The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (51 page)

Only the Khan of Khiva, in his remote desert fastness, continued to defy the might of the Tsar. Kaufman in Tashkent, and Ignatiev in St Petersburg, realised that if they were to absorb Khiva into Russia’s new Central Asian empire they must greatly improve their lines of communication in the region. Troops could only reach Turkestan after a long and arduous march from Orenburg, while Khiva, as previous expeditions had shown, was even more difficult of access. What was needed was a direct route from European Russia, along which troops and supplies could be moved, as well as better communications within Turkestan to tighten Russia’s grip on it. The most obvious way to link Central Asia to European Russia was by building a port on the eastern shore of the Caspian. Men and supplies could then be shipped down the Volga and across the Caspian to this point. They could also be ferried there from the Russian garrisons in the Caucasus. Eventually, when Khiva had been conquered and the troublesome Turcomans pacified, a railway could be constructed across the desert to Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Khokand.

So it was that, in the winter of 1869, just eighteen months after the submission of Bokhara, a small Russian force set sail from Petrovsk, on the Caucasian side of the Caspian, and a few days later landed in a desolate bay on its eastern shore. The spot was known as Krasnovodsk, and it was here that the Oxus was said to have once flowed into the Caspian. The whole operation was highly secret, for the Russians’ task was to construct a permanent fortress there, and St Petersburg did not wish the British to learn of the move until it was complete. For this reason the officer in command had strict instructions to avoid clashing with the Turcomans, lest the British come to hear of this through the native spies they were known to have among the tribes of the region. Despite this, it was not long before news of what was going on at Krasnovodsk reached British ears. It was to cause considerable alarm in both London and Calcutta.

Until now, still pursuing its policy of masterly inactivity, the British government had done no more than protest to St Petersburg over its recent forward moves in Central Asia, pointing out that they ran contrary to its own official pronouncements. London was uneasily aware, moreover, that what the Russians had done in Central Asia differed little from what Britain had already done when adding Sind and the Punjab to its Indian possessions, and had tried but failed to do in Afghanistan when it placed Shah Shujah on the throne. To protest too vociferously would be to invite charges of hypocrisy. However, the construction of a Russian fortress on the eastern shore of the Caspian, and the garrisoning of troops there, was altogether more disturbing, for it was seen as posing a threat to Afghanistan. Not only would it enable the Russians to launch an expedition against Khiva, thereby adding it to their domains and dependencies in Central Asia, but it would also bring them within striking distance of Herat, strategic key to India.

For some time the forward school, with Sir Henry Rawlinson as its principal spokesman, had been urging the British government to abandon its policy of masterly inactivity. Rawlinson had even proposed that Afghanistan should be made a ‘quasi-protectorate’ of Britain’s so as to keep it out of Russia’s grasp. Some of those who had previously supported the government’s passive policies now began to question their realism. Even the Viceroy, Sir John Lawrence, began to have second thoughts. The Russians, he advised, should be warned not to interfere in the affairs of Afghanistan or any other state sharing a frontier with India. It should be made clear to St Petersburg, moreover, that ‘an advance towards India, beyond a certain point, would entail her in war, in all parts of the world, with England’. Lawrence proposed that Central Asia should be divided into British and Russian spheres of influence, the details of which should be worked out between the two governments.

The opportunity for some plain talking with the Russians arose shortly afterwards when Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Secretary, met his opposite number, Prince Gorchakov, at Heidelberg. Clarendon enquired bluntly, of Gorchakov whether Russia’s recent Asiatic conquests, which went so far beyond what he himself had spelt out in his celebrated memorandum, had been ordered by Tsar Alexander, or were the result of commanders on the spot exceeding their instructions. It was an embarrassing question, and it required an answer. Gorchakov chose to blame the soldiers, explaining that they thereby hoped to win distinction for themselves. Even now, though, the British were probably no nearer the truth than before, or than scholars are to this day. At the same time Gorchakov assured Clarendon that his government had no intention of advancing any further into Central Asia, and certainly harboured no designs on India.

The British had by now become used to such assurances and promises, and to seeing them broken. Pursuing Lawrence’s expedient of trying to put a fixed limit on further Russian advances, Clarendon therefore proposed to Gorchakov that their two governments should establish, not so much spheres of influence in Asia, but a permanent neutral zone between their two expanding empires there. The Russian immediately suggested that Afghanistan would serve this purpose, his own government having no interest of any kind in it. The latter, if it could be believed, was welcome news to the British, and Clarendon assured Gorchakov that his government had no territorial ambitions there either. For a time the prospects for such an agreement looked quite promising, and discussions and correspondence continued between London and St Petersburg. In the end, however, they were to grind to a halt over the question of where precisely Afghanistan’s remote and unmapped northern frontier ran, especially in the almost totally unexplored Pamir region. For it was here that the most advanced Russian military posts lay closest to British India.

Hitherto, British strategists had always worked on the assumption that the Khyber and Bolan passes were the most likely entry points for a Russian invasion of India. But now they were awakening to the uncomfortable realisation that further to the north, in a region that they knew virtually nothing about, there were other passes through which the Cossacks might one day pour down into India. For this unwelcome piece of intelligence they had to thank two British explorers who, lucky to be alive still, had just returned from Chinese Turkestan after a highly adventurous journey. And if that were not enough, they also brought back with them alarming tales of Russian intrigues there. The diplomatic process might have reached an impasse, but the Great Game certainly had not.

