The journey and Peking itself, despite the warm air, the rich arable fields and the groves of cypresses and juniper, aroused in Przhevalsky a deep aversion to everything Chinese. His pride as a European was stung by the Chinese scorn for the ‘foreign devils’ who had humiliated them in two wars. His European fastidiousness was shocked by the villagers’ unconcealed defecation and their careful husbandry of all animal or human dung for the fields or the fireplace. He loathed the delicacies of Chinese cuisine: Przhevalsky would say he ‘never tired of mutton’ and no amount of shark’s fin could tempt him to overcome his prejudice against food cooked in oil.
Peking was still closed to European traders; Europeans were to be found only among the five embassies—British, French, German, American and Russian—the Russian Clerical Mission and the missionaries. Although the Russian Embassy, by far the best equipped, boasted of such members as Dr Emil Bretschneider, the world-famous systematic botanist, and the Russian Clerical Mission still upheld its scholarly reputation, Przhevalsky was disgusted by his compatriots. It was just like Nikolayevsk on the Amur, except that they swilled champagne instead of vodka. From his very first day in Peking, his letters to his mother (‘on the lack of moral fibre of the Chinese’) and to General Tikhmenev are almost incoherent with revulsion:
The first impressions are enough to say unmistakably that it is unimaginable foulness. The same clay and wattle houses as on the Ussuri. Unimaginable filth and stench, people squatting relieving themselves right and left in the street … The Chinese here are ten times worse than our Amur ones. On the Amur at least they’re kept in fear and trembling, while here they call all Europeans to their faces or behind their backs nothing but devils … Crookery and fraud are developed to extremes. The Chinaman here is a Jew plus a Muscovite pickpocket, both squared. But the lamentable thing is to see Europeans being polite to this rabble …
He complained to his mother that January of 1871: ‘You can’t walk here if you don’t carry a nagayka whip … this Russian weapon is the only way of putting sense into the exceedingly persistent impudent fellows, especially the beggars who walk all the streets here quite naked.’
In a week his mind was irrevocably made up, in a conquistador mould which was to soften little in his future journeys. He wrote to an officer friend: ‘In my opinion only rifles and cannons of the Europeans can do any good here. Missionary preaching, on which Europe puts its hopes, is the voice of one crying in the wilderness …’ China, ruined by a succession of inadequate emperors, a corrupt administration, the greed of the Europeans and the savagery of the rebels, was finished in Przhevalsky’s eyes. Already his journey was taking on political overtones. Przhevalsky was the first Russian to voice the idea of fomenting a rebellion of Buddhists as well as Moslems and of uniting the Buddhist Tibetans and Khalkha Mongols with the Buddhist Buryats as well as the Moslem Uighurs with the Moslem Uzbeks and Kirghiz—under Russian sovereignty. He began to look at Mongolia and China from the point of view of a military strategist. Above all, his dream of seeing Lhasa and the Dalai Lama, of penetrating to the spiritual centre of the empty lands he was exploring, was now not just a personal, but a national dream.
It is strange and sad that Przhevalsky saw only China’s degradation—une ruine effroyable as Huc and Gabet put it. He had time neither for the grandeur of the past nor for the hopeful augurs of the future. He was openly contemptuous of Russian sinologists and their books on the great dynasties and philosophers of China. Even such figures as the Emperor K’ang Hsi, who created a state of such exemplary efficiency that even the British Embassy headed by Lord Macartney was lost for words, seemed to evoke no sympathy in Przhevalsky. In the 1870s, under the Dowager-Empress Tz’u-hsi and such clear-sighted statesmen as Li Hung-ch’ang, there were real signs that the Chinese were coming to terms with the modern world; but Przhevalsky chose to ignore such signs. One thing only in Peking pleased him: the university was using his Notes on General Geography as a set text.
Przhevalsky found the funds allocated for his expedition pitifully small. Luckily, Aleksandr Vlangali put him up at the Embassy and very soon this former mining engineer became one of Przhevalsky’s strongest supporters. He lent the explorer money against the funds due from St Petersburg, he even wrote to the War Ministry asking them to double their grant. He was confident that Przhevalsky would break through the hostile and turbulent provinces that lay between Peking and Kuku Nor. He wrote to Litke at the Geographical Society: ‘As far as insurgents are concerned, the name of a Russian and the absence of anything that can arouse a robber band’s greed will deflect any attempted attack.’ After some months Vlangali succeeded in getting Przhevalsky a passport from the Chinese that would let him travel only as far as Kansu province; as yet the half-wild Tanguts (nomadic Tibetans) around Kuku Nor made Kansu impenetrable in the view of the authorities.
