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

by Donald Rayfield

  It was nearly seven years since Przhevalsky had last visited a Chinese town: Hami did nothing to change his aversion. He rode in to pay his respects to the chin-ts’ai (military governor); the heads of three recently executed criminals adorned the city gates. Soldiers with banners solemnly escorted him to the residence. The next day the chin-ts’ai, Min Ch’ung, repaid the visit and came to Przhevalsky’s tent and invited the Russian officers to dine. Dinner was magnificent: sixty courses, including swallows’ nest soup, shark’s fin and prawns (Hami was two months’ journey from the sea), washed down with wine and spirit. Przhevalsky barely concealed his loathing for the food and drank nothing but water. Nevertheless, he and Min Ch’ung got on well. The governor seemed ‘the best of a bad lot’ and was content with the gift of a revolver and a silver toilet set. The expedition offered to put on a display of marksmanship. They fired a salvo of 200 bullets; Przhevalsky shot down swifts and sparrows with his shotguns, and with both barrels of his Lancaster he shot two eggs at a time, hurled into the air by spectators. Min Ch’ung was politely impressed, declaring that twelve Russians were as good as 1,000 Chinese soldiers and that war was therefore out of the question. Przhevalsky concurred. ‘I was sorry to waste cartridges which were now irreplaceable, but the reputation of a good shot … produces a spellbinding impression on Asiatics.’

  Przhevalsky wanted two things from Hami: information and supplies. There was little of the first. Min Ch’ung led the officers on a tour of the town but avoided answering specific questions. Hami had some 4,500 soldiers and over 5,000 civilians, roughly equally divided between Chinese immigrants, Tungans and Uighurs. The population had stayed mainly loyal to the government and had undergone three Tungan attacks which destroyed all the gardens and orchards, and all the trees save Hami’s sacred ‘nine-dragon’ willow. Now the canals and fields on which this oasis of fifty square miles depended were coming to life. The population, in return for its loyalty, was allowed to live under the rule of the local Uighur Wang, a dowager who refused to have anything to do with Przhevalsky. The people were colourful and cosmopolitan; the Moslems wore mitre hats and bright gowns; the women Przhevalsky noted, were ‘fairly beautiful’ but wore rouge and were ‘of very loose behaviour’.

  The essential feature of Hami was its strategic military position. Przhevalsky wrote: ‘Once this point is occupied by an enemy, the whole Chinese army to the west will be cut off from its sources of supply, i.e. from China proper. It will have only the very circuitous and difficult northern route via Uliasutai, but that too will be occupied by any enemy attacking from the north.’ The only road from east to west went through Hami, and this made it a focus of Russian commercial interest; the copious supply of silver left by Chinese soldiery and the dearth of goods made it a trader’s dream. But the army interested Przhevalsky more. Unlike most Russian observers, he had no high opinion of General Tso’s victorious troops; he advised Milyutin that there was nothing to fear from them: ‘Manchu soldiers remind us of loose-living peasant women, which their indescribable habits make them resemble all the more.’ They had smooth-bore guns with sawn-off barrels, dirty and rusty. The infantry were too lazy to walk and rode on confiscated horses. The officers neither shot nor lived under canvas. The men smoked opium, the officers dealt in it. Przhevalsky’s reports encouraged Milyutin to take a hard line over the Ili negotiations then in progress.

  A cultivated oasis held little for the naturalist: a total of thirty-seven species of flora and thirty-two of birds. Only poisonous spiders (Galeodes sp.) that crept into the bedding aroused any excitement. June was hot; the Cossacks dammed the stream to make a swimming pool, but Przhevalsky wanted to leave Hami. He spent five days buying 200 buns, ten sheep and some rice and barley. Min Ch’ung would not release him without an escort of two officers and fifteen soldiers.

  One of these officers ‘turned out to be a decent man’; he acquiesced with Przhevalsky’s desire to be left alone and sent back nine of the soldiers, while the rest rode on ahead of the expedition to the next station. For the first days the expedition was escorted along the road that led to An-hsi and China proper, across an undulating plain with ridges of loess still not eroded by the wind. This was the Hami desert that separates the Tien Shan from the Nan Shan (‘southern mountains’). There were no animals or plants, just red-hot earth littered with bones and smoky, dusty, still air. Salt clouds created mirages, and the ground was so hot that even at night they were all uncomfortable. In vain they doused the tents with water. From Yen-tu they moved at night and in the early morning across a totally waterless expanse to K’u-fi (K’u-shui), battling with a hot east wind and with drowsiness. At K’u-fi the water was bad, muddied by men and cattle fighting to drink. The entire Chinese army had trodden this road and there was no fodder except for bushels of reeds, for each of which Przhevalsky had to pay one-and-a-half liang—two ounces of silver.