·25·
Spies Along the Silk Road

At the time that these events took place, Chinese Turkestan was shown on both British and Russian maps as a vast white blank, with the locations of oasis towns like Kashgar and Yarkand only approximately indicated. Cut off from the rest of Central Asia by towering mountain ranges, and from China by the huge expanse of the Taklamakan desert, it was one of the least known areas on earth. Centuries earlier the flourishing Silk Road, which linked imperial China to distant Rome, had passed through it, bringing great prosperity to its oases. But this traffic had long ago ceased, and most of the oases had been swallowed up by the desert. The region had then sunk back into virtual oblivion.

The Taklamakan desert, which dominates the region, had always enjoyed an ill reputation among travellers, and over the years a sad procession of men – merchants, soldiers and Buddhist pilgrims – had left their bones there after losing their way between the widely scattered oases. Sometimes entire caravans had been known to vanish into it without trace. It is no surprise to learn that Taklamakan, in the local Uighur tongue, means ‘Go in – and you won’t come out’. As a result very few Europeans had ever been to this remote region, for there was little to attract them to it.

Chinese Turkestan, or Sinkiang as it is today called, had long been part of the Chinese Empire. However, the central authorities’ hold over it had always been tenuous, for the Muslim population had nothing in common with their Manchu rulers and everything in common with their ethnic cousins in Bokhara, Khokand and Khiva, lying on the far side of the Pamirs. As a result, in the early 1860s, a violent revolt had broken out among the Muslims against their overlords. Chinese cities were burned to the ground and their inhabitants massacred. The insurrection, which had begun in the east, spread quickly westwards until the whole of Turkestan was up in arms. It was at that moment that a remarkable Muslim adventurer named Yakub Beg, claiming direct descent from Tamerlane, arrived on the scene. Veteran of a number of engagements against the Russians, in which he had acquitted himself with courage and distinction (having five bullet wounds to show for it), he was now in the service of Kashgar’s former Muslim ruler, then living in exile in Khokand. It was the latter’s hope to drive out the infidel Chinese and reclaim his throne.

In January 1865, accompanied by a small force of armed men, Yakub Beg and his patron crossed the mountains to Kashgar to find it in bloody turmoil, with rival factions fighting among themselves for possession of the throne, as well as against the Chinese. But within two years, by means of his own charismatic leadership and European tactics which he had picked up from the Russians, Yakub Beg had managed to wrest Kashgar and Yarkand from both the Chinese and his local rivals. The two Chinese governors, it is said, chose to blow themselves up rather than surrender to the Muslims. According to one colourful, but unsubstantiated, account, Kashgar’s defenders had eaten their own wives and children before submitting, having first devoured every four-legged creature in the city, including cats and rats.

After ruthlessly pushing aside his patron, and making Kashgar his capital, Yakub Beg declared himself ruler of Kashgaria, as the liberated area now became called. From here he proceeded to fight his way eastwards, taking more and more of Chinese Turkestan under his wing. Before long his rule was to extend to Urumchi, Turfan and Hami, the latter lying nearly 1,000 miles from Kashgar. In addition to his own troops from Khokand, his authority was maintained by means of mercenaries recruited from the local ethnic groups and tribes, including Afghans and even a few Chinese, not to mention a handful of Indian Army deserters who had found their way across the mountains. So far as the Muslim population was concerned, Yakub Beg’s expulsion of the Chinese from the region brought few, if any, benefits, as it merely replaced one unwelcome ruler with another. They found themselves, like the vanquished Chinese, the victims of plunder, massacre and rape at the hands of his rag-bag army. As each oasis town and village capitulated, moreover, Yakub Beg’s secret police and tax-collectors moved in to terrorise and squeeze them.

Such was the situation in the former Chinese territory when, in the autumn of 1868, an adventurous British traveller named Robert Shaw crossed the mountains northwards, intent on being the first of his countrymen to reach the mysterious cities of Kashgar and Yarkand. It was no secret to him that one Russian officer, of Kazakh origin, had preceded him there in the guise of a trader, bringing back valuable military and commercial intelligence. But that was before Yakub Beg’s seizure of power, and Shaw was convinced that Kashgaria now offered great commercial prospects to enterprising British merchants. Shaw had originally intended to be a regular soldier, and had passed first into Sandhurst from Marlborough. However, in his youth he had been struck down with rheumatic fever, and persistent ill-health finally forced him to abandon any hopes of a military career. What he lacked in bodily fitness, he more than made up for in determination. At the age of 20 he had moved to India, taking up residence in the Himalayan foothills as a tea-planter. It was as a result of talking to native traders who had visited Chinese Turkestan that he became persuaded that a great untapped market lay there, especially for Indian tea now that supplies from China had been halted by Yakub Beg’s conquest of the region.

Journeys beyond India’s frontiers were severely frowned upon by the authorities in Calcutta, and British officers and other officials were banned from attempting them. The lesson of Conolly and Stoddart had not been forgotten. As the Viceroy put it: ‘If they lose their lives we cannot avenge them, and so lose credit.’ He also felt that they tended to do more harm than good, though, as will be seen, he made an exception for Indian agents carrying out specific tasks for the government, since they could be more readily disowned. Robert Shaw, however, was not a government employee, and therefore felt bound by no such restrictions. On September 20, 1868, having sent a native messenger ahead to inform Yakub Beg’s frontier officials of his corning, and of his friendly intentions, he set out from Leh with a caravan laden with tea and other merchandise.