the Ussuri at his own expense and proved his capability … then he could rely on the Society organizing a more serious expedition to Central Asia under his leadership.

  With encouragement and a number of letters introducing him to leading figures in the Siberian sections of the Geographical Society in Omsk and Irkutsk Przhevalsky had to make do. Together with Robert Koecher, he set off on the interminable trek to Irkutsk, before the snow melted and the boggy taiga of western Siberia became impassable to wheel or sledge-runner. In the middle of April he was there.

  Irkutsk, like most Siberian towns then, was rough, provincial in culture, corrupt in administration. Przhevalsky thought its officials the dregs of the Russian empire. But he was fortunate in that the Geographical Society’s branches in Siberia were so powerful and influential that they were virtually an arm of the civil and military government. Major-General Kukel, to whom Przhevalsky reported, was chief of staff of the East Siberian military district and, at the same time, president of the Geographical Society at Irkutsk. His successor in the Society, Sofyanov, was commander of the artillery. The Irkutsk Geographical Society had no trouble getting all the books, equipment, men, and even arms it needed for its research.

  Major-General Kukel was something of a rebel. Some years earlier he had nearly been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for his liberalism. There was evidence that Kukel had connived at the escape of the anarchist Bakunin from Siberia to America. He was a man who often had to fight authority and he appreciated Przhevalsky’s courage and character. Others found Przhevalsky cocky: they bided their time and later had their revenge.

  During the late Siberian spring Przhevalsky worked in the Irkutsk Geographical Society’s library. He brought the catalogues into order and read every book, journal and manuscript he could get on the Ussuri area. He had Fateyev send him from Warsaw a Zoological Atlas of Birds by Fritsch, and a Polish dictionary, so that he could read his copy of Tyzenhauz’s Ornithology. The Polish dictionary was not enough, so Przhevalsky sought out a Polish exile in Irkutsk to give him lessons in the language.

  Meanwhile the committee of the Geographical Society was working out a plan for Przhevalsky’s expedition that summer which reflected the interests of government as well as geography. Przhevalsky was asked: first, to examine the disposition of the two battalions guarding the newly acquired Ussuri region along the Manchu and Korean borders; secondly, to collect information on the native population, Cossack and Chinese; thirdly, to reconnoitre land and water routes from the Ussuri and the coast to the Manchu and Korean frontiers; fourthly, to correct maps; and only fifthly, to carry out scientific research and survey and collect specimens of the fauna and flora. All this, in a territory the size of Britain, of virgin forest, mountains and rivers, in a few months!

  By June Przhevalsky was ready to go. He wrote to Fateyev, ‘Yes, my lot is enviable and my obligation hard: I am to explore places in most of which no civilized European’s foot has trod.’ But one thing marred his joy—Robert Koecher was not only homesick, but aghast at the terrible conditions and the immense distances to be overcome in the coming months. Przhevalsky was sickened by Koecher’s treachery. He explained in a letter to Iosafat Fateyev: ‘the German turned out to be quite useless and utterly incapable of enduring any physical hardships. Also he cried every day for his fiancée Amalia and for Warsaw, so in the end I threw him out.’

  It was not the last time that a woman unwittingly deprived Przhevalsky of his travelling companion; he never forgave the sex. Quickly he searched for a replacement. He met a sixteen-year-old boy Nikolay Yagunov, son of a widow, a deportee from Russia, who had just left school at Irkutsk and was training to be a topographer. The Yagunovs were desperately poor, and were only too anxious to please Przhevalsky. In a few days Przhevalsky taught Nikolay Yagunov how to dry plant specimens, to skin and cure animals and birds, and on 7/19 June 1867 the first Przhevalsky expedition was underway.

  2

  Siberian Jungle

  Przhevalsky’s first expedition was light and fleet. At the last moment he took on a third member, Nikolayev; but his supplies were minimal. He had only gunpowder and shot in abundance (twenty-five pounds of one and fifteen pounds of the other). He took his dog, a pointer, for company, to retrieve game and locate wild animals. But his scientific equipment consisted just of a thermometer, a compass and maps.

  Przhevalsky was in a hurry. He crossed Lake Baykal by steamer, and in eight days on post-horses he covered the mountainous and rough 600 miles that lay between Lake Baykal and the River Shilka, the first major tributary of the River Amur. The conifer forests gave way to treeless steppe, where Russian Cossacks and Buryat Mongol nomads struggled to make a living from the desolate and frigid land. It was mid-June, but there were still frosts and the leaves of the trees were not fully open. Ice floes drifted down the rivers. The party reached the River Shilka (or upper Amur) above its navigable course.

