And a couple of little videos:

And

Apologies for the heavy-breathing soundtrack.

Here are some holiday snaps from that trip. Words to follow.

Though never explicitly describing himself as such, Bailey is a spy, attempting to establish the threat posed to British India by the Bolshevik regime.  Mission To Tashkent therefore offers a unique snapshot of the latter stages of the Great Game, in the aftermath of the collapse of Asia’s two great Empires. The Russian Empire had fallen in the February Revolution of 1917, triggered in part by Russia’s massive losses in WWI. Only months later Lenin’s October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. (By mid-1918 the new state was young enough that, as Bailey entered Tashkent, Tsarist sympathisers still held government positions, and it was not clear that the Bolsheviks would survive the Civil War.) In China, the Kuomintang’s Republic of China had brought to an end two thousand years of Imperial history; the Republic was now barely six years old, and since 1916 Beijing had held little real authority: the country had descended into feuding fiefdoms (this was the so-called Warlord era). Xinjiang, under the virtual dictatorship of Yang Zengxin, was relatively stable during this time. The British and Russians also exerted some authority here – the winnings of the Great Game; both powers had Consulates in Kashgar, while the Russians maintained a Cossack detachment, and the British a guard of Gilgit Scouts.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks won their Civil War, and Russian Central Asia was fully integrated into the USSR as the Turkmen, Tajik, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republics. In China, Chiang Kai-shek brought an end to the Warlord era in the late 20′s, continuing the ROC even after being forced to retreat to Taiwan by Mao’s Communists in 1948. During Bailey’s mission, though, the geopolitical stakes were still very high.

Summit of Mintaka Pass, 1918

One tale from Mission to Tashkent, concerning the Mintaka Pass – at the nexus of Russia, China and British India – is worth recounting here, but requires a little background. (Note that Wikipedia’s photograph of the Mintaka Pass was taken by Bailey during his journey; the border cairn is clearly visible.) Since 1916 a number of parties of Norwegians had been arriving in Khotan (‘from China’, as Bailey puts it; Xinjiang had at the best of times never been a part of China proper), always without proper visas. In fact, these ‘Norwegians’ were Germans from Eastern China, trapped at the outbreak of the War by the Russians to the north, and, seawards, the British and Japanese. Their only practical means of escape was via the Wakhjir Pass [see also a previous post here] to neutral Afghanistan, which entailed a months-long journey across the entire breadth of Warlord-era China; the Gilgit Scouts in China were mandated to prevent such movements.

Descending from the Mintaka pass in May 1918, Bailey is met by a Chinese Guard of Honour and by Gilgit Scouts. Very much as an aside he relates a previous visit to the Mintaka by the Scouts’ commanding officer: the officer had been ordered by the British Consulate to intercept a party of two ‘Norwegians’ in Xinjiang who were straying from their stated route to Kashgar. He found them a number of days from the Wakhjir but was unable to arrest them on Chinese territory. Instead, dressed as a local man, he befriended them and offered to act as their guide to Afghanistan, where – coincidentally – he was also travelling. They travelled in this manner for a number of days, he allaying their concern that they had perhaps moved too far to the south. And so he led them over the pass, although this was not the Wakhir, but the Mintaka; and as soon as they set foot in British India he drew his revolver and arrested them. They spent the remainder of the War as POWs.

Mintaka Pass on Google Maps

View Larger Map

References and further reading
F. M. Bailey. Mission to Tashkent (1946)
Peter Hopkirk. Setting the East Ablaze (1984)
Lonely Planet Guidebooks. Pakistan & the Karakoram Highway Travel Guide (May 2008)

40cm of fresh snow in the streets of St. John’s

Ploughed in

Virgin stairs

Wind-blown icicles

Snow-blown ads in a window

One of St. John’s many alleys

White, green and yellow

Signal Hill, closer to London than Vancouver

Another street-scene

Such a dramatic change is primarily due to the fact that China – uniquely for a country of its size – has a single time zone, convenient only for Beijing and Eastern China. Presumably this is something of a political statement by the Chinese Government. The time changes at China’s border crossings with Tajikistan and Pakistan – both GMT+5 – are almost as precipitous.

