Rayfield The Dream of Lhasa

The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839-1888), Explorer of Central Asia
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ISBN: 978-0-571-30044-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 242 Seiten

The great Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839-1888) made an indelible contribution to the world's atlases, and its store of zoological and botanical knowledge, as a consequence of his four arduous and dangerous expeditions through the Central Asia of Western Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan and Northern Tibet. Donald Rayfield's biography of Przhevalsky - first published in 1976 and drawing on the exporer's diaries, letters, and published works - tells the thrilling story of the explorer's groundbreaking journeys, undertaken in an age of extreme political sensitivity between Russia, China and Britain. A rich portrait emerges of an extraordinary Byronic character who was ill-suited to civilisation but much at home with the loneliness and hardship of the nomadic life. A rigorous army officer and a phenomenal shot, gifted also with a photographic memory, Przhevalsky became one of the most widely-admired men in Russia, and Rayfield adroitly explores the grounds of his reputation.

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London. In addition to his definitive biography of Chekhov (reissued in Faber Finds), his books include The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839-88), Explorer of Central Asia and Stalin and His Hangmen. His 'superb new translation' (William Boyd - Guardian) of Gogol's Dead Souls was published in 2008.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rayfield, Donald

Leseproben

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 expansion 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.

In 1858 the Chinese were being threatened by an Anglo-French alliance; they dared not antagonize Russia as well. At Aigun they ceded the left bank of the Amur as far as the Ussuri, and from there both banks to the sea. The territory between the Ussuri and the sea was to be a condominium. Muravyov quickly established a town, Blagoveshchensk—‘Good Tidings’—on the middle Amur and built up the Cossack population of the new province to 20,000. Political and criminal exiles, retired sailors and, finally, the efficient German Mennonite farmers from the Volga were all induced or forced to settle there.

But by June 1859 the Chinese had checked the Anglo-French menace. They felt strong enough to repudiate the ‘unequal’ treaty of Aigun; China and Russia threatened each other with war. The advances of the Taiping rebels and a renewed attack by the English and the French on Peking and Shanghai turned the tables once more. In November 1860 Russia forced the disarrayed Chinese to sign a treaty which surrendered the Amur, the right bank of the Ussuri, half of Lake Hanka (Hingku), the enormous territory between the Ussuri and the sea, and the Chinese half of the island of Sakhalin. Russia had now cut Manchuria off from the sea, she had a land border with Korea and, on the island of Sakhalin, with Japan. She had relatively ice-free Pacific harbours, as well as 1,000 miles of navigable river from the sea to the edge of Transbaykalia. Before the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the turn of the century, the Amur was the main link between the Russian Far East and the rest of the Empire; even today no proper road connects the two except through China. Russia’s Amur possessions virtually encircled Manchuria, giving her a stranglehold on northern China that she could not resist tightening. The Amur was to give eastern Siberia grain and meat, as well as adding to Siberia’s wealth of fur and minerals. Muravyov quickly brought in shipping, telegraph lines and colonists, before resigning, when St Petersburg would not give him still looser a rein, and leaving his empire to a lesser breed of officials whose inadequacies were to embitter Przhevalsky.

*

As Przhevalsky’s expedition followed the Amur south-east, the river broadened to a quarter of a mile wide and, breaking through the mountains that divide Mongolia from Manchuria, Przhevalsky found himself in the odd luxuriance of vegetation that marks the Ussuri region off from both the Siberian taiga and the Manchurian steppes. Cossack posts alternated with the birch-bark huts (yurts) of the Orochon (or Udeghe) fishermen. Paeonies and lilies grew in the meadows. At Blagoveshchensk Przhevalsky was lucky to catch another steamer going the whole length of the Amur. By the beginning of July he was in the village of Khabarovka where the Amur becomes wholly Russian, at the confluence of the Ussuri.

Few European explorers had preceded Przhevalsky on the Ussuri. The first had been three Jesuit fathers, Régis, Jartoux and Fridel in 1709, who were mapping the Chinese empire for the Emperor K’ang Hsi. Their maps were available to the Russians through various sources, chiefly the works of Father Iakinf (Bichurin), the greatest scholar of the Russian Clerical Mission in Peking in the first half of the nineteenth century. But one-and-a-half centuries elapsed before Muravyov’s expeditions sent Russian explorers up the Ussuri: the most notable being Maksimovich, of St Petersburg’s Botanical Gardens, who was to analyse and describe nearly all Przhevalsky’s botanical collections.

In Khabarovka...