Francis Younghusband and the delusions of the Great Game

October 1889 found Captain Francis Younghusband, a British officer in the 1^st King’s Dragoon Guards, skirting the foothills of the Pamir Mountains. It was then, as now, a land of steep valleys and snow-capped peaks surrounded by the vast ranges of high Central Asia. Extending from the Hindu Kush in the West through to China’s Mountain of Heaven in the East, and then beyond to the Himalayas, these lofty climes were known to contemporaries as the ‘Roof of the World’.

In the late 19th century, this world was even more remote than it is today, and lay far beyond the northern frontiers of the British Raj. For those who travelled here, the threats were many: bands of raiding tribesmen roamed the land, preying on unfortunate traders who crossed their path. In the winter, fierce blizzards and avalanches could surge down the mountainsides and into valleys, swallowing up swathes of terrain; food could be scarce, and disease was as common as treachery. The Pamirs’ petty principalities and tribal kingdoms formed a contested and unstable no-man’s-land between three great empires – the British, Russian and Qing Chinese. This was a hard country, and no place for the weak or timid.

It was here, in the heart of High Asia, that Francis Younghusband received an unexpected invitation. While heading for the Taghdumbash Pamir, a local Kyrgyz rider came to him bearing a letter. Its contents, ‘written in Turki’, were addressed to Younghusband from Captain Bronislav Grombchevsky – ‘the well-known Russian traveller’ – who was leading a reconnaissance mission through the Pamir Mountains on his way to Ladakh in northern India.

Grombchevsky explained that he and his Cossack companions had set up camp at a place called Khaian Aksai, not far from Younghusband’s party, and that he was anxious to meet his British counterpart. Intrigued and excited, Younghusband sent a letter back – ‘in Persian and English’ – stating ‘that I was very glad to have the opportunity of meeting so distinguished a traveller, and would arrange to encamp with him the next day.’

When Younghusband and his men found Grombchevsky’s camp at Khaian Aksai, on 23 October 1889, it was an historic occasion. As Younghusband wrote in The Heart of a Continent  (1904), an account of his travels: ‘This was the first meeting of Russian and English exploring parties upon the borderlands of India, and there was much in each of us to interest the other.’

A photo of their meeting survives. In it, they stand together with their men surrounding them. Younghusband, dressed in expedition gear, has the slight but determined look of the Victorian adventurer; to his left, the broad and bearlike Grombchevsky towers over him in the uniform of a Russian officer, sporting a fine beard.

Appearances aside, the two men had a lot in common. Indeed, they were not only daring explorers cut from the same cloth; they were also the unofficial agents of rival empires vying for mastery in the imperial borderlands between British India and Russian Turkestan. To call them ‘spies’ might be to offend their gentlemanly honour: both Grombchevsky and Younghusband maintained that their missions were, primarily, advancing the cause of science, knowledge and civilisation.

Neither man doubted, however, that it was also his duty to collect valuable intelligence – geographic, demographic and political – that might assist the cause of his respective imperial masters in St Petersburg or Calcutta.

Younghusband took his orders directly from the Indian Government’s Intelligence Department. This institution had been established recently in Simla during the 1880s under the watchful eye of Major General Sir Charles MacGregor, Quartermaster General of the Indian Army and one of the leading proponents of the interventionist ‘forward school’ of Indian defence. Grombchevsky, for his part, would later boast that he met with the tsar before every expedition he undertook and acted with his express approval.

Crucially, both men strove for the same prize: the acquisition of alliances with local chieftains that would allow for the opening of new export markets and confer strategic advantage over rival imperial powers.

In this pursuit, they were players of ‘the Great Game’. The term, first coined by the British adventurer Arthur Conolly in 1840 and later immortalised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, was used to describe Britain and Russia’s struggle for power, influence and strategic supremacy in Central Asia. In the 1850s, the Russian statesman Count Nesselrode described the Anglo-Russian rivalry in these lands in a rather more poetic – if ominous – turn of phrase: ‘the Tournament of Shadows’.

