TOURNAMENT OF SHADOWS: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia
By KARL E. MEYER and SHARON BLAIR BRYSAC
Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999. 646 pages, $35

Morris Rossabi

Central Asia has traditionally been a multicultural crossroads. Chinese, Mongols, Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, Iranians, and Russians, among others, have at various times ruled parts of the region. Indian Buddhist pilgrims, Mongol soldiers, Chinese envoys, Persian traders, Turkic dancers, Russian explorers, Genoese and Venetian merchants, British adventurers, and German and Japanese archeologists have lived in or traveled through the area; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the region captivated a particularly fascinating (and eccentric) cast of characters.
Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac have had the good sense to base their highly readable book on the diverse and often sharply perceptive individuals drawn to Central Asia over the past two hundred years. This biographical approach not only is entertaining but also permits the authors to touch on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from theosophy to the vogue in Europe for Kashmiri shawls to the excellent system of education in Scotland and, finally, to the hazards of travel across Central Asia. They are blessed that nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans of different social backgrounds treated letters and diaries as serious undertakings. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, and Alexander Burnes, British Resident in Kabul, did not dash off bureaucratic memos or cursory notes. Instead they wrote careful, if biased, letters describing the remarkable sights and political and military dramas they witnessed in Central Asia. They and their contemporaries left behind accounts of their involvement in and observations of the European scramble for influence in the region. Moreover, the principal actors were not the only diarists; lesser performers, including missionaries, journalists, and wives and mistresses of officials set down their impressions on paper. Almost every European visitor to the region seems to have written a report or kept a diary.

Meyer and Brysac have capitalized on these splendid materials to offer vignettes of European involvement in Central Asia. They write about Benjamin Jowett, Curzon's professor in Balliol College at Oxford, whose ambition was "to govern the world through my pupils." They describe the visions and bizarre ideology of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the mystical theosophist, and the opportunism of Dr. Joseph Wolff, son of a rabbi but a seemingly ardent convert to Christianity who preceded the Jews for Jesus movement by 150 years in his effort to "bring the light of the Gospels to Jews and other unbelievers."
Nikolai M. Przhevalsky, the noted Russian explorer, rivets the authors' attention because of his achievements and his unappealing personality. A "conquistador imperialist," he led four expeditions that mapped much of Central Asia, studied its flora and fauna, and discovered the species of horse that today bears his name. Despite his lengthy sojourn in Asia, he was contemptuous of the local people, "an explorer of China who despised the Chinese."
Sven Hedin, the early-twentieth-century Swedish cartographer, simultaneously impresses and repels the authors. An ardent advocate of the Nietzschean concept of the "Superman," Hedin undertook the extremely dangerous crossing of the daunting and inhospitable Taklamakan desert. He survived this foolhardy effort, though at least two of his men died and others were badly injured. Yet his expeditions resulted in the mapping of many previously unknown regions of East Asia, and his books had a sizable readership and elicited great interest in the area. (His unalloyed admiration for the so-called Superman eventually prompted him to support the Third Reich, despite his own heritage as the great-grandson of a rabbi.)
Nearly all of these figures played a role in the Great Game that afflicted Central Asia in the nineteenth century. The Great Game originated with Britain's efforts to protect India, the crown jewel of its empire. Russian expansionism in Central Asia, which began as an attempt to create a buffer zone against another Mongol-style onslaught from the east, appeared to threaten British aspirations in India, spawning a Russo-English struggle for power. Later the Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. Though Meyer and Brysac allude to the complexities of this conflict, they focus more on personalities than on politics. In fact, an analysis of the ramifications of the Great Game would require considerable research in the British and Russian archives on the diplomatic negotiations and the struggles between the principal adversaries. By concentrating on individuals, the authors emerge with a more colorful narrative.
A slight defect is their attempt to link the Great Game to power politics in Asia in the twentieth century. Their argument that the Great Game was a "prologue to the Cold War" is not convincing. The conflict between the Western countries and the Soviet bloc was not simply a chess game about territory. Different ideologies and visions of the world were contested, and the struggle was not limited to Asia.
The intriguing story the authors tell so well far outweighs this minor blemish. Tournament of Shadows takes its place with and complements Peter Hopkirk's similarly readable Foreign Devils on the Silk Road.

Morris Rossabi is the author of Khubilai Khan and other books, and wrote the introduction to the recently published Bounty from the Sheep.