Przhevalsky still had not been given the two Cossacks promised by the War Ministry. He decided to take the Buryat Cossack who had joined him in Kyakhta, to borrow a Cossack from the Peking Embassy and to survey the country that lay between Kalgan and Dalai Nor (the Great Lake) 200 miles north-east. As well as an exploration of an unknown corner of south-east Mongolia, it was a trial, a foretaste of the expedition westwards. He bought two horses for himself and Pyltsov and seven camels to carry the Cossacks, and about a ton of supplies. Other preparations were harder. No amount of money would induce any Chinaman or Mongol to come as a guide. Even money itself was problematical. The Chinese dealt in silver, the unit being a liang (or tael) of about 37 grams (1⅓ ounces) which had to be hacked off an ingot. There were cash coins, but the rate of conversion for these varied from town to town, from 1,500 to 6,000 coins per liang. Every transaction needed the speed of a calculating machine and the skill of a silversmith. Chinese villagers often refused to sell food or provide accommodation at any price. After a gruelling journey at the beginning of April the party reached the shores of the lake, horribly illuminated in the night by a grass fire which raged all round its banks.
Like Lake Hanka, Dalai Nor was a birdwatchers’ paradise. The migratory species battling northwards against the freezing gales stopped here, but only to rest. Siberia was far more friendly for the geese and cranes in search of a nesting place than this shelterless desolate salt lake. But once again Przhevalsky could shoot to his heart’s delight and rest from the rigours of the journey.
Apart from the cold and the wind that raised clouds of salt or sand which blotted out the sun and settled in every pore of the skin, Przhevalsky had to cope with the hostility of the population. One of his chief tasks was to map his routes in China on a scale of six miles to the inch. He would persuade the local villagers or Mongol nomads that his Schmalkalder surveying compass was just another sort of binoculars. He discarded the tripod, lagged behind the main party, taking bearings as unobtrusively as possible. At night, Pyltsov would engage visitors in conversation through the Buryat interpreter while Przhevalsky shut himself in his tent to set the bearings out on paper. While he did not have to go to the lengths of the pandits sent out by the India Office to survey southern Tibet, disguised as Ladakh merchants or pilgrims with their theodolites and compasses built into prayer wheels, Przhevalsky was still forced constantly to employ ruses to carry out his work.
He began to see the magnitude of his task. The Mongolian horses were wonderfully adapted to expeditions: they needed little rest and no special food. He watched the great herds which belonged to the Emperor thriving almost untended on the sparse semi-desert around the lake. But the two-humped Bactrian camels were more complicated animals. Przhevalsky learnt to admire their physical endurance but they needed special handling. Starved for three days before any expedition, watered as little as twice a week, picking up the dry scrubby vegetation of the semi-desert, they could carry four hundredweight twenty-five miles a day for a month. But the Mongols gave their camels special consideration which Przhevalsky, anxious to press on, would not concede. Camels required ten days’ rest each month; they were used
to six months—the summer—on leave each year with the herd. They could not endure the damp mountain air that they were to find in Kansu, nor could they recover easily from the high altitudes of Tibet. Above all, they needed skilled loading to prevent ulcers and sprains. The Mongols had all sorts of techniques: they used human urine to heal the sores; they stitched patches of leather with an awl on to the camels’ heels; they dosed them with rhubarb; they had a custom by which any exhausted camel could be left in the care of the nearest ger. (A ger, or yurt, is a circular house, about twelve feet in diameter, made of felt stretched over a lattice frame; the Mongol nomads dismantle and re-erect their gers as they move with their herds.) Przhevalsky’s Cossacks were little used to camels and many animals were to die during the expedition. The camels were willing: they would eat leather, straw, even dried meat—the bird carcases Pyltsov was preparing. But Przhevalsky found their sensitivity sheer cowardice. When a camel saw a pile of bones in the desert it would bolt in fright.
Przhevalsky’s time was often taken up sharing the dirty work with the Cossacks. Loading the camels, staking them out for the night, each attached by a rope to its wooded burunduk (a stick through the nostrils) on a common line, and gathering argal (dried dung) for a fire all took time which could have been spent on more valuable scientific work. The barometer had broken on the journey across Siberia and Przhevalsky had to measure altitude by comparing the temperatures at which water boiled. Temperature and humidity were recorded four times daily; everything visible was mapped, as well as the more plausible information from the local Mongols. This forced the party to move always during the daytime, whatever the conditions, and the camels and men suffered accordingly.