More fundamentally, it is remarkable that Afghanistan and China share a border at all. The narrow finger of Afghanistan reaching out north-east to touch China is known as the Wakhan Corridor (Google Maps, Google Earth). Its borders were established by a number of boundary agreements between the Russian and British Empires in the late Nineteeth Century to act as a buffer zone between British India and Russian Central Asia^[1]. These agreements ceded to Aghanistan territory between the Amu Darya to the north (the River Oxus of Antiquity) and the Hindu Kush to the south. East of Lake Sarikol, the supposed source of the Amu Darya, the northen edge of the Wakhan corridor was sufficiently remote that it was not demarcated until 1895. Afghanistan and China demarcated their border only in 1963^[2], although this must have been something of a formality, given the region’s major watersheds.

And so today, at the far eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, on top of the Wakhjir Pass almost five kilometres above sea level, you can look east 210 minutes into the future.

A little more about the Wakhjir Pass
The Wakhan Corridor and the Wakhjir Pass in particular are remarkable for more than temporal peculiarities. The Wakhjir Pass is at the confluence of three of the world’s great mountain ranges: the Karakoram to the south-east, the Hindu Kush to the south and the Pamir to the north. It lays on what was once the main route between Yarkand and Kabul, one of the many Silk Roads; Marco Polo may or may not have crossed, but his namesake sheep still frequent the area. During the Great Game, Lord Curzon and Sir Francis Younghusband passed this way. Other visitors include HW Tilman, Sir Aurel Stein and perhaps the 7th Century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang.

The pass may also be very close to the true source of the Oxus. Curzon and Tilman were both of the opinion that the Oxus rises not in Lake Sarikol, but from a small ice-cave about ten kilometres south of the Wakhjir. It seems that the ice-cave still exists. Interestingly, Tilman writes:

“Wood’s great journey of 1838 and his discovery of the lake [Sarikol] to which he gave the name Victoria was thought to have settled the matter, and the Pamir river issuing from that lake was held to be the true parent stream. It was upon this geographical basis that the Boundary Agreement of 1872 with Russia was made.”

If this is the case, and the true source of the Oxus lies south of the Wakhjir Pass, huge tracts of the Wakhan Corridor should have fallen to the Russians, and Afghanistan and China would not share a border at all.

The Wakhan Corridor has seen few outsiders since the decline of the Silk Roads six hundred years ago and the Wakhjir Pass has been effectively closed since Mao’s Communists took power in 1949. Recent visitors to the region include the biologist and conservationist George Schaller^[3] (2004), John Mock and Kimberley O’Neil^[4] (also 2004) and Mark Jenkins, Doug Chabot and Greg Mortenson^[5] (2005). The accounts of their journeys are fascinating.

But it seems that no outsider has crossed the Wakhjir Pass for decades, perhaps since Tilman in 1947.

References and further reading
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan – USSR (1983, pdf)
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan – China (1969, pdf)
M Aurel Stein. Description of the route over the Wakhjir Pass in Ancient Khotan (1907)
National Geographic. Lifetime Achievement: Biologist George Schaller
John Mock & Kimberley O’Neil. The Source of the Oxus River: A Journey to the Wakhan Pamir & Across the Dilisang Pass to Misgar (2004)
Mark Jenkins. Afghanistan: A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor (Outside Magazine, Nov. 2005)

Addendum
Go Hirai of the Japanese Alpine Club reached the top of the Wakhjir Pass in 2001, but did not cross into China. You can read his account here (pdf), although the English is a little awkward in places; the description of the crest of the pass is tantalisingly vague.

As unlikely as it sounds, Mock and O’Neil have developed a tourism brochure for the Aga Khan Foundation-Afghanistan, called Wakhan & the Afghan Pamir, published in 2006. You can see a preview – and some fabulous images – at the photographer Matthieu Paley’s site http://www.paleyphoto.com. It’s not possible to link directly to the brochure – look under the ‘Books’ menu.