Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia [Hardcover]

Shareen Blair Brysac (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

From the romantic conflicts of the Victorian Great Game to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Tournament of Shadows traces the struggle for control of Central Asia and Tibet from the 1830s to the present. . The original Great Game (18001917), the clandestine struggle between Russia and Britain for mastery of Central Asia, has long been regarded as one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts in history. The prize, control of the vast Eurasian heartland, was believed by some to be key to world dominion. Teeming with improbable drama and exaggerated tensions, the conflict featured soldiers, mystics, archeologists, and spies, among them some of historys most colorful characters. While the original Great Game ended with the Russian Revolution, the geopolitical struggles in Central Asia continue to the present day. Beginning with the soldiers and propagandists of the Victorian era, Tournament of Shadows chronicles nearly two centuries of conflict in the Eurasian heartland, conflict that has spawned wars in Afghanistan, the invasion of Tibet, and economic scrambles for control of Caspian oil. Karl E. Meyer, formerly of the New York Times, and his wife, Shareen Blair Brysac, formerly of CBS News, have created a vivid narrative that brings to life the engaging personalities in this colorful conflict: Russias greatest explorer, Nicholas Przhevalsky, who died trying to shoot his way to Lhasa; Nicholas Roerich, the Russian artist and mystic who searched for fabled Shambhala under the patronage of Henry Wallace, the American Secretary of Agriculture; Philadelphia socialite Brooke Dolan, like a figure out of Hemingway, who reached Lhasa as an OSS operative; SS Captain Ernst Schfer, who led an expedition to Tibet in the late 1930s in an attempt to confirm Nazi racial theories; William Rockhill, the first American to befriend and advise a Dalai Lama; Sarat Chandra Das, the Bengali explorer who went to Lhasa in the secret service of the Raj. Revealing a wealth of new material that has never before been published, Meyer and Brysac have written a sweeping history of a riveting tournament, a two-century joust with political and economic implications that remain as topical today as this mornings newspaper.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, the Russian and British Empires played out a chess game of diplomacy, espionage, and military thrusts into Central Asia to protect their expanding interests. When play began, the frontiers of their empires lay 2,000 miles apart, across vast deserts and almost impassable mountain ranges; by the end, they were separated by only 20 miles. Karl E. Meyer of The New York Times and Shareen Blair Brysac, documentary filmmaker for CBS, update and significantly expand earlier studies of the imperial rivalry, notably Peter Hopkirk's pioneering The Great Game. Tournament of Shadows reads like a racy adventure story, yet there is no need for the authors to embellish their well-researched facts. The region attracted a host of bizarre characters, each with his own idiosyncratic goals. The authors begin with the journey to Bokhara of an ambitious horse doctor, hired by the East India Company in 1806 to improve its breeding stock, and end with the CIA's assistance to anti-Chinese guerrillas in Tibet during the cold war. American participants in the opening of Central Asia have not previously received much attention, but Tournament of Shadows introduces adventurers such as William Rockhill, commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution in the 1880s to explore Tibet, and William McGovern, who, to the chagrin of the British, reached Lhasa in 1923. The wealth and instability of Central Asia continue to keep the region in the headlines, motivating the Soviet Union's disastrous 10-year intervention in Afghanistan and fueling an international race for resources--especially oil--today. --John Stevenson

From Publishers Weekly

Equal parts geopolitical intrigue and quest for Shangri-la, the Great Game was the imperialist duel for influence in Central Asia that occupied the best and the brightest of the Russian and British empires through the entire 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In this detailed narrative from Meyer (former London bureau chief for the Washington Post) and Brysac (a producer for CBS News), the story of the Great Game is told from the perspective of the explorers, soldiers and archeologists (many of whom frequently doubled as spies) who planted their nations' flags in the steppes and mountain passes of Afghanistan, Turkestan and Tibet. Among the colorful characters portrayed are William Moorcroft, the East India Company stable master who trekked to fabled Bokhara to purchase horses for the British cavalry, and SS officer Ernst Schafer, who led a German expedition to Tibet in search of a lost Aryan homeland. Notably missing is the viewpoint of the native inhabitants, though Meyer and Brysac do express admiration for the "pundits," the Indian explorers immortalized in Kipling's imperialist epic, Kim, who surveyed regions where Europeans feared to tread. A passing familiarity with Central Asian history would serve readers well, but even those who don't know a Gurkha from a yurt will get the gist. An impressive feat of historical synthesis that draws on sources ranging from published biographies to secret memos buried in the archives of the East India Company, this rousing history is written with some of the ?lan exhibited by the most stylish participants in the Great Game itself. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 671 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430284
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430287
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,026,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Game, Okay Book, February 12, 2001

By 

Rodney Meek (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Paperback)

Having read Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game", I was intrigued by the subject of the imperial machinations between Britain and Russia in Central Asia in the 19th century. The intrigues and maneuvers and subterfuge between the two opponents indeed offer some interesting insights into the development of the 20th century's Cold War and into the conduct of colonial powers and their proxy wars. Much of this, however, has faded from the public's historical consciousness.

Famous in their time, the explorers and military leaders of that place and time have now slipped into footnotes and obscure scholarly treatises. And of course, those figures who by necessity had to operate far more clandestinely on their secret missions are now almost wholly forgotten. Only the high points remain barely remembered, events like the Afghan Wars.