The two phrases, the ‘game’ and the ‘tournament’, captured the sense of individual audacity and derring-do required to participate in this battle of wills. For those who ventured into the heart of Asia, disguised as Persian traders, Tatar horse dealers and Muslim holy men, the stakes were high. Discovery could mean being sold into slavery – or worse, an agonising death. Throughout the 19th century, several players’ lives were lost in their dogged pursuit of the upper hand. Conolly himself met a gruesome end when, seeking to persuade the khanates of Central Asia to unite against Russia, he was imprisoned and beheaded by the Emir of Bukhara. The deserts, gorges and rivulets of these lands were haunted by the ghosts of players past, unfortunate souls whose game had been prematurely ended.

Despite such risks, the British ‘game’ and Russian ‘tournament’ also invoked the spirit of gentlemanly sportsmanship, an ideal of a fierce but honour-bound contest between worthy peers. As Younghusband expressed it in The Heart of a Continent: ‘We and the Russians are rivals, but I am sure that individual Russian and English officers like each other a great deal better than they do the individuals of nations with which they are not in rivalry. We are both playing at a big game, and we should not be one jot better off for trying to conceal the fact.’

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Great Game’s most prolific players were, like Younghusband and Grombchevsky, young officers hungry for the sort of adventure, glory and fame that could only be acquired by risking one’s life in far-off countries. Born in 1855, Grombchevsky, the son of a Polish aristocrat, had distinguished himself in the Russian army’s Central Asian campaigns in the 1870s. Younghusband, the younger of the two men, was born in 1863 into a military family in Murree, a hill-station on the frontiers of the British Raj. In 1887, at the age of 24, he had completed a dazzling expedition across uncharted lands between Manchuria and the Himalayas, a feat that saw him elected as the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society at the time, winning its prestigious gold medal.

It was their determination to play the Great Game that brought Younghusband and Grombchevsky together in the Pamir Mountains in 1889. Worrying reports had reached the Intelligence Department in Simla of Grombchevsky’s 1888 Pamirs expedition. The Department had good reason to believe that the Russian explorer had held discussions with Safdar Ali Khan, the Mir of Hunza, and that St Petersburg had already sought to bring this local tribal leader under Russian protection.

For the Russians, controlling the mountain passes located in the Mir’s territory would allow them to open up a new line of approach through which to attack British India in the event of war. For the British, denying the Russians control of these borderlands was paramount to India’s defence. Such strategic considerations were foremost in their minds when, after making perilous journeys through mountain passes at the head of rival expeditions, Younghusband and Grombchevsky encountered one another on the Roof of the World.

Yet when Captain Younghusband arrived at Khaian Aksai on 23 October 1889, the imperial rivalry between Great Britain and Russia was temporarily suspended. Instead, the two officers greeted one another as kindred spirits: ‘it was an exciting event, also delightful in prospect’, Younghusband wrote, ‘for two Europeans always find it a joy to meet one another in the depths of Asia.’

On arriving at the Russian camp, Younghusband recalled that Grombchevsky ‘greeted me most cordially’ and had ‘a pleasant, genial manner’. After a short walk together, Grombchevsky invited Younghusband to dine with him in his tent. In true Russian style, they ‘sat down to a very substantial repast of soup and stews, washed down with a plentiful supply of vodka.’ They spoke in French.

As the vodka flowed, the two men quickly turned to politics. As Younghusband recalled in Wonders of the Himalaya  (1924): ‘He [Grombchevsky] became very frank about the invasion of India. He said we English might not believe the Russians really intended to invade India, but he could assure me that the Russian Army… thought of nothing else.’ To illustrate this, Grombchevsky summoned his Cossacks over to the tent and asked them whether they would like to march upon India; the Cossacks answered instantly with a rousing cheer, declaring their eagerness to seize the Raj from Britain’s hands.