  At K’u-fi the expedition left the road and turned towards Sa-chou (Tun-huang). They crossed the sterile gravel and dolomite of the Pei Shan (‘northern mountains’) into relatively fertile gobi—a few shrubs of a new species of nitraria and an occasional group of kulans and wild camels that fed on the nitraria. Nearly 100 miles away, the Nan Shan came into view, with its prospects of cool air and running water. So alluring were the mountains that the expedition covered the distance from Hami to Sa-chou in eighteen days, despite the unbelievable heat and the gales which deluged them with salt, tore up metal tent-pegs and ripped the sailcloth tents to shreds. They crossed the waterless bed of the Buluntsir (Su-lo Ho), desiccated by the irrigation ditches of Sa-chou, but whose floods now and again reached Lob Nor if the oases, sun and sand did not swallow them up first. They climbed the Chiao Ho (Tan Ho) to the oasis, an improbable island of flax, barley and wheat, with fields and lanes edged by poplars and willows.

  The expedition camped for a week by a stream four miles out of Sa-chou. Przhevalsky refused all invitations from town and beat off the crowds that came to gawp at the ‘foreign devils’. Sa-chou was unfriendly. Abdul’s Tungan dialect did not make for fluent conversation with Mandarin-speaking officials. Przhevalsky was refused guides and told to halt at Sa-chou until authorization to proceed was received from General Tso, whose headquarters lay over 200 miles away in Su-chou (Chiu-ch’üan). The officials told Przhevalsky, as Koyander had been informed in Peking, that they knew of no route over the Nan Shan to Tibet. Only two months ago, persuaded that there was a price on his head, Count Széchenyi had ended his journey to Lob Nor and Tibet at Sa-chou and agreed to give up. The authorities urged Przhevalsky to follow Széchenyi’s example and tried to frighten him with an account of the dreadful waterless Kum Tag between Sa-chou and Lob Nor, should he try to break out to the west on Marco Polo’s route of 1272 or the Tungans’ of 1870.

  Przhevalsky had the sense to refrain from argument; deviously, he told the officials that he would take his party to the Nan Shan for six weeks’ hunting and then come back to learn what General Tso advised. Given this perfidious promise, his officer-escort helped him buy the provisions he would need for a stay in the mountains: a ton of cereals for men and horses, and another fifteen sheep. Then, with an officer and three soldiers, the expedition left the oasis for the mountains to the south.

  Fifty yards from the last field of Sa-chou they were in desert again, where the gazelles that raided the barley fields spent the daytime. Briefly, Przhevalsky explored the splendid eighth-century ‘thousand caves’ shrine seven miles south-east of the oasis, with its gigantic Buddhas mutilated by the Tungans, but still attended by a few lamas. ‘Imaginary’ gods did not appeal to Przhevalsky; he left the caves for later Russian explorers, such as Oldenburg in 1914, to describe in full. Two guides and two Chinese policemen led the party to the Tan Ho, forced them to ford it and finally to stop at an impasse where the river emerged from mountain ravines. Przhevalsky suspected his guides of sabotage and dismissed them. For the rest of the year he was ‘lost’, he had vanished in the wilds as far as the Chinese or Russian authoriti
es were aware.

  In unmapped, impenetrable country, without guides, Przhevalsky felt only exultation. He sent Dondok Irinchinov and Kolomeytsov to climb the Tan Ho, at this point a river four feet deep, twenty-four yards wide, flowing fast and dirty yellow between vertical loess cliffs. Irinchinov and Kolomeytsov traced it into the mountains, past ruins of abandoned goldmines. Finding no pass from the Tan Ho across what Przhevalsky was to name the Humboldt range, the two men retraced their steps. Meanwhile, Przhevalsky had taken a Cossack, Urusov, and left camp on the Tan Ho to climb the mountains to the south. They rode thirty miles a day and found not a sign of a pass, but they came across two Mongols, each of them with a spare horse. Przhevalsky rode them down and forced them to rein in. He suspected that they were horse-thieves, but thought them likely guides. ‘We gently invited them to come with us to our camp. The Mongols refused outright. It was no good my promising good pay and gifts—nothing had any effect. Then I announced to the Mongols that I was taking them by force to my camp … in case of flight I warned them I would shoot.’ Back at camp the Mongols were fed and put under guard. The next day the party set off under their ‘guidance’, leaving a note in a cleft stick for Irinchinov and Kolomeytsov. They crossed the Tan Ho, went over a ridge, then recrossed the river, the camels fording, the men using a derelict military bridge. The route then led up a tributary, the Kuku Usu, to alpine slopes which allowed the starving, weakened camels to graze and the men to light a fire of tamarisk. The main party stopped to recuperate; two Cossacks went ahead with the Mongols to reconnoitre the route to Tsaidam. The Cossacks returned (after letting the Mongols go on home) with the information needed, and the expedition enjoyed five days’ rest, hunting and mountain-climbing from their base of green meadows and spring water, while they waited for Kolomeytsov and Irinchinov to catch up.