"Tournament of Shadows" is a good survey of the confrontations between Russia and Britain in India, Tibet, and Afghanistan. The book, like the figures on whom it reports, covers a lot of ground, dealing with the earliest Western penetrations into Central Asia and ending with events in post-WWII Tibet. A huge cast of characters is introduced, including men and women from England, Czarist and Soviet Russia, India, the U.S., and Germany. A great many significant developments are discussed, along with amusing and interesting side treks into historical minutiae.

The book's breezy, even gossipy, style is both its strength and weakness. Readers who don't want to delve too deeply into any one aspect of this fascinating period won't get bogged down by extended analyses. And certainly, the layperson will find out quite a few tidbits about the personal and private lives of quite a few people.

However, a narrower concentration would have helped focus the book and eliminate some confusion. So many governors and sahibs and explorers and diplomats and generals race on and off the page that it becomes hard to separate Bell from Bailey or remember who was imprisoned in Khokand and who got murdered in Kabul. It's certainly laudable to resurrect some faded luminaries and bring them back into the limelight, but little seems to be accomplished by trying to cram in every tangential figure and giving them only one or two paragraphs.

Still, it's a good (if overly lengthy) general introduction to the field, although with rather more time spent on Tibet than it seems to me was merited. Also, I would've preferred that sources be footnoted rather than directly referenced in the text, since the numerous citations to recent works and new archival discoveries border on authorial boasting. ("Look at how much homework we did!") But that's just a quibble.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written and Riveting!, March 17, 2000

By 

Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Hardcover)

I'm a big fan of Peter Hopkirk's works on the Great Game, so buying this book was a no-brainer! It covers a lot of the same ground as Hopkirk did, but does go into some ancillary episodes, and comes up to date more than his. I agree with one of the other reviewers that better, and better-anotated, maps would have helped readers who became confused with exactly where some of the places mentioned are located, but I didn't let it detract from the exjoyment I received from this book. It's an excellent addition to the books on the great Game, and I welcome it.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great Game - great power politics in Central Asia, January 26, 2000

By 

Jonathan P. Scoll (Edina, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Hardcover)

The nineteenth-century experience of the Westerner in Asia, the perspective of the humblest individual, was never better depicted than by Rudyard Kipling, novelist and poet of empire. In the case of Afghanistan, his advice to "The Young British Soldier" was short and stark:

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

If Kipling had been better studied in Moscow, the Soviet Union might still be around today. Its ten year losing war in Afghanistan was a large contributor to its demise.

In 1839, in an earlier, and similarly ill-considered intervention, and with an eye on what they thought were Czarist Russian designs in the region, the British marched an army of over 20,000 from India, over unmapped mountain passes, into Afghanistan. Three years later, a single survivor returned to Jalalabad, on a limping horse, to tell the tale. Britain learned the lesson, and never again sought direct conquest of the country. Thenceforth, her power in the region would be projected by more indirect means.

With this, Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac set the stage for their masterful account, of Great Power rivalry - Victorian statesmen termed it "The Great Game" -- for political dominance of inner Asia, the land along the ancient Silk Route. Britain, its erstwhile rival, Czarist Russia, and (later, and to a lesser extent) Germany and the United States, all "played it through" as the authors note, using the language of the greatest of British (and Indian and Pakistani) games, cricket.

Much of the Game revolved around maps. We are reminded - usefully, in this day of mail-order hand-held GPS devices, available to every backpacker - that maps are power, state secrets, and that until very recently, parts of Tibet were still "white", unmapped. (The next space shuttle mission is reported to involve high resolution radar mapping of 80 percent of the earth. The results will, in part, be classified, to prevent their use by "hostile" powers. The global Great Game continues.)

In the end, the Great Game produced "scores but no prizes". Afghanistan from the first defied British and Russians alike; the British Raj itself faded like the Mughals it had supplanted. The Soviet Union, the heir to the empire of the Czars, is gone, and central Asia, and former Soviet territories once again divided into autonomous or semi-autonomous states. Tibet, the least penetrable area of all, was absorbed, in 1950, ironically, by the player held in lowest esteem by the others, a resurgent China.

"Tournament of Shadows" is not a socioeconomic or geopolitical study on the Fernand Braudel model, but a succession of narratives of the adventures (and misadventures) of a colorful series of soldiers, geographers, scientists, explorers, out and out charlatans, and others, from whom the West gained its first definitive experience of the region. The first of these is the unlikely William Moorcraft, a middle-aged down and out Lancashire horse doctor who parlayed a humdrum posting at Calcutta into an expedition, in 1820, to Bokhara, in Turkestan, a thousand miles away. The last is a curious duo, the Russian grandson of Leo Tolstoy and an American, Brooke Dolan, sent by the OSS (precursor of the CIA) on a mission to the Dalai Lama in wartime Tibet.

They were an intrepid lot: tough outdoorsmen, resourceful and sturdily anti-authority. All were, in their own way, dreamers. Most were amateur linguists and not a few published scholarly accounts of their travels and exploits. Time and again the authors note wistfully that one or the other of them is unjustly forgotten today. By this wonderfully entertaining account, Meyer and Brysac have more than made up for such neglect.

Jonathan Scoll