The Geographical Society had been the first in 1867 to draw attention to the Tungan rebellion. After the devastations of the Taiping rebels, the damage done by the Tungans, who slaughtered Chinese and Mongol non-Moslems, irreversibly destroyed the irrigation systems that made the oases habitable, depopulated whole provinces, and broke for a long time China’s lines of communication with its western borders, finally rendered China, in the eyes of many Russian ministers, fit only for partition and conquest.
Przhevalsky once more arrived in St Petersburg at a crucial moment. Four ministers determined his future: Baron Osten-Saken, who was both a member of the Academy of Sciences and an important figure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; General Count Litke, who was then vice-president of the Imperial Geographical Society; Aleksandr Vlangali, ambassador to Peking who was now in Petersburg for consultations; and D. A. Milyutin, Minister of War, the most capable and aggressive of the Russian ministers. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Gorchakov was anxious not to antagonize enemies and friends in Europe by any unnecessary expansion of the Russian empire, Milyutin was determined to match the British conquests in Burma and French incursions into Indo-China with similar conquests in Central Asia and the periphery of China. Milyutin had his way; furthermore, he had kept an eye on Przhevalsky over the previous eight years and knew that he was an officer with iron resolve. In the end, Aleksandr Vlangali was persuaded that Przhevalsky had tact as well as strength of mind and could pass through troubled regions of Inner Mongolia without either rousing the authorities to anti-Russian measures or getting himself into serious trouble. Permission, against the better judgement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, was given for an expedition to show the Russian flag and explore the desolate Ordos Plateau and the still unknown ‘Blue Lake’, Kuku Nor, where Chinese, Mongol and Tangut (nomadic Tibetan) populations met. The Geographical Society was to contribute 1,000 roubles a year, the War Ministry another 1,000; Przhevalsky was to find 1,000 a year from his own pocket, while the Botanical Gardens contributed 300. The Russian Embassy in Peking, better equipped with information and negotiators than any other Western embassy, began to lobby the Chinese authorities for the necessary passports.
Przhevalsky’s preparations were simple. He decided to send Yagunov away to complete his education at the Junker college in Warsaw, under the tutelage of Przhevalsky’s faithful friend, Fateyev. Here Yagunov immediately showed the effectiveness of his tutor’s lessons in geography and history—‘the energetic youth’, as Przhevalsky described him in the foreword to his Travels in the Ussuri Region, was top of his class. But now Przhevalsky needed a new companion, He explained to Milyutin that ‘a companion is also indispensable should I personally be doomed not to return’—to safeguard, as well as to help gather, the specimens of plants and animals and the scientific information. The idea of an equal or a civilian specialist as a companion was intolerable. He wrote, ‘It would be desirable for the youth to come out of enthusiasm and not for money … no special literary or gentlemanly breeding is needed.’ A Cossack N.C.O. was more to his liking than another officer. He explained frankly to Fateyev: ‘Anyone who wants to set off with me must know that he will only be a man who carries out what he is asked to; no personal desires or gathering of collections for himself or someone else is allowed. Such despotism is, in my opinion, essential to the success of the undertaking.’
Finally, Fateyev recruited Mikhail Pyltsov, once Przhevalsky’s favourite pupil, now a sub-lieutenant.
Przhevalsky had thrown his playing cards into the Amur as he left Nikolayevsk, declaiming, ‘Goodbye to the Amur and goodbye to Amur habits’, but the money was useful. He ordered a Lancaster rifle, made to his specifications, from London. He wrote from St Petersburg asking his mother to secure an option on two setters, the better of which he would take to China. Then he raised more money by selling his railway shares. Everything was staked on the coming expedition. He told his mother, ‘It’s very bad, very bad about the shares, but I’m not too worried now as the journey to Mongolia is for me the best thing and a good piece of luck. On this expedition, of course, my entire future depends. In St Petersburg it’s unbearably foul: dust, heat, stench.’ But he stayed on through the Petersburg summer until Travels in the Ussuri Region, which he dedicated ‘to my beloved mother’, was ready for the printers. It was published in August 1870 when, at last, Przhevalsky managed to escape to Otradnoye and the Smolensk countryside.