Grombchevsky went further, telling his rival that the British had invited Russian hostility towards them in Central Asia owing to their persistent efforts to frustrate the tsars’ legitimate interests in the Black Sea and the Balkans. In airing such grievances to Younghusband, Grombchevsky was echoing the bullish rhetoric of Russia’s ‘men on the spot’ – the soldiers and generals garrisoned in Turkestan – and their supporters in St Petersburg, who were itching for a showdown with the British.

Following the Russian defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of Britain and France in 1856, the Great Game had only intensified. Frustrated in the Black Sea, the Russians had redirected their attentions, opening up a front for imperial expansion in the heart of Asia that extended across Persia, the Caucasus, Trans-Caspia, and the Eurasian Steppe. By the mid-1880s, the borders of Russian Turkestan had moved threateningly close to Herat – the western Afghan city providing the first step on the path to the Khyber and Bolan passes – triggering a diplomatic crisis that had led Britain and Russia temporarily to the brink of war.

Not that our two players would allow such hostilities to spoil good company. Back in Grombchevky’s tent, amid the bracing blizzards of a remote corner of Central Asia, the conversation continued in an air of gentlemanly good humour. The Russian officer teased Younghusband that an army of 400,000 men, allied with local rulers, was ready to stream down the Khyber and Bolan passes and sweep through the Indian subcontinent. Needling further, he also claimed that the emir of Afghanistan could easily be tempted away from his alliance with Britain by the prospect of plundering India’s riches.

Younghusband countered by pointing out Russia’s own vulnerabilities. Might it not be possible, he suggested, that the emir would be more tempted by the prospect of Russia’s Central Asian territories? Were not the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand also treasures in the eyes of an ambitious Muslim ruler? Younghusband declared that whereas northern India was securely fortified, the tsar’s possessions in Turkestan were over-extended and vulnerable, the soft underbelly of Russia’s Asiatic imperium.

During their back-and-forth, Younghusband noticed in Grombchevsky’s tent a map on which a portion was marked out in red. This covered a ‘gap’ in the Pamirs, a no-man’s land where Russian, Indian, Afghan and Chinese territories came close to one another, but did not quite touch. That St Petersburg had designs on the Pamirs now became clear.

On 25 October, after spending two days in each other’s company, the two adventurers bade each other farewell. Grombchevsky noted in his diary that they promised ‘to continue cooperation and keeping on correspondence’. In his estimation, ‘the British expedition, particularly its courageous chief, impressed me greatly’. The two men parted with Grombchevsky saying that he hoped they would meet again, ‘either in peace at St. Petersburg or in war on the Indian frontier’.

The two would meet once more in Yarkand, Chinese Turkestan, in August 1890, where Grombchevsky allowed his younger adversary ‘to repay me for the hospitality shown him’ at Khaian Aksai. Their paths would not cross again thereafter, though both continued their adventures. Grombchevsky remained a faithful servant of the tsar, notably in China, until the onset of the Russian Revolution. Younghusband combined imperial service, personal adventurism, and writing books.

What are we to make of their encounter in High Asia? It is clear that both Grombchevsky and Younghusband, like the Russian hawks and British forwardists backing their expeditions with bated breath, were nursing their own delusions.

The Russian hawks tended to overestimate the fragility of British rule in India. Russian commanders ‘on the spot’ in Turkestan fantasised of washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, and they drew up extensive plans to this effect. Memories of the 1857-59 Indian Rebellion were still fresh, and there was no lack of intelligence to sustain the Russian hawks’ dreams of conquest. In 1900, the Russian Consulate in Bombay produced an intelligence report describing India as ‘the most vulnerable part of the British Empire’. The ‘deep hatred of the population of multimillions’, it claimed, rendered the Raj a giant with feet of clay.

But just how vulnerable was the Raj in the late 19th century? In 1898, David Livkin, a Russian spy and expert in Oriental languages managed to infiltrate the Raj disguised as a Persian dealer in precious stones. Entering through the sea port of Madras, he set up a network of local spies with the help of Muslim merchants in Hyderabad, which informed him of the prevailing political conditions in British India. In his report, read with great interest in St Petersburg, he came to a pessimistic conclusion: ‘English dominance remains extremely consolidated, because their rule is a paragon of organisation. Conceding for a moment that a revolt or a local mutiny occurs somewhere, immediately a sufficient amount of troops will be assembled to suppress it, due to the appropriate routes of transportation and railways in existence.’

