By the Shores of Issyk-Kul

Deep in the heart of Central Asia, squeezed into the crook of a range of

lofty snow-capped peaks known, for good reason, as the Celestial Mountains, stands a lake. Not just any lake, but a deep, blue body of water

over 100 miles across that never freezes over – no mean feat in this remote, elevated region at the very heart of a vast continent.

Lake Issyk-Kul, the “pearl of the Tien Shan,” whose name translates roughly as “warm lake” in Kyrgyz, may well be the sort of place where legends are made. Yet, if truth be told, it is the lake’s mild climate and strategic location that is its main draw. During the days of the old Silk Road, the shores of the lake were an important staging point on the historic trading route between China and the Mediterranean.

Earlier peoples had settled here well before the heyday of the silk trade. Evidence of this is set in stone around the lake’s shores: Neolithic peoples left their mark at Cholpon-Ata on the north shore, where petroglyphs of stick-figure hunters and animals decorate a field of boulders, and near Tamga, close to the south shore, there is an isolated rock mysteriously inscribed with a Buddhist prayer in Tibetan script.

Some lake visitors stayed longer than others. Mongols and Turkic nomads came and went relatively quickly, but the Scythians who appeared around the sixth century bc stayed in the region for almost a millennium, leaving mound graves as evidence of their time here. Tamerlane is rumored to have imprisoned captured Tartars on an island fortress here, now long vanished beneath the lake’s surface. There is even a legend that St. Matthew died close to the lake, after having established a monastery on its shoreline. More macabre is the suspicion that the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century had its origins in a Nestorian Christian community on the northeast shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, and that travelling merchants were instrumental in transmitting the disease as they journeyed westwards.

With the demise of the Silk Road, Lake Issyk-Kul, like much of Central Asia, all but vanished from the Western gaze, enjoying a quiet obscurity until the nineteenth century, when the tsar’s explorers arrived. One early explorer was Pyotr Semyonov Tyan-Shansky, a pioneering military geographer who succeeded in proving that the Chuy River, which flows close to the western end of the lake, was no longer connected to Lake Issyk-Kul as had previously been thought. Another Russian geographer who followed in Tyan-Shansky’s footsteps was an ambitious young officer named Przhevalsky.

nikolai mikhailovich Przhevalsky was born in Smolensk in 1839, of mixed Cossack and Polish noble ancestry. After study in Smolensk and the military academy at St. Petersburg, he went on to teach at the Warsaw Military School for a few years before leading an expedition to Eastern Siberia, where he explored the Ussuri River basin for the Russian Geographical Society, under the patronage of Tyan-Shansky. The expedition took place from 1867-69 and was the first of five long, exploratory journeys that would shape Przhevalsky’s life and define his legacy.

In the year following his return from Siberia, Przhevalsky turned his attention to Central Asia (or “Inner Asia” as it was usually referred to in those days). On the first of four journeys, from 1870-73, he crossed the Gobi desert to reach Beijing and explored the upper reaches of the Yangtze River that flowed down from the Tibetan Plateau. That journey set in motion a desire that later became an obsession: to reach Lhasa, the mysterious – and forbidden – Tibetan capital. This first Central Asian and Tibetan expedition also sowed the seed for Przhevalsky’s lifelong distaste for the Chinese people and their culture.

Przhevalsky’s second Inner Asia expedition (1876-77) explored East Turkestan and the Tien Shan (“Celestial Mountains”) range, visiting what would later become Communist China’s prime nuclear test site – the isolated and inaccessible Lake Lop Nor, the first Europeans to do so since Marco Polo travelled this way in the thirteenth century. Once again, however, Przhevalsky failed to reach Lhasa.

The years 1879-80 saw Przhevalsky head a third expedition to Tibet, which got within 160 miles of Lhasa before being turned back by hostile Chinese officials, who were reluctant to allow inquisitive foreigners access to this most secretive of locations.

It was on Przhevalsky’s fourth journey (1883-1886) to Central Asia – once again with the goal of reaching Lhasa, that he reached Lake Issyk-Kul and the town of Karakol (which means “black wrist”), after crossing the Gobi desert and eastern Tien Shan ranges.

On what was to be his fifth expedition (1888-1890), Przhevalsky planned to depart from Karakol, cross the Tien Shan and traverse the Tarim basin from north to south, then explore northwestern Tibet and hopefully Lhasa. But en route to Karakol, Przhevalsky (who had never lost a man during all his expeditions) made the mistake of drinking tainted water. By the time he had reached Karakol, he had contracted typhus. He fought bravely (“I hardly fear death,” he said, “after all, I have stood face to face with it many times.”) but succumbed to the disease on October 20, 1888. He was buried, as per his request, on the shores of Issyk-Kul, under a simple marker which reads “Explorer N.M. Przhevalsky. 1839-1888.” In 1889, Karakol was renamed Przhevalsk (it reverted to Karakol from 1921-1939, then again in 1991, after Kyrgyz independence).