His mother had been told to order lemonade for the expedition. Przhevalsky’s manservant, Ivan Makarov, was set to work making boots, greasing nets with fish fat, and rebuilding the firing range at Otradnoye. Here Przhevalsky practised shooting: ever since his demonstration in the Korean town of Keiko he had given overriding priority to target practice in the preparations for his expeditions. Deadly accuracy with revolver and rifle was to him more of a protection than any passport or official backing. Eventually Pyltsov arrived and, from St Petersburg, the promised money began to come, in paltry dribs and drabs.
In September 1870 Przhevalsky left his tearful mother. The trek across Siberia was bedevilled by knee-deep mud all the way from Tyumen to Irkutsk. At Irkutsk Przhevalsky was issued some of the money promised to him; but at the same time he found himself the centre of a row. Baron Kukel, his protector, was dead. The authorities had read Przhevalsky’s article in the European Herald; they used the journal of the Irkutsk Geographical Society to call Przhevalsky a liar, a slanderer of the administration. They particularly disliked the criticisms in his article (the book had not yet reached Irkutsk) which implied that settlement should be removed from the control of the military authorities and given to the civil administration, so that peasants, not discharged soldiers and Cossacks, could till the soil. He not only accused the military of cruelty, he blamed them for the starvation, the epidemics of intermittent fever and the demoralization of the population. Przhevalsky wrote a letter of refutation to the Irkutsk Geographical Society, who refused to print it. He resigned from the Society and sent his letter to the St Petersburg Gazette. Suddenly, Przhevalsky won support from his chief in Nikolayevsk, General Tikhmenev, who wrote to the same newspaper, confirming that Przhevalsky had written only the truth, and also to the governor-general, Korsakov, to protect Przhevalsky from the consequences of writing to the newspapers, excusing his rashness and his wrath.
Immediately, this row was followed by another. Przhevalsky opened the December 1869 issue of the Voyenny Sbornik (Military Collection) to find an article by Doctor Plaksin of Nikolayevsk on the Ussuri and Amur. Certainly, Plaksin had been sent to the Ussuri for the winter for 1867–8, but most of the content of his article was plagiarized from Przhevalsky’s dissertation. Przhevalsky wrote to Plaksin demanding that he hand over the seventy-two-rouble fee he had been paid. Plaksin eventually agreed, but complained to everyone in Irkutsk of Przhevalsky’s grasping nature. Przhevalsky gave the money to a charity for poor Cossacks, but his stay in Irkutsk was unpleasant. He left for Kyakhta, on the Mongolian border, with a heavy heart. Only General Tikhmenev could be relied on to defend him against intrigues: Tikhmenev wrote, ‘If they take advantage of your three years’ absence … and think of writing anything against you, then they’ll have me to deal with. I’ve promised myself that if they so much as open their mouths again, I’ll squeeze them till the pips squeak.’
Hating the petty intrigues of army life and officialdom, Przhevalsky, Mikhail Pyltsov and a Cossack from a rich Buryat family, not to mention the setter Faust, left the church spires of Kyakhta for the wooded hills of northern Mongolia and the empty Gobi beyond.
3
Two Mongolian Winters
Late autumn is the kindest season in Mongolia. The relentless north-west gales and terrible cold of winter, the treacherous arid spring and the summer heat that bakes the gravel, clay and sand of the Gobi all give way to the still, clear, chilly days of November. Przhevalsky’s expedition covered the 1,000 miles from Kyakhta to Peking over the official trade route which the Russians had been usi
ng throughout the nineteenth century and which had been, since the Tientsin agreement of 1860, organized as a proper post-route, with stations run by the Mongols every twenty miles where horses and camels could be changed. The Russians had the right to a certain number of freight caravans which made the journey in anything from twenty-five to forty days; an express courier, once he had notified the Chinese War Ministry, could ride across in nine days. Most of Russia’s tea was carried over this route. Chinese traders brought it to Kalgan—‘the gateway’—(Chang-chia-k’ou) on the edge of the Mongolian plateau 140 miles north-west of Peking; Russian merchants then organized caravans of freight camels to Siberia. To keep this line open the Russian authorities put a heavy tax on tea from China that arrived by sea at Odessa, so that the slow and expensive land route remained profitable.
At first Przhevalsky saw little of Mongolia. The first 200 miles to Urga (now Ulan Baatar) was covered in a Chinese two-wheeled cart, carrying a wooden box in which the passengers were jolted along, shut off from the outside world. At Urga, however, Przhevalsky found a Mongol caravan leaving for Kalgan and the leisurely pace of the loaded camels left Przhevalsky and his companions free to walk ahead shooting at the gazelles and the buzzards.
Mongolia, when Przhevalsky saw it, was a geographical and ethnological term, not a political entity. Today the Mongols are divided among three states: the million or so Khalkha Mongols form the Mongolian People’s Republic; several million Mongols of the Chakhar and other southern groups live in Inner Mongolia (four provinces, from Jehol to Ningsia Hui, of China), every year more integrated with their Chinese neighbours; various groups live in the Soviet Union—the Buryats in Siberia, the Kalmyks near the mouth of the Volga. The dynamic Mongol state built up by the Genghis Khan had disintegrated by the sixteenth century into a plethora of petty khanates who were gradually brought peaceably or violently under Chinese suzerainty. There was more than one reason to account for the Mongols’ reversion to a peaceful nomadic life. The importation of Yellow Sect Buddhism from Tibet and the foundation of the monastery Erdeni-Dzuu on the site of the ruined capital of Karakorum; the effectiveness of the Ming and Manchu dynasties’ political and administrative methods—methods borrowed from the Mongols themselves—in subduing whole peoples by subverting their rulers; the syphilis, plague and typhus which the Mongols brought home from their conquests and which ravaged every single Mongol family: which is cause and which effect is hard to say. In the 1870s Przhevalsky found the Mongols feckless, talkative, hospitable, inquisitive, but without serious interests beyond those of the nomads.
Urga was really a Chinese military garrison built around a religious community, Bogdo (Holy) or Da (Great) Küren (Monastic Town). Przhevalsky had the advantage of spending four days there in the company of the Russian consul, Yakov Shishmaryov, who knew a good deal about the Mongols and travelled in the west of Mongolia. But the lamaseries of Urga, where the Kutukhtu, the third living divinity in the Buddhist world after the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama of Tibet, resided, made little impression on him. He knew nothing of the works of scholarship—translations of the Buddhist scriptures and of the Tibetan encyclopaedias, thirty-volume dictionaries of the Tibetan, Manchu and Mongolian languages—which the mindless discipline, the untidiness and the filth of the lamas’ community belied. Buddhism to Przhevalsky was a pretext for idleness, a religion that sapped vitality and hindered progress.
There was much in the Mongols that Przhevalsky liked. They had something in common with the Cossacks (many of the Transbaykal Cossacks were of Buryat Mongol blood): they despised peasant labour and the plough, loving cattle and, above all, horses; they liked to travel, to sing and to make love; despite their subservience to Chinese officials and their feudal princes they had a natural equality in their bearing with superiors. Like the Cossacks, they were hospitable and easy in their domestic life. Mongol women and girls, though they had to do all the work of the community, had the spirit and the freedom of Cossack womenfolk. But the Mongol’s personal habits horrified Przhevalsky. Like many nomads in arid countries he had a morbid fear of water: he never washed, he would use dry dung not just as fuel but as a plate for meat, and he would drink tea out of a dish from which he had just eaten raw sheep fat. Nevertheless the Mongols never drank unboiled water—always brewing tea—and each kept to his own personal wooden bowl, so that there was some system of hygiene. The Mongol diet centred on mutton and milk products—fresh, sour or alcoholic; even Przhevalsky’s appetite was dwarfed by that of his Mongol guides, one of whom devoured ten pounds of mutton at a sitting. Przhevalsky was shocked by the Mongols’ gluttony, but his own eating habits repelled them; once his Mongol guide ran off to vomit when he saw Przhevalsky eating a wild duck he had shot.
To demand the tolerance and objectivity of the twentieth-century anthropologist from the nineteenth-century explorer would be futile. What drove the Livingstones or Przhevalskys into darkest Africa or Asia was not the need to prove an academic hypothesis, but, in part, a reaction against European society. Men like Przhevalsky continued to see the worst in all cultures more clearly than the best. Hypercritical or romantic, the dreamer’s observations of alien societies are not less valuable for being one-sided. And in Przhevalsky’s case, a bias against stagnant cultures was inseparable from his own dynamism and his single-minded pursuit of the wild.
The Khalkha Mongols and their country had already been the subject of several Russian studies. Bunge had surveyed the route across the Gobi to Peking in the 1830s, when it began to replace the dangerous, if more direct, route across Kirghizia and Dzungaria from southern Siberia. But the Mongols of the south, on the middle reaches of the Huang Ho (the Yellow River) on the Ordos Plateau, or farther west in the A-la Shan (Lola Mountains) and around Kuku Nor, were virtually unknown. Scholarly accounts all drew on Chinese sources, often outdated and inaccurate. Since the days of Marco Polo, an occasional European had penetrated from Peking to the west. Przhevalsky had read their accounts, but not one was a professional geographer. Odoric de Pordenone had been in Lhasa in the 1300s; a handful of Jesuits had penetrated Tibet in the seventeenth century, and thirteen Capucin monks had spent some years in Lhasa in the eighteenth century. The French missionary travellers Abbés Huc and Gabet had crossed through Hsi-ning to Tibet, but their account (of the 1840s) was too full of sensation and inaccuracy to be useful scientifically. Przhevalsky was entering a region of which less was known than of darkest Africa, so fragmentary and derivative was information on its peoples, flora, fauna, natural features and climate.
The journey from Urga was a pleasure trip compared with the months to come. After the hilly steppes of Urga the landscape became ‘gobi’—semi-desert of clay and gravel with sparse clumps of grass, occasional shrubs and even dwarf trees. Przhevalsky and Pyltsov walked ahead, often diverted from the track by the dzeren, the Mongolian gazelle. The caravan would be held up for an hour or two until Przhevalsky returned with the gift of a carcase to placate the impatient Mongol camel-driver. In the air and beneath the ground nature was alive. The ground squirrels gathered hay in stacks to last through the terrible, though snowless, Mongolian winter. They would scurry from hole to hole, while high above buzzards and eagles circled, ready to pounce. Carrion crows followed the caravan, ripping the sacks of supplies, even tearing open the camels’ humps. These carrion crows horrified Przhevalsky in Urga, where, together with the vultures and the half-wild dogs, they tore at the flesh of the dead who, according to Mongol custom, were dragged out to be devoured by the animals.
With each day the temperature dropped and the Gobi became more and more a sandy desert; the north-westerly wind that made the thirty-degree frosts almost unbearable grew stronger. But by the end of December the worst was over: Przhevalsky was passing into the gentler and more fertile zone of Inner Mongolia among the Chakhar Mongols. Then, after almost alpine mountains, the plains of China, warm, bustling, well-watered, opened out several thousand feet below the Mongolian plateau. All the traffic from Mongolia filtered through Kal
gan, a town of 70,000 Chinese with a handful of Russian traders and two Protestant missionaries. Here Przhevalsky hired two horses and some pack-mules for the descent to Peking.
The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia Page 6
