Great Game

23Feb10

The superiority and the racism of the European explorers along the Silk Road in the 19th century and into the mid-20th century is evident in Wood’s description of their attitudes towards the people in whose lands they were map making, collecting artifacts and exploring for lost, ancient cities. This creates a strange contradiction in the motives, attitudes and behaviours of such prominent visitors as the Russian Przhevalsky or the Swede Hedin. The tone of Wood’s writing, however, reveals the usual mix of criticism of the worst aspects of European feelings of superiority, with a wide-eyed fascination with their actual ‘adventures’ as explorers.
This in part comes from the excerpts that she reprints from the actual books and journals that the explorers themselves wrote, recording their experiences. There is a kind of hardy, boy’s world of adventure. One thinks of the movie Indiana Jones or something like that, but in the Spielberg movie there is not really any of the irony or awareness of what might be wrong about the archaeologist/adventurer entering ancient cities to bring artifacts from those cultures back to European societies, museums and collectors. The entire period of European movement into Central and South Asia in the colonial period occurs, as the book seems to show us, because of the already established bases in India. In addition, geographical closeness between Russia and China enabled the Russians, in an expansionist nationalist period, to become among the new invaders in lands where borders were always possibly about to be breached.
Just as when we watch reports of the Americans or British invading Iraq in the 2000s we are understanding the entry into sovereign territory through catchy titles, like “Operation Desert Storm”. Wood refers to Oscar Wilde’s witty discussion of European expansion and rivalries in Asia as the “Great Game”. This is a very good way to describe something that is largely disturbing. The entire period does feel like a game; again like a boy’s adventure story. In fact one can imagine that the explorers not only risked their lives, and saw the lives of their crews come to an end as they obsessively pushed forward with determination to reach Tibet, for example, as a great game. Exploring, mapping, naming, discovering treasures – these seem to be almost kinds of ‘rushes’: emotional and perhaps even a way to find something meaningful, as if men have to explore and name to prove their superiority over that which they name, in the process of achieving this.
It was an age of science and a period of self-conscious interest in cataloguing things. Said has noted this in his writings on Orientalism: the way that the Western intellectual and academics and adventurers wanted to create an Orient, mysterious and controllable. Two things are very striking: one, the difference between the excitement to find things from cultures where no living people are anymore and make those artifacts and places into mythology, and 2) to put down the actual inhabitants that are alive at the time of the travels. This is a strange thing that becomes even stranger when we learn that Hedin, for example, met with Hitler and that they discussed eating yogurt and how to have a long life.
To conclude, the Europeans battled and fought over territory that had been fought over for centuries: they brought new dynamics to the region, such as increased firepower and technology that by the 20th century enabled the British to overpower the Tibetans. Our knowledge of the ancient civilizations again mainly comes from the European reconstructing of them from artifacts; there are it seems less observational sources of life and times in the Silk Route towns written by the ancient peoples who lived, worked and travelled along the routes. As well, one last thing: the difficulty of mastering the terrain, and being able to travel along the harsh routes, show us indeed something about what life would have been like over centuries of travel, exchange of ideas, trade, commerce, warfare and syncretism. The Europeans had new technology but they did not have the skill or endurance or knowledge of the landscape that the Asians, Indians, Chinese, Tibetans, Mongolians had.

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