The expeditions that Przhevalsky and his contemporaries staged were not simply matters of exploration. In truth, they all combined a serious study of natural history and geography with spying and political skullduggery. Indeed, the main goal of the second Central Asian expedition was to forge links with the Uyghur leader Yakub Beg, who had successfully set up an independent state, Kashgaria. Beg’s state – centered on Kashgar in southwest China, close to the border of what is now Kyrgyzstan – was independent, and Russia dearly wanted to bring it under its influence.

This was, after all, the era of The Great Game, when Russia and Western European powers competed for influence in this remote region. During this period, science and politics went hand in hand, as the advance of scientific knowledge was considered the cornerstone of the expansion of empire and “civilization.” There was nothing new in this. In fact, one of Przhevalsky’s boyhood heroes had been the Scottish explorer and medical missionary David Livingstone who, while undoubtedly a great philanthropist and adventurer, had also been an unwitting architect of British colonialism in Africa.

None of the evidence suggests that Przhevalsky was an unwilling servant of the Russian crown. Despite peerless attention to his geographical and scientific studies, he appears to have been equally enthusiastic about his military role; after all, his initial training was at a military academy, and all the members of his expedition were serving in the Russian army. It would seem that Przhevalsky had unerring faith in the morality of his mission too – an unshakable belief that the people of the lands he passed through would benefit from imperial power. In this way he was of one mind with his British contemporaries Aurel Stein and Francis Younghusband.

Security concerns aside, Przhevalsky sent a highly impressive collection of samples back to St. Petersburg. On his 1870-73 journey alone he collected over 5,000 plants, 1,000 animals, 3,000 insects and the skins of 130 mammals. Such painstaking attention to recording and cataloguing the flora and fauna of the territory he was passing through brought dividends, most notably with the discovery of two hitherto unknown mammal species in remote regions of China – Przewalski’s Horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) and Przewalski’s Gazelle (Procapra przewalskii). The horse was a particularly significant discovery, as the short-legged species turned out to be a hitherto unknown progenitor of the modern horse. Both species were eventually named after him, using the Polish version of his name. After his death, his name was also given to a remote range in the Kunlun Mountains, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

kyrgyzstan – or more correctly, the Kyrgyz Republic – may well be, as its name suggests, predominantly Kyrgyz, but it is actually very ethnically diverse, something that lies at the heart of recent troubles there. In addition to a large number of Uzbeks and Tajiks who live in the south, there is still a sizeable population of Russians, mostly of Siberian Cossack descent, in some of the towns and villages that surround Lake Issyk-Kul. This, despite the economic hardship that sent many of their kin back to Mother Russia.

Travelling around Lake Issyk-Kul today you see places that seem more like Siberia than Central Asia. Many villages will have a gleaming new Saudi- or Turkish-funded mosque, yet some will also have an Orthodox church. Alongside Kyrgyz graveyards, with their strange yurt-like structures, there may also be Russian burial grounds, some graves bearing Orthodox crosses, while others have the red star of communist rule. In the village streets too, you cannot help but notice fair hair and blue, Slavic eyes alongside the black hair, green eyes and Asian features of the Kyrgyz population.

Slavic identity is most apparent in places along the lake’s northern shore, like Ananyevo, a leafy village 30 miles east of the resort town of Cholpon-Ata, where the powder-blue bell-tower of a Russian Orthodox church rises behind a tall gateway, neat single-storey cottages with wooden shutters and bright flowery gardens line the streets, and smartly dressed tow-headed children skip home from school.

The first Russian colonization around Lake Issyk-Kul took place between 1863 and 1873, when military bases were established near the mouths of the rivers Ak-Suu, Karakol and Naryn. The first settlers were mostly Cossacks from central Russia and western Siberia. Russian-style villages took shape, their names derived from the names of their founders or Russian national heroes. Ananyevo, takes its name from a local boy who became a WWII war hero, while Grigoriyevka, further to the west, was named after its first Russian settler. But names are not everything: Karakol, which is still sometimes parenthetically referred to as Przhevalsk, still has a pioneering feel to its streets and retains a pronounced Slavic identity despite its Kyrgyz appellation.

Karakol, a regional capital and summer hiking center for a trickle of Western tourists, was founded as a Russian fort in 1869. The town’s population grew considerably with the arrival of Dungan Muslim refugees from China in the 1880s. With a sprawling grid of leafy streets lined with wooden houses, it is not difficult to picture yourself in a sleepy Siberian town, albeit a particularly undeveloped and unspoiled one. The majority of the town’s population is Kyrgyz, but its nineteenth-century Russian character remains, and there are echoes of twentieth-century Soviet rule in the statues to Lenin and other notables, like Yusup Abdrakhmanov, first secretary of the Kyrgyz Communist Party, and in street names like Lenina, Kommunisticheskaya, Pionerskaya and Stakhanova.