  Russian navigation on the Shilka and the Amur was uncertain. The Amur was frozen from November until April, and in the short summer season had dangerous shallows and rapids. Przhevalsky caught a steamer in Sretensk; within a day it ran aground and holed its bow. The expedition, with one of the steamer’s passengers, had to hire a Cossack rowing boat to carry the party down to the conjunction of the Shilka and the Argun, where the Amur begins. The rowing boat suited Przhevalsky; to the annoyance of his passenger, he would order it to tie up on the bank for an hour or two, while he shot at the musk deer that emerged from the sepulchral silence of the pine forests, or the storks and fishing eagles at the water’s edge. In three days the boat reached the Amur, and followed it eastwards to Albazin, where Przhevalsky found a private steamboat which was leaving for Blagoveshchensk, 300 miles south-east downstream.

  Albazin was now a prosperous Cossack station. But its history illustrates Russia’s struggle to win the Amur River. The struggle began in the 1630s. It was an epoch of extraordinary expansion: the Russian empire spread over central and eastern Siberia, annexing, on average, territory the size of France every three years. By 1639, the Cossacks—soldiers, trappers, traders, settlers and negotiators all at once—had reached the Pacific, at the frigid Sea of Okhotsk. The Amur was the key route connecting the coastal posts with the garrisons of East Siberia, by sledge and troika in winter, by rowing boat and barge in summer. Expeditions set out from Yakutsk to subdue the Tungus tribes and make them tributaries of the Russians. Native chiefs were cajoled, taken hostage, tortured or killed. Eventually the Amur was won. But, in winning it, the Cossacks had desolated their conquests. No corn grew and no cattle were kept; Russian settlers could not make a living; only escaped convicts flourished, killing the natives as they hunted for fur or prospected for gold.

  In the 1660s and 1670s, however, a marauding group of Cossacks developed a flourishing agricultural and military settlement around Albazin, a destroyed Tungus village. The Chinese were hostile to the intrusion and the great Manchu Emperor K’ang Hsi demanded that the Russians withdraw. In 1683 war broke out. The Chinese destroyed Albazin, the Russians rebuilt it. The Chinese besieged it; disease turned the siege into a truce. Finally, in Nerchinsk in 1689, a treaty was drawn up and signed. The force of Manchu arms and the diplomatic skill of the Manchu’s Jesuit interpreters overcame Russian reluctance. For the first time since the overthrow of the Mongol yoke, Russian expans
ion eastwards was checked. The Amur was lost, and firm boundaries were drawn. The Russians had to be content with limited trading rights and the establishment of an embassy and clerical mission (which was scientific rather than evangelical) in Peking. The Russian empire had at last established contact with its mighty neighbour; for the next 160 years the Chinese had a guarded, but generally equable, relationship with the Russians, perhaps calmer and more fruitful than with any other European power.

  The Chinese maintained the Amur and Ussuri regions like a native reserve. Even their own Chinese and Manchu subjects were, with few exceptions, forbidden to penetrate these lands. They were, after all, part of the ancient homeland of the Manchu tribes who, although they might have given China its reigning dynasty, had never forgotten their Tungus origins and their ancient reverence for the soil, which they could not allow to be desecrated by Chinese farmers or miners. Only an occasional Mandarin barge sailed the Amur collecting tribute in furs, and a few desperadoes crossed secretly in search of wealth from sables, gold or the ginseng root. Not until the 1850s did the Russians dare to try and recapture this essential and empty highway to the Pacific and to Alaska.

  In 1847 eastern Siberia was given its most active governor-general, Count Muravyov; he spoke for Russia’s imperial interests: ‘With the spread of foreign possessions and English conquests in the Pacific, we can no longer leave the countries and seas adjoining the Amur without delineations, whatever was said in the treaty of Nerchinsk.’ He founded Nikolayevsk as a depot near the Amur’s mouth and in 1854 he personally led an expedition of a thousand men by gunboat up the Amur to link Nikolayevsk with Siberian territory on the River Shilka. He met with no real resistance. In 1855 there were three more boatloads, this time of colonists, cattle and ploughs; some foundered and died of starvation and cold, but others secured a foothold. Muravyov refused even to negotiate with the remonstrating Chinese officials. Russia’s whole empire in the east was at stake, especially during the Crimean War of 1853–6 when English and French frigates menaced the Russians all round the Sea of Okhotsk.