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

by Donald Rayfield

  Spring 1883 brought him back to Sloboda. The foundations for his new house were laid and the timber for its walls was being hewn. But the distillery was still working and Przhevalsky still felt unhappy: ‘There’s not much to console one in our life. Ordinary people are completely debauched, drunkenness and crime are the normal state of morality, honest and sobriety are rare exceptions.’ He renewed his attack on the distillery, from which he had rescued Kozlov. He told Pashetkin that his lease would be terminated. Then fate played into his hands. A neighbouring landowner, Porubin, called and complained that Pashetkin had run off with his wife. Przhevalsky, with that thunderous arrogance which either bewitched or enraged its victims, summoned Pashetkin to the house and told him not to set foot there again. Pashetkin had little choice but to leave the district with his mistress; in 1887 he was to buy an estate some miles away and remove both the distillery and Porubin’s wife there. Sloboda was purged of drink and adultery.

  The frantic preparations that summer were interrupted only by the breach with Eklon and a short visit to Moscow for the coronation of Aleksander III. Here Przhevalsky met the future Nicholas II again. The Tsarevich gave him a special lightweight aluminium telescope. On 9/21 August 1883, Przhevalsky, Roborovsky and the newly enlisted officer cadet Pyotr Kozlov left Moscow with Abdul, Dondok Irinchinov and some hefty grenadiers to join the Cossacks waiting for them in Kyakhta. The Russian railway system had at last crossed the Urals: it took them to Yekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk) from where fast troikas and river boats, towing barges laden with convicts and exiles, brought them to Tomsk. More horses brought them across the atrocious roads of eastern Siberia to Kyakhta by early October. At Kyakhta there was a letter for Przhevalsky from Nicholas’s tutor. The future Tsar had sent his photograph to travel with the expedition and asked for personal reports from Przhevalsky as the journey progressed. ‘Don’t give any thought to editing your letters; his Highness will be interested in all news written or even scratched by your hand.’

  The most strange, glowing sunsets lit up the Mongolian steppes each night. Far away in the Pacific the island of Krakatoa had erupted and its volcanic flares and dust coloured the arid Gobi skies. It was, though Przhevalsky could not know it, his last departure across the Russian frontier. The journey was to encompass a strange succession of reunions with men he had met in his first, second and third Central Asian travels; it was to complete the circle of his explorations.

  Przhevalsky’s first aim was to do what had last been attempted by Kublai Khan’s officers in 1280: to discover the source of the Huang Ho. A long trek across territory already familiar from the first and third journeys lay ahead. But only five of the twenty-one men in the expedition were old hands; a few weeks’ shooting practice in Kyakhta and the nine days’ trek to Urga were all the training the other sixteen received. One of them, Mikhail Protopopov, was a sixteen-year-old boy from the border town of Troitskosavsk, to whom Przhevalsky took a fancy and who was to help Roborovsky with photography.

  Fifty-six fine camels and thirty sheep were waiting for them in Urga. Przhevalsky cast a longing look at the sacred forested hill, full of game, across the river from the city, and then set off into the Gobi. He read out a solemn order to his men. It began: ‘The Emperor and all Russia, in fact the whole civilized world, is looking at us with trust and hope. Let us not spare strength, health or even our lives …’ The real expedition had begun; they spent the first night camped in the Russian consulate’s hay meadows, where Przhevalsky gazed at the last trees he would see until he reached Kansu.

  The camels and horses were divided into six echelons. Przhevalsky rode in front with Teleshov and the Mongol guide for the day. Dondok led the first echelon, while Kozlov rode in the middle and Roborovsky in the rear with the sheep, who dwindled day by day, only the lead ram being exempt from spit and soup-cauldron. Two Kyakhta dogs loped behind. It was bitterly cold. All over Asia winter had set in early and cruelly; the Russians, the Mongols believed, had brought a new climate with them. On many nights, even in November, the mercury froze solid. But the cover of snow petered out in the arid Gobi and the skies were clear. The convoy moved from sunrise to sunset in the short days, along a route now quite busy with caravans of rice from Ningsia Hui and pilgrims from Kansu. Przhevalsky still took the precaution of employing guides; familiarity had reconciled him to the defects of the Mongol. Now, he reflected, the ‘true son of the desert’ was superior to the physical degenerates of Europe, for here in the Gobi the forces of natural selection operated unhindered by medicine. But for all his Darwinism he still held that there was a universal law by which the ‘morally worse’ dominate every society.

  The journey was uneventful until they reached the present-day frontier of Mongolia and China, the Hörh Ula. Snowstorms buried the rocks two feet deep. An intermittent northerly gale made the cold terrible. Two horses were so weak from starvation that they had to be abandoned. Each evening brought eery sunsets that altered from a whitish to a blood-red glow.

  By the New Year of 1884 they were in the sand dunes of the A-la Shan. They crossed a new caravan route from Teng-k’ou to Mongolia and, two days from their first stop, Ting-yüan-ying, were intercepted by a messenger from the prince and his two brothers. The next day Przhevalsky was stopped by a drunken old man; it turned out to be a certain Myrgyn-bulyt, who had guided him in his first hunting expedition in the A-la Shan fourteen years ago. Ting-yüan-ying was full of memories: it was Przhevalsky’s fifth visit. The second brother, the abbot, offered him champagne from Tientsin; the brothers had discovered alcohol and the prince drank heavily. Other things had changed. The lama Sorji had died on a journey to Peking; Mukdoi, one of Przhevalsky’s guides from Ting-yüan-ying to Mongolia in 1880, had hanged himself to forestall arrest. Worst, there was a permanent European resident, Herr Gresel, who was buying tons of fine Mongol camel hair to export to Tientsin and England. Przhevalsky bought some more camels and a ton of cereals. He ventured out hunting in the A-la Shan, but had little sport. Chinese lumberjacks were felling the trees and the hunt ended in fiasco when Przhevalsky’s men stalked and fired at a tame yak, mistaking it for a wild sheep.

  The wet summer of 1883 had transformed the desert between Ting-yüan-ying and Kansu into pastureland. Pilgrims to the Tangut monasteries of the Ta-t’ung had made a well-worn track. There were crayfish in the pools; by the end of January the temperature began to climb above zero. At Sogtu-khüre the expedition discovered a new species of hedge-sparrow, Prunella kozlovi, named in honour of young Pyotr Kozlov. Here, too, was the stimulus for Kozlov’s later career as an archaeologist: the local Mongols talked of treasures unearthed when new wells were sunk. Przhevalsky had resigned himself to taking geological samples, but archaeology, like history, bored him. He stopped once, for four days, to take an accurate astronomical bearing and to shoot a few black-tailed gazelles. One thing went wrong: his Mongol guide went to some nearby gers to celebrate the Chinese New Year and never came back. He had to find his own way through the Great Wall into Kansu.

  The mountains were more and more densely settled as memories of rebellion and war faded. But the lamasery of Chörtentang was for Przhevalsky still the ‘most enchanting spot in Central Asia’; he camped opposite it on the banks of the frozen Ta-t’ung Ho. Five days in the mountains had made him and Roborovsky ‘as happy as children’. They waded through the snowdrifts, shooting redstarts and thrushes, while the camels and horses grazed on the pastures below. Roborovsky went out after the eared pheasant; he wandered into a mountain cave to find not a bird but a Buddhist hermit who abused him for disturbing the woods with his gun and then took off his sandal and shook the dust in the Russian’s face.

  The lamas of Chörtentang, however, permitted Przhevalsky to take the lives of the animals in their woods. He organized Cossacks into lines of beaters and they came home with bags of foxes, small deer and birds. Teleshov shot eleven rare Semun pheasants (Ithaginis sinensis). Tangut hunters came to the camp and sold Przhevalsky skins of the elusive cats of the m
ountains, such as the snow-leopard, which they shot with the aid of lures and ambushes. They sold the Russians a yak for meat, and Chinese peasants in the forest clearings sold eggs and buns.

  But damp forests were bad for the camels; they were fed straw and salt but still lost weight. Spring came late here and there were no flora or insects to collect. Abdul and a Cossack were sent down to Hsi-ning to ask General Ling for guides to the sources of the Huang Ho and the main expedition had to wait for them to return. Przhevalsky stayed at another familiar haunt, the lamasery of Choibseng; he had to sprinkle the ice with earth to get his camels there. Choibseng had a new abbot, but Przhevalsky was among friends. He met his once wild Tangut guide, the sports-loving Randzemba, of 1872, now a staid cleric. He met Jigjit, his Mongol guide. An abbot from a nearby lamasery came to look at him. But Przhevalsky could still find no real point of contact. Buddhism repelled him. He watched a religious procession walk past a pack of dogs that were tearing at the body of a dead child and he saw only hypocrisy and cant in the Buddhist’s sublime scorn for the dignity of human flesh.

  Abdul and the Cossack brought back unexpectedly affable greetings from General Ling and letters from Peking. The general said he had no guides to the sources of the Huang Ho; but he did give Przhevalsky two Tangut-speaking interpreters and sent what he must have known would exasperate him—an escort of thirty Chinese soldiers. With this unwelcome company, Przhevalsky set off on the muddy tracks of an area now thickly populated with pacified Tungans. Mud often stranded them: ‘… struggling for about two hours to get up a hill, we were forced to return to the camp we had left. Here, as always after we left, the Chinese, dogs, crows and kites were gathering various leftovers. Seeing us coming back, all this company scattered for cover.’

  They moved westwards into still-preserved forests and the going became easier. Przhevalsky thought the Tungans distinctly pro-Russian; so, perhaps, did the Chinese escort, for they started to maraud in the Tungan villages. This gave Przhevalsky the pretext he needed. He threatened to open fire on the Chinese soldiers and, hitherto impervious to his arguments, they left him. But this was not Przhevalsky’s last contact with the Chinese, for he was now leaving the cultivated zone and had to stock up on grain for the year ahead; Roborovsky, Abdul and some Cossacks rode down the mountains to buy supplies in Donker. The main party, meanwhile, moved up into the alpine meadows to graze the camels and in early April found the first flower of the journey, a gentian, g.squarrosa. The supplies bought in Donker went straight to Tsaidam on thirty-four hired camels under the supervision of a Cossack and one of the Hsi-ning interpreters; Dzun-dzasak in southern Tsaidam was to be the first base. The expedition followed the quieter, more devious route around the north shore of Kuku Nor. Five camels fell victims to the damp. The ground around Kuku Nor had been invaded by marmots and mole-rats; the soil over their burrows collapsed under the camels’ hooves and men were thrown from their horses. Often there was a burrow every other square yard—a feast for the bears, wolves and badgers that came to dig up the marmots and mole-rats.

  Kuku Nor was inhospitable. Dust and sand storms blew. The ice stayed unbroken three weeks longer than in 1873. The Tangut herdsmen, who had expelled most of the Mongols, shunned Przhevalsky and drove their great herds of yak, haynak (yak-cow cross, or dzo) and sheep away to safety. At Easter snow fell for five days and the expedition had to unpack winter clothes. They celebrated not with eggs but with cognac and preserves and a bouillabaisse made from Kuku Nor carp, Schizopygopsis przewalskii. On Easter Monday they hunted the eighteen species of bird that had so far arrived on the lake. They then left for Dulan Kit, the capital of the Kuku Nor Mongols. More camels were abandoned to the care of local nomads. At Dulan Kit the chief minister, or tosolakchi, remembered Przhevalsky and enabled him to move on by hiring him another twenty-three camels to take him to Tsaidam. Dondok and a Cossack rode ahead to Kurlyk, whose beise Przhevalsky had used so cavalierly in 1879, to buy more camels. Through dust and westerly gales, skirting the now thawed bogs of Tsaidam, Przhevalsky made his way to Dzun-dzasak, where he unloaded his animals and rested his men. The chieftain, like his neighbour in Barun-dzasak, ruled over only thirty households and could not offer any resistance: the Russians took over two rooms of his kherem (clay fort) as a storehouse and established the first base for a expedition into unexplored Tibet.

  The sources of the Huang Ho were reputed to lie little more than 100 miles away; but unexplored ranges, the Burkhan Budda and Shuga, barred the approaches. Przhevalsky prepared for several months away from base, leaving Dondok with six Cossacks to guard the stores. They were to take the camels into the Burkhan Budda foothills when summer brought plagues of insects to Tsaidam. The Cossacks were issued seeds to grow vegetables, and books to learn reading and writing and alleviate the tedium. The other fourteen men, with a guide from Tsaidam and one of General Ling’s interpreters, set off with twenty-nine camels, fifteen horses and a flock of sheep, carrying all the food and munitions they could, for the only inhabitants of the region they hoped to penetrate were predatory Ngoloks, a nomadic tribe of the Tibetan Khampa.

  8

  Conflicts and Conquests

  In mid-May 1884 Przhevalsky was climbing to 16,000 feet on his way to the Huang Ho. Leaving Tsaidam, he discovered an unrecorded ‘banner’ (khoshun) of Mongols in the south-east corner of the depression. The 300 gers of the Shan khoshun, thus the third largest group in Tsaidam, were apparently ruled by the Panchen Lama from southern Tibet. In the mountains, however, there was nothing but a few herds of wild yak and the odd vulture soaring over barren, ice- and snow-covered peaks. A few irises, dandelions or primulas grew around the watercourses. Then, getting used to the headaches and nausea brought on by the altitude, the expedition descended into a closed valley and climbed the next range in the double barrier that walls off Tibet from Tsaidam, before coming down to the plateau in which the Huang Ho, like the Yangtse Kiang, has its source. There was no track, only a slope of porous clay, undermined by marmots, down which horses stumbled into a half-frozen marsh.

  But once they were down in the rich, boggy salt-marsh—the Odon Tala, or ‘Starry Sea’—where springs bubbled up like stars through the bog, such countless herds of kulan (wild ass), yak and antelope appeared that Przhevalsky had to limit hunting and conserve ammunition. The animals were in moult and usable only as meat. Przhevalsky was satisfied that he had found what he sought: the springs that fed the two lakes from which the Huang Ho flows. He carefully measured the latitude by the Pole Star, but cloud and dust storms obscured the sun and he had to determine the longitude from his log.

  The Mongols and Tangut had, of course, always known of the sources of the Huang Ho. An obo marked the hill that overlooked the springs and every year many white animals would be brought from Hsi-ning and sacrificed to placate the spirits of the river on which so many millions of Chinese peasants depended. Przhevalsky took Roborovsky up the hill, memorizing the features of the ‘Starry Sea’ beneath them, with its pools and streams teeming with fish. The next day Przhevalsky set off with Teleshov and another Cossack to find access to the nearest of the lakes, Jaring Nor (Cha-ling Hu). After ten miles they hobbled the horses and settled for the day. Some bears approached; Przhevalsky and Teleshov grabbed their guns and rushed out, killing and skinning three fine bears. Retribution swiftly followed the killing of an animal sacred to Mongols and Tangut. That night it thundered and snowed. Przhevalsky awoke buried in snow, his Cossack sentries were frozen numb. The horses were distressed. They had to give up reconnaissance and stumble for five hours against a north-westerly blizzard over snow-covered burrows and bogs to camp. Their eyes ached from the dazzle for days to come. It was June at the latitude of Tunis: the camels were starving and the wild gazelles so crippled by the jagged ice that had formed that the wolves feasted. Birds dropped dead from the sky.

  Przhevalsky decided to leave and go south across the hills to the basin of the Yangtse. It was heavy going across bog, yak wallows and marmot burrows. Few birds p
ut up with the weather: the black-necked crane was sitting on eggs laid on wet grass in twenty-three degrees of frost. The flora, even in June, was limited to a few iris, spurge and clumps of Przewalskia tangutica. Ice cut the camels’ hooves and encased the yak-cropped reeds; some camels were too weak to go on. Men had skin ailments and fevers which Przhevalsky treated with carbolic acid and quinine. Luckily the guide had a rough idea of the way. Through the damp, rarefied air, normally below freezing, they crept over a pass at nearly 15,000 feet and, after some trial and error, came down to the Yangtse Kiang, known here by its Tibetan name, Do Chu. The sun shone as weakly as the moon through the dusty atmosphere; a few yak roamed the hills, quite safe from the tired and depressed Cossacks’ guns.

  For the first time Przhevalsky had penetrated the rain-sodden chasms and ridges of Tibet’s eastern zone, the birthplace of so many major rivers of east and south-east Asia. The flora was richer: Chinese, Tibetan and Himalayan; the climate was worse, and the wooded mountains sheltered only a few musk deer. There were new birds, such as the Sifan partridge, but they were hard to spot in the forests. A few hundred Khampa tribesmen lived here, who guided the expedition the last few miles to the river, but refused to answer questions and warned the Russians to guard against attack, though they sold them horses, sheep and yak meat. Przhevalsky was lucky in his Chinese interpreter who had spent nine years as a boy in Tibetan captivity and spoke the language well. But no sooner had the expedition camped by the Do Chu and begun to take bearings from a rock, than a bullet struck the sand. Khampa and Russians exchanged fire. Przhevalsky moved camp to more open ground, but stayed a week to collect plants. The Tibetans’ tents vanished from the opposite bank. A few days later a lama came from a nearby temple to apologize for the shots, but Przhevalsky remained wary. More lamas appeared and offered him a boat to ferry the expedition across the river. But camels could not be dragged over a river so deep and fast, and the banks were so precipitous that they could not move along them to find a better crossing point. Przhevalsky concluded that he could not risk so much for a march on Lhasa, over 400 miles to the south-west. Had Lhasa lost its appeal or was he afraid that his dream might turn out to be just another dirty Asiatic city? He would turn back to the Huang Ho and survey its two lakes instead.