The town’s Holy Trinity Cathedral most exudes the atmosphere of Old Russia. The splendid wooden building dates from 1895, when it replaced an earlier stone church that collapsed in an earthquake (fittingly, the very first place of worship in the town had been a Kyrgyz yurt). Although it now reverberates with booming Russian voices every Sunday morning, for three-quarters of a century the cathedral served less spiritual functions. In the Stalinist, atheist 1930s, it housed a dance club.

Not far away along on the shores of the lake, is a small settlement still shown on maps as Pristan Przhevalsk (Przhevalsk Pier). A statue and museum dedicated to the explorer are here in a shady green park favored by Kyrgyz wedding parties. This is not the only place that Przhevalsky is remembered in stone – there is also a monument to him in St. Petersburg, and monuments and a museum dedicated to his life and work in Smolensk Oblast, close to his birthplace. But somehow this quiet Central Asian location seems more appropriate for a memorial to one so devoted to exploration.

The monument to Przhevalsky, with an eagle spreading its wings atop a lofty stone plinth, was unveiled just six years after his death, but the museum and park were not added until late in the Soviet period, in 1957. Sadly, construction of the museum and park required the desecration of a Kyrgyz graveyard that occupied the same spot. Such an insensitive act did little to endear the memory of the explorer to the region’s Kyrgyz population. Like the monument, the neoclassical museum has an eagle atop its pediment, an unambiguous symbol of colonial might.

The museum contains a decent collection of mementos of the explorer’s life and journeys – letters, notebooks, photos and books. In pride of place is a portrait of the explorer that depicts him as virile, mustachioed, thick-haired and tough, not all that dissimilar to the classic portrait of Stalin, who, according to one urban legend (stoked by Vladimir Voinovich’s novel, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Chonkin) is Przhevalsky’s illegitimate son.

Another room has a wall-sized 3D map showing the routes of various expeditions to Central Asia, and a display of notebooks belonging to Przhevalsky’s second-in-command, containing sketches of wildlife encountered along the way and graphic details of punishments imposed by the Chinese on their prisoners. There is also what appears to be a stuffed, flea-bitten donkey. It is not a donkey at all, but rather a horse: the unique, short-legged species discovered by Przhevalsky in the wilds of Mongolia – Przewalski’s Horse.

it is hard to admire Przhevalsky the man as much as Przhevalsky the scientist. Although highly regarded for his pioneering scientific work and explorations that opened up large swathes of Central Asia for future development, the specters of racism and cruelty have always hung over his name. Such stains on his character are hard to refute. His contempt for the Chinese is well documented and was probably influenced by the frustration he suffered in having his way to Tibet blocked so many times by Beijing officialdom. But it cannot be denied that he also looked down on all of the indigenous people of Central Asia – Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Mongols and Uyghur – clearly considering them to be lesser beings who could only benefit from a firm colonial hand. Russian domination could bring nothing but benefits: “bear[ing] away in the name of civilization all these dregs of the human race.” Not that such feelings were at all unique in the late nineteenth-century, when most Europeans considered themselves superior to the races beyond their borders.

As to Przhevalsky’s cruelty, it would be an understatement to say he believed in being “firm but fair.” It may have been pure hyperbole, but a statement like, “Only the experience of later expeditions convinced me that three things are necessary for the success of long and dangerous journeys in Central Asia – money, a gun, and a whip,” as quoted in his last book, From Kyatkha to the Source of the Yellow River (Ot Kyatkhy na istoki Zheltoy reki), suggests a personality that would not balk at brutality for the sake of getting his way.

It is no accident that women do not feature prominently in this brief portrait. Other than his mother and nanny, with whom he was very close, Przhevalsky disliked the company of women and they had little part to play in his life. In fact, they hardly featured at all, unless the legend of a brief liaison with Joseph Stalin’s mother is to be believed. At his country estate near Smolensk, Przhevalsky is said to have entertained only male visitors, and on each of his Central Asia expeditions he was accompanied by a youthful male companion whom he would sponsor and lavish gifts upon in exchange for shunning women and loyally sharing his tent.

Przhevalsky’s English biographer Donald Rayfield is quick to assert the explorer’s puritanical outlook and makes no mention of sexual relationships. According to Rayfield’s Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolai Przhevalsky, Explorer of Central Asia, the longest of his companionships was with a young officer named Fyodor Eklon, which lasted from 1875 until 1883, when the youth nervously informed Przhevalsky that he was to be married. Przhevalsky was bitter and unforgiving over this “betrayal,” yet had already met a distillery clerk, Pyotr Kozlov, in the winter of 1881-82, who would become his new protégé and whom he would subsequently describe as “submissive, loyal and handsome.”

It was Kozlov who accompanied Przhevalsky on his final expeditions and who would go on to become a distinguished explorer and archaeologist in his own right. In fact, Kozlov fulfilled one of the long-held dreams that eluded his mentor – to meet the Dalai Lama, which he did in 1905, in Mongolia.  RL