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

by Donald Rayfield

  Fortunately for Przhevalsky, a Mongol official befriended him. The Mongol gave him a Moslem who proved an efficient guide across the A-la Shan desert that lay ahead; he also interceded with the Teng-k’ou commander. In the end, Przhevalsky retrieved all but a few trifles from the mandarin’s ‘customs inspection’ and even managed to sell two pistols, a revolver and a dagger for fifty liang. But it was a near thing; the commander had threatened to behead him should he leave without express permission.

  As Przhevalsky set off across the burning sands of A-la Shan on the 120-mile journey to Ting-yüan-ying, he swore he would skirt round Chinese towns in future. He was lucky in his guide; the wind-blown sands of the A-la Shan had obliterated the tracks. Only every twenty or thirty miles was there a well, with a cluster of gers belonging to the Öröd Mongols and functioning as a rudimentary postal station. The only food was the sulkhir (Agriophyllum gobicum), a grass that gave fodder to the camels and whose seeds the Öröd Mongols gathered and ground into a nutritious flour which they stirred into their tea. There was little life: an occasional khara-sulta, or black-tailed gazelle, darted across the route; gerbils squeaked an alarm from their holes, while desert jays flew about in search of lizards. One of the lizards, on which the A-la Shan predators depended, turned out to be a new species—Eremias przewalskii. But the sands were hostile; exhausted ducks and starving thrushes lay dying, drop-outs from the migratory flocks already heading south from Mongolia.

  Three officials intercepted the party north of Ting-yüan-ying. They asked if the party was composed of missionaries and, when the reply was in the negative, welcomed them to the town. Everything outside the clay fortifications of Ting-yüan-ying had burnt down, but within the walls of the capital of the 5,000 Mongols of A-la Shan the prince’s palace and park survived intact. Here Przhevalsky was shown unwonted friendliness. The prince, a feudal vassal and a relative by marriage of the emperor, was withdrawn; his name, as was the custom of Mongol princes, was secret, he was a widower and had taken to opium. But the two younger of his three sons and his prime minister, the lama Baldyn Sorji, were more forthcoming. The second son was, in principle, an abbot lama and a reincarnation of a minor godhead. But he much preferred hunting to other rituals and was the master of a two-hundred-strong fox-hunt of mounted lamas. He had even organized a small band of lama-warriors to repel Tungan attacks. He bought a gun from Przhevalsky and together they went shooting, the abbot driving away his worshippers who were disturbing the pheasants. Przhevalsky equally liked Siya, the third son, who was still in his teens, but just as keen a sportsman. The A-la Shan prince billeted the expedition on a Chinese hotel-keeper; crowds of visitors tore holes in the paper windows to gaze at the subjects of the ‘white Khan’, as the Russian tsar was known to the Mongols. The lama Sorji had actually been in Kyakhta once and was predisposed towards Russians; thanks to him, the prince sent daily gifts of melons, apples and pears to the fruit-starved Przhevalsky and Pyltsov. Przhevalsky returned their hospitality by giving the prince the barometer that had broken in Siberia, and binoculars and hunting accoutrements to his sons. Then Przhevalsky sold off some of the goods he had bought in Peking, making a sevenfold profit and conceiving ideas for Russian trade (which were to materialize in years to come) with the Mongols of China.

  Sorji gave Przhevalsky a fund of information on the pilgrimage routes from Urga through A-la Shan to Tibet that had been in use until the Tungans cut the tracks and poisoned the wells. He talked of the twelfth Dalai Lama, Prinlai, who was born, or rather reborn, in the Ili Valley on the Russian border (and who was to be poisoned by the lamas, perhaps at Chinese instigation, in 1875 at the age of nineteen). Sorji told Przhevalsky of the Tibetan’s dream of Shambalyn, a land of milk and honey to the north to which they would migrate in 450 years’ time. Every detail encouraged Przhevalsky’s dream of Lhasa. Lhasa was the Buddhists’ Rome, the Dalai Lama its Pope. Closed to all except Tibetans, Mongols and other Buddhist peoples, the capital of the last completely unexplored land in Asia, to a man of Przhevalsky’s temperament it had the magnetism of Mecca and the poetry of Eldorado. It was as much an irrational symbol of the unattainable, as a political or geographical goal.