Spring came, after a fashion. In May, the brackish lake water still froze an inch deep at night; the grass was blackened with fire—the gales brought dust and salt, but not rain. Yet the camels began to moult and by the time Przhevalsky reached the outskirts of Kalgan he managed to find thirty species of plant in bloom. In Kalgan the new Cossacks, one Buryat and one Russian, were waiting. They were to do as much of the manual work as possible and the Buryat was to be an interpreter, at least with the Mongols. But neither proved satisfactory. The Russian was homesick and the Buryat could not understand very much of the dialect of the southern Mongols. The next few months were to be among the toughest that Przhevalsky ever underwent.
In Przhevalsky’s eyes the real expedition was now beginning. On 3/15 May 1871, the last letters were posted in Kalgan and, with an extra camel, the party set off on the track that led west to the ancient Mongol town of Kuku Khoto (Hu-ho-hao-t’e) and the Yellow River, which Przhevalsky intended to cross at Pao-t’ou to reach the Ordos Plateau. Soon they met up with a Belgian missionary and with him went a little way south to a village. Here they met Sanda Jembu, who had guided Huc and Gabet to Tibet in 1844. He was now old and refused to accompany Przhevalsky as a guide. But the missionaries found another Christian Mongol who agreed to act as guide and as a Chinese-Mongol interpreter. The very first night the ‘guide’ ran off, taking with him a revolver and a knife. For two weeks Przhevalsky was neurotically suspicious of the population: everyone in the party had to take two hours’ guard duty each night, until they left the Kuku Khoto road for wilder country to the north and felt safer. Here, in the foothills of the Yin Shan, Przhevalsky could relax and hunt the wild mountain sheep. The local Mongols were unarmed, and the wild sheep were unafraid of man and so curious that, even when Przhevalsky fired, they stopped to see what had happened. But so thick-skinned and thick-boned were they, that it took some time before Przhevalsky could kill two elderly females. Here, in June, at the same latitude as Naples, there were still morning frosts and even two blizzards; few birds sang.
Moving ever westwards, Przhevalsky passed into the country of the Öröd Mongols. At night he was forced to pitch his tent among their gers, for they marked the only watering places. The water was horrible; he wrote to Fateyev, ‘Take a glass of pure water, put in a teaspoonful of mud, a pinch of salt, lime for colour and goose droppings for smell …’ The Mongols were less hostile than the Chinese, but just as curious. Przhevalsky had decided to pretend he was a trader; he had brought needles and soap with him which he sold at anything from five to eighteen times what he had paid for them. But he could not satisfy the demand for bronze idols or bear fat and, despite the skills of his Buryat Cossack, his disguise was so unconvincing that he had to abandon it. It was easier to claim that he was an official on a tour of inspection and discuss cattle, medicine and religion with the Öröd. Przhevalsky’s herbarium persuaded the Mongols that he was a doctor, a reputation he spread far and wide by curing several visitors with doses of quinine. The Mongols’ religious preoccupations convinced many of them that Przhevalsky’s equipment and bearing were those of a magician. For a while his path westwards was smoothed by fame of superhuman faculties.
But reaching the Yellow River, Przhevalsky was among hostile Chinese again. He then moved off into the Yin Shan, which at this point approaches the river. The gullies of the mountains, which the Mongols called the Muni Ula, were sparsely covered with pines and alders, and even wild apricot. The rains on the north side produced streams which dived underground, leaving shrubs to mark their dry beds. Higher up were alpine meadows from which Przhevalsky could see the Huang Ho and the Ordos plain beyond. The meadows were broken by rocky crags and chasms, over which Przhevalsky and Pyltsov clambered, risking their lives as they shot at the gazelles and deer. Often the bodies of the wounded and dead animals fell into impenetrable abysses. But the solitude of the Muni Ula soothed Przhevalsky’s soul; July brought with it a spurt of growth and the meadows were dotted with flowers.
After a time the local Mongols reconciled themselves to the fact that Przhevalsky would stay; they sold him milk and butter. Soon relations were so friendly that Przhevalsky managed to hire a Chinese-speaking guide, Jüljig, to take the party down to the Yellow River again, to the ferry and westwards over the Ordos.
Przhevalsky crossed the Muni Ula, stopped at the town of Pao-t’ou for rice and groats and, after several interviews with the Chinese general in command and the gift of a watch, was billeted in a merchant’s house. The raucous clamour of Chinese markets contrasted with the silence of the Muni Ula. Instead of fragrant apricot blossom, Przhevalsky breathed the odours of cooking oil, charcoal, mud, sweat and dung. Pao-t’ou was full of soldiers, some of them armed with European rifles, others with bamboo pikes, part of the army that had driven most of the Tungans out of the middle Huang Ho; to Przhevalsky they seemed nothing but a rabble of opium addicts. Eventually, after reciprocal gifts, Przhevalsky retrieved his passport and the expedition was embarked on the rope ferry.
Przhevalsky was preceded in the Ordos, a plateau surrounded by the Huang Ho on the west, north and east, and cut off by the Great Wall in the south, by no less an explorer than Père Armand David on the latter’s first botanical journey of 1867. Huc and Gabet had also crossed the Ordos. Przhevalsky preferred to keep near the river bank, rather than cut across diagonally, on his way west to Teng-k’ou. Secretly, he measured the flow of the river and mapped his route. There were no towns or villages for miles. The natural aridity and the massacres by the Tungans had reduced the populations to small groups of Mongols who lived off the liquorice roots they dug up, or of Chinese, who farmed plots of opium poppies concealed in the reeds by the river. Przhevalsky tried a pipe of opium but felt no effect. Feral cattle, which had survived the death of their herdsmen, grazed the desert shrubs warily. Przhevalsky shot four wild bulls and the party had at least meat in plenty.
A few days west of the ferry the baking-hot ground gave way to a lake, Tsaidamyn Nor, teeming with duck, and fed by a stream beside which the camels could graze. Here they stopped for ten days before passing on into the belt of sand that covered much of the northern Ordos and the land northwest of the river. In the sand he rediscovered a plant of the Cruciferae family, Pugionum cornutum, previously known to science only by a twig in London and a twig in S
tuttgart. He discovered two species of carp in the river which was also inhabited by turtles, sacred to the Mongols for the hieroglyphic-like markings on their shells. The Cossacks were so terrified of them that they refused to bathe.
It rained frequently on the Ordos, but the heat evaporated the water and the only outcome was a plague of mosquitoes and gnats which tormented the camels. Because of the insects, Przhevalsky let Jüljig share the expedition’s tent at night. Jüljig turned out to be covered with syphilitic sores; six weeks’ proximity to him was a horrible trial to Przhevalsky. To avoid the heat and the insects, the party rose before dawn, but even so, sweat and thirst soon silenced the normally songful Cossacks and depressed even the ever-cheerful Faust. The party would rest at the first well they encountered in the afternoon, before working on the results of the day and setting up camp. The camels had to be watered, dung gathered for a fire, a sheep had to be bought or hare and grouse shot for the evening’s soup. They ate with their fingers out of wooden bowls. The Cossacks and Jüljig took turns to graze the livestock.
As they neared the ferry point for Teng-k’ou on the west bank of the Huang Ho, Jüljig disgraced himself. He fell asleep under a bush, while Mikhail Pyltsov’s horse grazed on the bank. The bank caved in and the horse drowned. Pyltsov had to ride on one of the camels, and Jüljig was told to leave the party at Teng-k’ou.
Chinese soldiers in Teng-k’ou spotted the expedition on the opposite bank. They rowed across and took back Jüljig with Przhevalsky’s passport for the commander to inspect. Jüljig spoke good Chinese and presently the soldiers returned to pick up Przhevalsky, who had changed into more formal clothes, and who took with him his Buryat Cossack, his dog Faust and his double-barrelled Lancaster. Only a few civilian inhabitants and one clay wall were left in Teng-k’ou after the rebellion. Przhevalsky was made to wait in a house hung with bunches of garlic. Then he had to submit to a bullying interrogation by the commander of Teng-k’ou who became friendly only when he demonstrated his marksmanship in competition with the commander and his ancient English gun. In the confusion, however, Faust was lost and it was with great relief that on returning to his camp on the other bank of the Huang Ho Przhevalsky saw that Faust had swum back on his own. After many demands from the commander, who tried to appropriate as many as he could of Przhevalsky’s weapons, the soldiers agreed to ferry the entire expedition over to Teng-k’ou, dragging the camels by ropes across the quarter-mile-wide river.
The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia Page 7