  Ten days at the ‘well of grace’, as Przhevalsky named his camp, enabled him to provide geographers with a missing link in the great system of mountains linking the Pamir with the Nan Shan. From his reconnaissance at this altitude Przhevalsky saw that the Humboldt range he had entered was an unbroken continuation of the Altyn Tag he had located south of Lob Nor, walling off the whole of Tibet from the desert and making Tsaidam an undrained plateau, hemmed in by mountains on all sides. Beyond the Humboldt range, dividing the northern part of Tsaidam from the rest, came another range, which Przhevalsky named, after Humboldt’s fellow genius, the Ritter range. They were forbidding ranges: up to 11,000 feet they were composed of loess and fine gravel, above this level they were rounded granite boulders in a sea of rubble and gravel, ground down by wind. Only a few Mongol encampments and perhaps a Chinese picket lived here; a few kulans, gazelles, wolves and hares inhabited the outcrops of buckthorn and wormwood in the more sheltered watercourses. In the alpine zone there were meadows carpeted with gentians and astragalus, saxifrage and daisies that grew right up to the snow-line; here Tibetan fauna, the wild yak, a new species of marmot, the Himalayan vulture and a giant partridge the size of a hen, could be found. But the Humboldt range (the western Nan Shan) was as dry as the Ta-t’ung range (the eastern Nan Shan) was wet. It lay out of reach of the monsoons of Kansu or Tibet.

  The ‘well of grace’ gave the expedition breathing space: they could beat the salt out of their clothes; set up a proper kitchen to bake buns; slice, salt and dry meat for the autumn and winter ahead. Abdul and two Cossacks were sent down to Sa-chou to appease the authorities and buy more supplies. They had a message from General Tso suggesting that the expedition should come east to Hsi-ning and thence set out for Tibet—the route, in fact, of Széchenyi’s withdrawal. Abdul cunningly ordered and paid for supplies he did not take, and thus lulled the Sa-chou authorities into thinking Przhevalsky would return. When Abdul and the Cossacks regained the camp, they all set off instead for Tsaidam. Przhevalsky had now despatched his last letters: he told Vladimir he was confident of reaching Lhasa ‘by threats or bribes’, relying on his armed force; he complained to Koyander of the Sa-chou authorities’ refusal to give him guides, a complaint which Koyander took up with the Tsung-li-yamen. They could only beg Koyander to urge Przhevalsky to withdraw.

  But the explorer was now out of reach of advice. He was in the wet alpine zone, picking his way over stone fields, forcing the footsore camels on, collecting the dwarf flora. It was hard to hunt here; the quarry was invisible against the grey-brown, rain-soaked rocks, and the stone fields and rarefied air made the hunter hopelessly slow. Each morning the party would split into two and hunt until noon in a landscape whose silence was broken only by the marmot’s whistle or partridge’s cry. They had no luck, but Przhevalsky found happiness in physical exhaustion: ‘Just for a minute you become a really spiritual creature, you are cut off from everyday trivial thoughts and urges.’ Only the wilderness could purge the irritations and the undefined dark side of his nature that he abhorred.

  After resting the camels, Przhevalsky sent Kolomeytsov and Irinchinov down to northern Tsaidam, the plain of Syrtyn, to see if the Mongols would provide guides to Tibet. If not, Przhevalsky proposed to cut along the Tan Ho and find his 1873 route. But the Syrtyn Mongols turned out to be hospitable: Irinchinov and Kolomeytsov brought back butter to vary the monotonous diet of hare, ptarmigan and venison. Immediately the expedition set off for Syrtyn. Only one more pass lay between them and the plain. The salty clay valley gave way to moraines with abandoned goldmines, then to glaciers and snow.