  After a proper interval, the prince received Przhevalsky formally. He asked if Przhevalsky could bring him a camera and then if it were true that the camera worked with a fluid extracted from children’s eyeballs. (Twenty-three Europeans had been murdered in Tientsin in July 1870 on suspicion of killing children for their eyeballs.) The prince gave Przhevalsky permission to hunt in his reserve, the A-la Shan mountains that separated the Huang Ho from the deserts; he arranged for Sorji to look after Przhevalsky’s camels and one of the Cossacks who was immobile with homesickness.

  The first snow was falling in September in the A-la Shan mountains. Isolated by desert, a narrow ridge of schists, limestone and gneiss, only seventeen miles wide, the mountains gave Przhevalsky all the solitude he craved. Here he could shoot the kuku-yamaan (the blue goat or bharal), and the deer reserved for the prince. It rained frequently, but the mountains were too narrow to hold the water in a stream or in pools; consequently there were few species of flora and fauna to collect. But the kuku-yamaan were plentiful on the inaccessible crags. Once Przhevalsky spotted a herd of twelve on a cornice which left them no escape; later, he wrote in a letter:

  I couldn’t hold back with emotion at seeing two big animals flying somersaulting into the terrible depths. But a hunter’s passion overcame the force of impression. I loaded my carbine again and put another two bullets into the kuku-yamaans, who didn’t know what to do with fear. So I fired seven times from one. place, until at last the animals decided to do something desperate: they descended the ridge of the rock and leapt about eighty feet down from the cliff.

  But after these two happy weeks, Przhevalsky returned to Ting-yüan-ying where he realized that having only fifty liang—the price of one good camel—he could now go no farther. He had to return to Peking for more money and supplies. In any case he was ill-equipped for the approaching winter and his passport would take him only as far as Kansu. There were other factors: the Tungans were still ravaging Kansu, 100 miles to the south, and in many areas Chinese hostility to Russians had been inflamed by the events of 1871—Russia had announced that it was taking ‘temporary’ possession of the Ili Valley in southern Dzungaria to restore order. The Ili Valley (or Kulja region) included the two passes which the Chinese army would need to hold if it was ever to crush the Moslems, the Tungan and Uighur rebels of Dzungaria and Sinkiang.

  Selling two rifles to get some new camels and a little silver, Przhevalsky took leave of the abbot, Siya and Sorji, who gave him a Mongol guide. It was now late October and Przhevalsky was in a hurry to be back before winter overtook him. He chose to avoid the settled areas of the Yellow River and to take the mountain route to the north. Misfortunes beset him almost at once. Mikhail Pyltsov fell ill with typhoid. At the spring of Khara Morite, where the track east forked from the Urga caravan route, they halted. For nine days Przhevalsky watched helplessly, until Pyltsov was over the worst and could be propped up, half-conscious, in the saddle again. The party took the northern, Gobi side of the Khara Nariin mountains. Now the first blizzards forced them to stay in their tent. Two camels and a horse were so ill that they were abandoned. After travelling 100 miles Przhevalsky crossed the mountains back to the warmer Huang Ho side. Here there were Chinese villages and encampments of Mongols, who had fled from the Tungan parties and soldier marauders in the Khara Nariin. The landscape was as desolate as the Ordos across the river, but in the grasslands that followed the old channels of the Huang-Ho, Przhevalsky could use Faust to sniff out countless quail and pheasants.

  Another 100 miles brought Przhevalsky to his old route from Kalgan. From here he could dispense with surveying and taking bearings. But he had to suppress his irritation with his Cossacks and the Mongol, who delayed departure each morning by their endless tea-drinking. Now they were climbing away from the river again, on to the Mongo
lian plateau; as the scarlet sun set, an ominous grey-blue belt spread from the east. The cold was deadly. On this deserted route they had to buy camel dung or cut up saddles for fuel. The air froze the fat from the meat they ate into a solid coat on their hands, and the candle burnt so deep that the flame was buried in tallow. In vain they insulated the tent with baggage and Pyltsov snuggled up with Faust under his felt blanket. Everyone slept naked and, having to get up every night to shoot the wild dogs that raided the tent and the wolves that scared the horses, they shivered. One day Pyltsov’s horse bolted and threw him, knocking him unconscious. Some fifty miles north of Kuku Khoto disaster struck near the temple of Shirete Dzuu, where the caravan route to Uliasutai in western Mongolia passed. Przhevalsky’s camels wandered off in search of pasture and vanished, either stolen or swept away by another caravan; no one would help, and for days the Cossacks searched. One sick camel and two lame horses were left. One of the horses froze to death; the camel collapsed a day later, blocking the door of the tent with its carcase. Finally, Przhevalsky exchanged the carcase for hay for the remaining horse and persuaded a Mongol to sell him a stronger animal, on which one Cossack and the Mongol rode off to Kuku Khoto. While Przhevalsky waited, he watched the Chinese searching the Gobi for the carcases of gazelles, stricken by pestilence. He could do nothing; there was not even fuel for a fire to melt ink and write. After seventeen days the Cossack and Mongol returned; they had spent Przhevalsky’s last liangs on some half-lame camels which brought the expedition to the comparative warmth of Kalgan just in time for the Russian New Year of 1872.