As well as pouring cold water on some of the fever dreams of Russian hawks, Livkin’s account also suggested that the British forwardists’ assessments of the Russian threat were overblown. Their fears of an unholy alliance between Russian armies, Central Asian tribes, and Indian fifth columnists overestimated Russia’s ability to project power and influence. As one Soviet official later remarked, somewhat amused, ‘one can hardly imagine tsarist generals acting as apostles of the Indian revolution!’

And even if the Russians could incite a general uprising in India, or secure alliances with Indian princes hostile to British rule, the tsar’s armies would still have to march hundreds, if not thousands, of miles across difficult terrain to reach the gateways to India.

Figures such as Younghusband who consistently called for military intervention beyond the Raj’s frontiers were sincere in believing that Russian manoeuvres there posed a mortal threat to British interests. Yet they also knew that conjuring up the spectre of malign Russian activities – whether it be in Afghanistan, the Pamirs or Tibet – might persuade their superiors to sanction intervention, and thereby satisfy their deep yearning for adventure. In their ambition and lust for exploration, they proved adept at manipulating the anxieties of their imperial masters.

Younghusband knew what he was doing when, in the 1890s, he began to warn of Russia’s ability to unleash the warlike mountain tribes on the Raj’s frontiers in ‘one great avalanche on the plains of India’; or when he started referring to Russian activity in Tibet as a menace to Britain’s position in Central Asia. He was surely aware that such comments would find a ready audience with some of the rising stars of British India, such as Lord Curzon – the vigorous ‘forwardist’ and Russo-sceptic who became Viceroy in 1899.

Ever in search of a new adventure, Younghusband courted Lord Curzon to sanction an expedition to Tibet in 1903-1904, seeking to investigate rumoured Russian influence there. Curzon, fearing that Tibet could become ‘a new Afghanistan’, consented. Yet when the expedition arrived in the holy city, there was precious little sign that the Tibetans had been armed to the teeth by the Russians, as had been claimed in intelligence reports. Yet by the time this became apparent, Younghusband’s expedition had turned into a fully fledged invasion, causing a debacle that embarrassed the government in Calcutta and elicited a chorus of condemnation from other European powers as well as the United States.

The Tibetan expedition proved to be the final flourish of the Great Game. Soon afterwards, Britain and Russia settled their differences, and in 1907 the Anglo-Russian Convention was signed. Rivals became allies, and the game was finally up – Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet were no longer the playing field for imperial competition.

Younghusband continued his explorations, eventually playing a prominent role as a President and then grandee of the Royal Geographical Society. Nonetheless, his travels in High Asia had changed him. They had induced a profound crisis of faith, which eventually compelled him to abandon the evangelical Christianity of his youth and explore, by turns, Tolstoyan simplicity, Eastern mysticism, and proto-hippyish free love. He died in England in 1942 at the age of 79.

Life was less kind to Grombchevsky. The Russian Revolution of 1917 upended his fortunes when the Bolsheviks rose to power, seized his property and threw him unceremoniously into a Siberian prison. He eventually fled to his native Poland, where, despite his poverty, he devoted himself to writing accounts of his travels.

In 1924, bedridden and close to death, Grombchevsky sent a letter to the man he had met all those years ago in the Pamir Mountains: ‘The revolution in Russia bereaved me of all I possessed’, he wrote to Younghusband with regret. ‘As to the state of my health’, he added, ‘I do no more have any illusions’. He was unable to leave his room owing to ‘a grave heart disease’, and asked whether his former rival might help him to find a publisher for a book he had written.

Soon after, there came another letter announcing Grombchevsky’s passing. The book remained unpublished.

A version of this portrait originally appeared in Spies in History, edited by Paul Lay and published by Bokförlaget Stolpe.