  The next day Kalmynin went off with another Cossack, Yegorov, to fetch the carcase of a yak the latter had shot and left wounded. They tied up their camels and walked cautiously into a network of chasms, any one of which might hide the dangerous wounded yak. A trail of blood led over the Syrtyn range. On the way they shot wild sheep and Kalmynin had to go back to collect the bodies. As he went, he also shot a kulan and by the time he was finished, Yegorov was out of earshot and darkness was falling. Kalmynin went back to camp; Yegorov had disappeared. A search party went out in the morning. They found the yak’s blood trail and followed it another two miles along stony ravines until it faded out. The party separated, calling, firing their rifles. Przhevalsky himself rode out and found nothing. The next day they met a group of Mongol herdsmen driving sheep to Sa-chou: they had seen no one. Two Cossacks rode to a Mongol encampment twelve miles away; others searched over a radius of sixteen miles. Yegorov had vanished. They waited three more days until all the searchers had returned. Deeply unhappy, the expedition moved on. It was only August; already the first sharp frosts had come.

  After travelling sixteen miles, the expedition stopped by a well. Just as they were moving off, Irinchinov spotted a human figure coming down a mountain. Fyodor Eklon and a Cossack rode to investigate and brought back Yegorov, still alive after six days in the mountains, dressed just in a shirt. Only Cossack toughness and ingenuity had saved him. He had walked all the first night and, the next morning, had wandered west instead of north. His shoes were torn to pieces almost at once; he ripped off his trousers and bound his feet with them. Then he shot a hare, ate the raw flesh and shod himself with the skin; once he lit a fire by firing a bullet into tinder; on other nights he covered himself with yak dung to keep warm. Eventually he reached the plain, where he spotted some nomads and their cattle. But the nomads hid from him and Yegorov tried in vain to milk their cows. He had given up hope and was making for the well only in order to wash his shirt and die in a decent clean shroud.

  Przhevalsky covered Yegorov’s broken skin with poultices and alleviated his exhaustion with quinine. In two days Yegorov was able to mount a camel, and the expedition, intact and happy, picked its way over the debris of broken rock and slippery granite domes down to Syrtyn.

  Like the rest of Tsaidam, Syrtyn was a salty marsh which barely supported a few cattle and their herdsmen in the cool and cold seasons; here, too, isolation drove the Mongols to grow a little cereal to eke out their diet of meat and kharmyk berries. Thick layers of salt made much of Syrtyn quite barren, but there were springs and streams in the
east, rushing down from the Nan Shan, where the marshy flora gave subsistence pasture. Syrtyn had no fish or amphibians, only a few kulans, wild camels, gazelles and marmots. Only a lemming, Eremiomys przewalskii, was new to science.

  The people gave the expedition milk and a guide across the Ritter range to central Tsaidam. The guide, Tan To, was an unusually spruce Mongol; Przhevalsky felt sure he was a lady’s man and paid him appropriately, with scissors, soap and beads. Tan To led them for two days over flat, waterless country to the Oregyn River; the camels were relieved by the desert conditions. Yegorov had fully recovered, but one Cossack was trampled by the lead ram in the flock of sheep, and Dondok Irinchinov lost three front teeth when a camel tore out a metal stake and flung it in his face. The expedition spent a day by the Oregyn to get over these misfortunes.

  The Oregyn River brought them out of the Ritter mountains to two lakes, Yikhe (Great) and Baga (Little) Tsaidamyn Nor. Though it was only early September, the cattle were already down on their winter pasture. It did not augur well for conditions on the Tibetan plateau, another 5,000 feet up. First of all, however, Przhevalsky turned east to Kurlyk Nor, where the local chieftain, or beise, might provide supplies and a guide. Kurlyk Nor was overlooked by Tsaidam’s only forest, a sparse copse of Juniper pseudosabina. By the lake were fields in which barley grew among the kharmyk shrubs, and here Przhevalsky camped, watching the women laboriously grinding barley. He drank a salty-sweet liqueur made from kharmyk berries; he shot another specimen of a bird, Rhopophilus deserti, which he had discovered in Tsaidam in 1872.

  The beise paid the camp a visit, which Przhevalsky returned. The chieftain’s filthy fingers covered with filthy silver rings put rancid butter in Przhevalsky’s tea; but the beise, for all his graciousness, refused him a guide. Przhevalsky threatened to take provisions and a guide by force; he swore at the beise and threw him out of his tent. After this display, the beise grew more friendly. He found Przhevalsky a guide and personally counted the shovelfuls of grain that were dug out for Przhevalsky; he lit the pipe of a Cossack whose singing he admired, and he accepted a farewell gift of tobacco, a silver coin and a loaf of sugar.