  Przhevalsky had lost twelve camels and eleven horses—dead, abandoned, lost or traded in. But he was eager to set off again. From Kalgan he wrote letters full of undiminished energy. ‘Yes,’ he asserted to Fateyev, ‘only here can one appraise the mighty moral force of the European compared with the decrepit nature of the Asiatic.’ He described how he would thrash a Chinese who had misdirected him, or praised the A-la Shan prince’s sons, ‘one is very handsome—almost a European’. From Kalgan he sent off his collected specimens, including some fine sheep and antelope skins. Then he went straight to Peking on his own to talk to Vlangali. Vlangali persuaded Przhevalsky’s backers to pay him and Pyltsov twice as much and gave them an advance. He also pressed the Chinese Ministry into granting Przhevalsky a passport giving him the right to go to Tibet at his own risk and with two native guides. While Vlangali negotiated, Przhevalsky went on to the European treaty port of Tientsin, where he bought 600 roubles’ worth of bric-a-bac to sell at a profit in A-la Shan, and acquired an entire arsenal for the expedition: one Berdan carbine for himself, two Schneider carbines, a seventeen-shot Henry Martini for one Cossack, thirteen revolvers and nearly a quarter of a ton of ammunition, as well as a new aneroid barometer for measuring altitude.

  4

  Invitation to Lhasa

  On his return to Kalgan, Przhevalsky replaced his Cossacks with two new Cossacks from the Russian garrison at Urga. One was Russian, Panfil Chebayev; the other, a Buryat, Dondok Irinchinov, was to accompany him on all his Central Asian travels. He quickly grew to love them. Przhevalsky joined them in daily target practice with the new weapons, until they could put on a demonstration of rapid and accurate fire that compelled the Chinese of Kalgan to gasp with admiration. Despite Faust’s opposition, the expedition took on one more member: Karza, a Mongol dog, who was to take over sentry duty at night. Then, on 5/17 March 1872, with nearly one-and-a-half tons of provisions loaded on nine camels, they set off along their old route on the 600-mile journey straight for A-la Shan.

  By early June Przhevalsky was once more in Ting-yüang-ying, wearing full staff officer’s uniform, with gifts of a revolver, rugs, pistols and picture postcards. It was here that he had an unexpected stroke of luck. A caravan of Tanguts, a nomadic, Tibetan-speaking people inhabiting the wetter areas on the upper Huang Ho and in the Kansu mountains, the Ta-t’ung Shan, were on their way to Kuku Nor, the Blue Lake, which was the one still unexplored region in Przhevalsky’s original programme. The Tanguts were partly traders, partly pilgrims to the lamaseries in the Ta-t’ung Shan and, at first, they seemed overjoyed at the prospect of having Przhevalsky’s armed party to protect them from Tungan attacks. But the A-la Shan prince tried to deter Przhevalsky with threats, promises and deceitful prevarication—in all probability he was answerable to Peking for Przhevalsky’s safety, though Przhevalsky suspected he was waiting for a message from the Chinese authorities in Ning-hsia (Yin-ch’uan) to the south authorizing or forbidding the expedition to go on into an area of military operations.

  Nevertheless, after selling his Tientsin goods and exchanging a carbine for six more camels and 100 liang, Przhevalsky set off with the Tangut caravan. He hung back in the rear so that his observations might pass unnoticed. He dared not take proper bearings, and in any case the Tanguts preferred to rise at midnight and travel in the coolness and the dark. The desert that stretched between Ting-yüan-ying and the mountains of Kansu was horrible. Worst were the Tengri sands, where only dung and skeletons—human and animal—marked the route. Once, after drinking tea, Przhevalsky glanced into the well from which the water had been drawn to see a human corpse rotting at the bottom. The Tungans, of which he had heard so much ever since leaving Urga, when they were threatening central Mongolia, were now a reality. Ruined lamaseries were strewn with decomposing bodies.

  There were more pleasant moments. Przhevalsky had now acquired an almost divine reputation. He collected herbs—he must be a great physician; his guns were supernaturally accurate; his aneroid barometer prophesied rain. People were friendly, sometimes reverent. One of the Tanguts, Randzemba, rode off with Przhevalsky shooting gazelles. He was a wild shot, but he could spot an animal which Przhevalsky could not discern even with binoculars. As the mountains appeared, the caravan passed through the Great Wall into China proper again. At Ta-tsin there were Manchu soldiers who had served on the Amur and spoke Russian; they had even taught the town baker to bake white buns in European style.

  Fortunately, the Tanguts were as anxious as Przhevalsky to avoid the Chinese towns; they feared the soldiers as much as the Tungans, who were even now being ruthlessly hounded out of the capital of Kansu, Hsi-ning, by the Chinese army. The caravan climbed the first of the three ranges that barred Kuku Nor from the Mongolian deserts. Immediately, the moist cool Kansu air supplanted the arid heat of A-la Shan. Now Przhevalsky was in a new world: Kansu was the farthest point north of that remarkable belt of cool, monsoonal mountains between Tibet and China where so many intrepid collectors have discovered so many extraordinary plants—paeonies, rhododendrons, magnolias—to enrich the gardens of Europe and America. Almost all Przhevalsky’s plant discoveries—the mecanopsis and honeysuckle species, Geranium pylzowii, the Tangut daphne—were found in his several periods in Kansu.

  But now was not the time to halt for long; Tungans were active, and Przhevalsky wanted to press on as far as he could into Tibet before winter once again upset his plans. He decided to return for the following spring and summer. Meanwhile, he needed his wits about him. There were human bones everywhere, and the Tanguts were too nervous to light fires. Once they captured a Chinese and, suspecting him to be a Tungan, dragged him along, tied to a camel’s tail. That evening they sharpened a sabre and debated whether or not to execute him. The victim calmly drank tea; Przhevalsky was too sickened to stay, and rode off to hunt feral horses. He returned to find the Chinese pardoned. Later, the caravan saw another camp fire and, when Przhevalsky and seven Tanguts rode out to investigate, they were fired on. It turned out that each party had mistaken the other for Tungans.

  The rains came every day; plants would not dry, gun barrels rusted. When the caravan reached the lamasery of Chörtentang in the mountains above the Ta-t’ung Ho, Przhevalsky decided to shelter. Chörtentang, a safe refuge from Tungan attack, was a traditional resting place where camels were changed for mules, more suitable for the slippery mountain paths. The abbot of the lamasery spoke no Mongol,
being a Tangut, but through two interpreters he talked with Przhevalsky and grew to like him; the abbot was an artist and painted a portrait of Przhevalsky that was still hanging in the lamasery when Przhevalsky’s protégé, the explorer Kozlov, visited Chörtentang in 1900. During these five days, parted from the Tangut caravan who were grateful for his protection, Przhevalsky enjoyed the freedom from constraint.

  He hired mules and donkeys to cross the Ta-t’ung and explore the main range of mountains to the west. Here, in the To-lai Shan, fifty miles from Chörtentang, Przhevalsky found the lamasery of Choibseng to be equally helpful. The lamas let him live in their storehouse, where they kept bronze Buddhas, and here Przhevalsky was able to leave his collections to lighten his load on the journey to Tibet. Choibseng was well fortified and housed 1,000 militiamen, Tangut, Chinese and Manchu, who were supposed to protect the Ta-t’ung against Tungans. The militia were cowardly and frankly welcomed Przhevalsky’s arrival as a sure talisman against attack. There were now no difficulties in hiring Tangut-speaking guides or buying supplies. But, cast in the role of defender, Przhevalsky could feel only contempt for this ‘dishonourable flock of sheep’. He was to write to General Tikhmenev and to Yakov Shishmaryov, consul at Urga, when he returned to Kansu the following year: